I came into the movement to resist violence against women through a women’s martial arts school and self-defense program at my college in the late 1970s. It opened up a world of physical self-confidence and fitness that I’d never really been part of before. As a child I’d been physically and verbally bullied and my upbringing was such that girls did not fight or use physical force. That left me with no good options. I got past that, but not completely. When I started to learn karate and self-defense, it was a revelation.
I began to progress in our dojo, attended several national women in martial arts training weekends, and I learned to teach basic self-defense for women. When I moved to another state for graduate school, I stopped actively practicing karate, but I continued to teach self-defense to any women who wanted to take it. I taught to women in wheelchairs and with canes at senior centers, I taught college students, I taught faculty, and I included some of the information and skills in academic courses I taught as a graduate student.
The system of self-defense I’d learned was adaptable to virtually anyone, and helped develop a way of thinking for students that could change the ways they faced the world as women in our culture. It wasn’t so much a rote development of specific sets of techniques, but rather a way to approach thinking about and preparing for using our own bodies against different targets on an assailant’s body to provide opportunities to escape. It is, quite simply, physical and mental safety-planning.
However, it is also true, and something I included in every course I taught, that just because someone has these skills and practices them, does not mean they are obligated to use those skills, or are somehow at fault if they don’t. There are always circumstances where resisting may increase the physical danger, or where someone other than the offender may be endangered if self-defense is used. Having to make a choice not to resist never means the survivor is at fault. Never.
As I’ve told so many audiences I’ve trained over the years about domestic violence dynamics, and many judges when I’ve represented survivors, no one but the person facing danger can truly understand all of the nuances of the situation. Whether or not someone has skills to defend themselves, they are never the ones at fault for decisions they have to make, or choices they have had taken away from them. My hope for students is that the self-defense skills might allow them to more accurately gauge the danger they face and understand the options they have should they feel resistance is in order.
Despite this, I was firmly convinced that many women could use these skills to prevent sexual assaults, and by doing so, help change the world. Perhaps you’re already seeing the huge issues with this understanding. At that point, I deeply believed that violence against women was a basic underpinning of patriarchy and that if we could help women feel physically able to fight back we could start removing that underpinning. However, this was a completely simplistic and naïve understanding that I soon had to face as I delved into the range of work coming out of the movement.
At this point, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the movement started to include the voices of those working against domestic violence, acquaintance rape, sexual harassment, and racist, homophobic, and other hate-motivated violence, all of which most deeply affected women or female-identified people. Self-defense, I soon realized, is just not a viable option for women living with violent and abusive men. Neither is it a good option against many of these other forms of violence. It’s an answer for some things, but not for the entire spectrum of violence threatening women.
Not only is it not an answer, but in so many cases it can actively worsen women’s lives to try to defend themselves. Physically fighting back against an abusive partner can result in extreme escalation of the abuser’s violence. A criminal “justice” system designed by men, for men, simply cannot, and definitely does not, perceive or accept women’s reality in our world. It treats women’s use of force as completely out of the realm of legal defenses such as coercion, duress, or self-defense. Even when things began to change in this regard, the only way the courts could (seemingly) address this issue was to see it as a form of mental illness – a “syndrome.” It was virtually unheard of for women who used physical force to prevent or escape violence against themselves or their children to be understood as acting “reasonably” under the circumstances they faced.
The interlocking forms of oppression my first women’s studies professor, Marilyn Frye, described as a “bird cage,” simply are too strong to be dismantled merely by women learning to physically defend themselves. Those who did would most likely be seen as so outside of the proper roles for women that they would risk criminal charges for doing so and receive far longer sentences than the men who abused women. Women of color and trans women are likely to be treated even more harshly as those interlocking oppressions play out.
In one rape crisis program I interacted with in the late 1980s, a woman who had fought off a rapist who came into her apartment with her and proceeded to attack her, by wounding him with a small kitchen knife, was denied services because she was criminally charged and the rules of their funding prevented them from serving “perpetrators”.
Women who fought back against severely abusive male partners were imprisoned for years on end. Sadly many of them reported never having felt as safe as they did in prison because they’d had so many years of violence and trauma from men in their lives.
When I was in law school in the early 1990s, I had a memorable conversation with one of my male classmates. I was attempting to give him a glimpse into the lives of women (which was an effort doomed to fail, yet I persisted!). I explained that it was dangerous for women to walk the distance to the student parking lot at night, and that every time I did that I was poised to have to defend myself. His response to me was that I must be mentally ill to think like that. Needless to say, although I suggested he check in with his daughters about that, I didn’t spend any further effort trying to show him the world through women’s eyes!
I still believe that knowing self-defense improves the lives of women, and I personally feel that the confidence I’ve gained from this has had many positive effects on my life. I have continued to teach self-defense to women and LGBTQ++ people from time to time. It’s a useful skill, and mindset, to have. It is a belief that one’s body and personal integrity is valuable enough to physically defend, and the understanding that we can almost always develop skills that allow us to do so. As I said above, it is physical and mental safety-planning. It can also be a small, but significant, part of healing from trauma for those who have been affected by violence.
Every time I teach a group of people to learn to confront assailants, escape strangulation holds, avoid different types of weapons and use their voices with all the power they can muster to create openings for escape, I am proud of them. Not everyone excels at this, of course, but I see changes in them all that I believe can help them walk more freely and confidently in the world. The best-case scenario is that none of them will ever have to use physical resistance skills, of course. My experience is that folks who take these courses also learn to trust their instincts, be aware of what’s happening around them, and understand they have the right to respond accordingly when they feel danger. Sometimes that is enough to make them appear not to be a “good” target.
Even though I have learned, and accept, that self-defense is not always the answer, I also firmly believe it has benefits to those who learn it. I value those skills and the many people I’ve been able to introduce to them. It’s certainly not been the focus of my life for a great many years, now, but it is an important piece of my personal herstory. I use those skills – both what I’ve learned about defending myself and those I’ve learned from teaching others – in almost every part of my life.
I didn’t necessarily understand what I was getting into when I walked into that first Feminist Self-Defense and Karate Association class, but I’m sure glad it did it! It started my life-long work against gender-based violence, and it gave me skills and confidence to change my own life.
Have I changed the world since then? Certainly not the revolution I was sure we could bring about. In some ways, though, I have. In the almost half-century since then, I’ve been part of many hard-fought changes. The world is very different than it was then. And my part in creating those changes is due, in great part, to where I started. Thanks to that training, I’m continuing to fight the good fight – in individual survivors’ lives, in the law and in the world. It’s a calling, and it’s my life!