5 Techniques you would teach in a Beginners Women's Self Defence Class ?

I like old palden's list:
1. Stomp feet
2. Kick groin
3. Punch throat
4. Gouge eyes
5. Bite anything that you can sink your teeth into.

w/ and addendum. All the above done while screaming their bloody head off and looking for the very first opportunity to get the heck out of Dodge!

 

Earning money aside, are these classes of any use what-so-ever if the women don't continue any form of practice?

 

1. triangle choke from guard
2. arm bar from guard
3. escape from mount to RNC
4. basic 1-2 combination
5. plum clinch, body clinch and half clinch for knees

Essentially, universal basics

The eye gouges, finger jabs and scratching sound nice, but in reality when someone is jacked full of adrenaline and rage, these methods usually don’t work. Especially in a life or death confrontation.

Women who are being attacked are more than likely going to be raped [by men]. If they don’t know how to escape from the ground, then they’re as good as done, or dead.

In order to understand how to fight in a defensive manner mentally, they need to be able to practice/drill these techniques. You can’t teach someone something like eye gouges, scratching and some other methods if they can’t get a live feel for them to begin with.

 

You'd be surprised how much good it can do. When someone doesn't have anything the first useful thing you give them is probably going to be how they react. For an awful lot of the women we taught just the the revelation that they could fight and should fight made them more willing to fight. Experiencing physical aggression and violence from the inside made a lot of them better at recognizing it in others before it got out of hand.

More training is always good. But the real secret is showing up ready and willing to take action. Even without training that lowers the completed crime rate tremendously. And the ones who aren't completely successful have faster, less complicated recoveries.

If it makes them more effective when they say "Enough!" that's even better. The essential part is getting them to the point where they'll do their level best to tear the guy's head off and beat him to death with it. These courses really can do a good job of getting them there. But there has to be sweat and discomfort and adrenaline and some sort of real physical feedback. Listening to words and parroting them back doesn't do anything. The body has to be deeply involved in the process.

 

So it's more about empowerment?

 

Most instructors usually overlook the ultimate technique and i don't see it taught much at all.

Turn and run like hell.

Any other technique pales in comparison.

 

Depends what you mean by "empowerment". It's about making them willing to fight and giving them a few better tools than they had before. Bayonet training in the Army is "about empowerment" in exactly the same way. It increases aggression, brings out killer instinct, disinhibits violence and gives a few basic techniques that will work well enough.

 

It gives them options I suppose and slightly more of a chance they might actually do something to enable escape.
I've always been of the adage that 'A little bit of information is often a bad thing' but having a small chance is better than none at all in a self defence situation, as long as it doesn't escallate the situation.

 

I really should turn this into a sticky...

I. Eighty Years on the Seesaw

Back in the early days of women's self defense books, the late 19th century through WWI the standard advice was to scream, try to get help and to do ineffective but possibly painful things. With World War I and the entry of British and American women into the industrial labor force self defense training became more physical, more assertive and more effective. During the late 1920s and 30s there was a move back to kirche, kinder und kuchen. The accepted wisdom regressed.

During WWII we got Rosie the Riveter and another generation of women who did the heavy dirty jobs because men were away fighting. Self defense material from that era is, once again, more realistic, more aggressive and more direct. The post-war withdrawal followed as before. During the Second Wave feminism of the 1960s things reversed. The 1970s backlash led to the reprehensible Fred Storaska and his How to Say No to a Rapist and Survive. One of my most cherished dreams is to find that evil son of a bitch and let my wife beat him to death. He was responsible for more lies and B.S. on the subject than any single other person. And every bit of it played right into a rapist's hands.

This was the era when women started to be more accepted in martial arts schools. There was still a long way to go. A lot of schools wouldn't accept women, shunted them off to dumbed down courses, stuck them in with children or actively made life miserable for the ones who tried to be accepted as students like everyone else. A lot of women who fought to get into mainstream martial arts schools in those days can still show you the scars, busted teeth and broken bones they had to endure. It was an All Boys, No Girls Allowed club.

But it was an era when women were getting into jobs that had been unthinkable during peacetime. The FBI and CIA started accepting women as officers around that time. Many police departments started allowing women as regular officers during the late 1970s where they had only been "matrons" or vice decoys in earlier days.

II. Women's Self Defense, Not Self Defense for Ladies

In the early 1980s we got Pye Bateman and the beginning of modern women's self defense training materials. Some time later we saw Model Mugging and its spin offs. They weren't perfect, but they were much better than what there was before. It involved going full out against a resisting attacker. Techniques were chosen that took women's physical reality and the sorts of situations they actually had to deal with.

I've seen things change dramatically in the thirty or so years I've been in this game. When I first started Judo in the early 70s there was a self defense class for "Ladies and children". It was pretty typical of the era. There was a bunch of grab releases. There was pushing. There was screaming. There were references to hat-pins. Who the hell wore hats let alone hats with pins in those days?

It was imitation Cheez-Whiz on a cracker. It just wouldn't work.

The idea was that you didn't want to make the attacker angry. You didn't want to escalate. If you fought back you'd just be hurt worse. You should be aware, sit tight, wait for an opportunity to get away, reason with him, make him see you as a human being. If things got really bad you could do a pain compliance hold like a wristlock that would make him give up. Or you could pretend to faint. You could act crazy or (they just whispered this) pee on yourself or throw up so he would be disgusted.

It was all so dainty and apologetic you could just ****.

That's Fred Storaska crap. A lot of it is straight out of his book and a number of imitators. It doesn't work. It makes a person defenseless. It won't do diddly to stop an attacker. In fact, it plays up his power and self-importance and fits his script perfectly. If we did a point-by-point explanation of all the things about it that are dead wrong the list would take pages.

The newer wave that started in the 80s stressed simple, powerful, effective physical techniques. There was yelling, not screaming. The two things are physically very different and psychologically worlds apart. Some of the early stuff was straight out of traditional martial arts which had its own problems. But from the earliest days there were attempts to choose or modify techniques so they emphasized using the defender's strengths. For women defending themselves against men that meant getting in closer and relying less on upper body strength. A typical woman who plays knuckle tag with a typical man is in for a world of hurt.

For the first ten or fifteen years the TMAs laughed at all of this. How cute, they said. The ladies are practicing being attacked by the Michelin Man. They're feeling empowered. But it can't possibly work. You need years and years in the dojo doing endless kata. You need to stand in neat lines and bark "Osu!" It takes ten years to perfect the reverse punch and spinning back kick.

In time the martial arts world caught up. They changed some of the names to make the men feel good about it. It was "Street Effective Self Defense", "Reality Based Training" or "Close Quarters Combat". There was a lot more black clothing and heavy metal music in the background. Take away the props, and it was pretty much a copy of the WSD stuff modified for a male audience.

III. Get the Facts
A lot of guys still buy the old myths. And you're one of the Martial Dad. WSD isn't your obsession, so there hasn't been any real reason to take a look at the research. We have because it's what we taught. In fact, some years back we did a comprehensive interdisciplinary review article on the effectiveness of different strategies to prevent sexual assault. It covered literature criminology and its recognized sub-specialty of victimology, education, public health and a number of other fields.

The old lies go something like this:

Women should wait, watch and look for a chance to escape. If they get physical or escalate the situation they will get hurt worse because they can't fight a man and win without years and years of training. They should talk to the bad guy and convince him to stop, appeal to his better nature. They shouldn't use weapons because they make a mistake and hurt an innocent person who they just thought was a criminal. And if they do use weapons they will just be taken away and used against them.

When we started teaching WSD at least half the students believed this stuff, especially the ones over 30. By the time we packed it in (at least for now, who knows about some day) in 2005 it had changed. When we asked "How many of you have been told..." almost all the young women looked at us as if to say "Teacher, you really need to stop smoking those funny cigarettes before breakfast."

The real world hadn't changed. What we know about it had.

This was the era when things relating to women became "serious" enough to study academically. And it's the time when people started studying crime prevention as a legitimate part of criminology. It started with Wright and Rossi interviewing prisoners and showing them films of people walking through shopping centers to see which ones they considered to be good victims. In 1980 Bart and O'Brien began to systematically study crime reports and do random interviews to see what sort of things women had done when they were attacked and match it up against the results. Kleck turned the gun control world upside down with randomized studies and in depth analysis of the UCR and NCVS as they related to DGU and DKU or Defensive Gun Use and Defensive Knife Use.

This isn't just one study or one method. It's consistent across many different fields with different research methods, across decades with different data and different populations. When the same pattern shows up across all these ranges scientists say it's "robust". And they start giving the results a lot of respect. For work in the social sciences the self defense outcomes material has is pretty darned robust.

What Works and What Doesn't Work

Violent Crime in General

If you do nothing the criminal will complete the crime.

If you cooperate he will complete the crime.

If you try to reason with him or get him to empathize with you you won't appeal to his better nature. He is even more likely to complete the crime. And there's a slightly higher chance that the victim will get hurt.

Running has a good chance of working. Other studies indicate that it works best if you do it immediately. The longer you wait, the less effective. It also works better if there is somewhere safe to run to, not just somewhere dangerous to run from.

Screaming does not work. In fact, under the effect of adrenaline the vocal cords tighten. In many cases screaming is physically impossible.

Yelling worked quite well. In the case of women defending themselves against men swearing loudly worked even better. Several studies including Wright and Rossi's and if memory serves Quinsey's and Upfold's found that the criminals expressed surprise. Prison interviews indicated that many found it "unladylike". Who knows what they really meant.

Struggling, slapping, grabbing and pushing don't work. The completed crime rate goes up slightly.

Earnest physical resistance works very well, better than flight or strong verbal techniques. Broadly speaking that included the more powerful strikes like punching, kicking, elbowing and kneeing. In the years we were studying grappling training was not as widespread and had not been studied enough for us to draw formal conclusions.

The earlier the defender used earnest physical resistance the better the outcome.

Combining strategies such as fighting and then running lowered the completed crime rate even more.

Knives and firearms against violent criminals worked extremely well. The completed rates of robbery, simple assault and sexual assault dropped from a base of over 92% down to no more than 3%. In less than 10% of cases were shots actually fired or was anyone cut or stabbed. Generally a forceful, assertive presentation resulted in the perpetrator leaving. The NIJ's studies and those of researchers such as Kleck pretty conclusively showed that the criminal is not going to "take the weapon away and use it against you." For the years under study there were no credible or verifiable reported incidents. One NIJ study concluded that the chance of a knife or firearm being taken away and used against the defender was - and I quote - "Less than one ten thousandth of one percent".

That's as close to "it just ain't gonna happen" a statistician will ever admit to.

Violent Crimes Against Women

We mostly looked at data about sexual assault with a few excursions into robbery. As far as we could tell the outcomes for robbery were the same for men and women.

The results for sexual assault supported the "Swear like a sailor, fight early, fight hard" strategy down the line. When they were faced with earnest physical resistance the rapists' chances of success went from over 90% to around 20%. When they were combined with strong verbal presentation and running the odds were even better.

Women who fought back - earnest physical resistance, not struggling or slapping - they did not "escalate the situation" and "get hurt worse". There was a slightly higher injury rate among those who fought. But in every study which examined the order of events the most serious injury came before the defender fought back. Injury caused resistance. Resistance did not cause injury.

When women fought back using guns or knives they simply didn't get raped.

Women whose earnest physical resistance was not successful, the cases where a sexual assault was completed, were better off. They reported fewer psychological problems. Their recoveries were quicker and less complicated. They did not experience the guilt and ambiguity that are very common among victims who do not fight back.

You've got to keep the situation in perspective. There's no danger of the situation escalating. If a guy is trying to shove parts of himself into someone's body it has already escalated. There isn't that much further it can go. The Law recognizes that the crime is so awful a woman is perfectly justified in killing her attacker. She risks terrible lifelong psychological damage, internal laceration, pregnancy and a horrible slow death from incurable diseases.

Then there's the Law. The criminal justice system is supposed to identify criminals and punish them or at least keep them away from good people for a good long time. If there is no evidence of physical violence other than the rape a prosecutor simply will not take the case. Phrases like "regrets after a bad date" or "he said, she said" and "maybe it was a misunderstanding" dissolve it all away. But if the defender has a black eye or a loosened tooth there isn't much doubt. The prosecutor will start to get interested in taking the case. If the attacker has cracked ribs or a broken nose, a lacerated scrotum, let alone penetrating stab wounds it's much harder to say "She was just playing hard to get. She really wanted me. Honest."

If you can't prevent the crime at least you can make sure the legal system makes his life miserable for the next ten years. It isn't a great comfort, but it helps.

Tell Them to Be Aware

Nearly all of the women in all of the studies reported using a variety awareness and verbal deescalation strategies several times in their life. I can't put firm numbers on it, but the best I can say is that it looks like women learn how to do this from childhood. The usual response from groups of women has been "Well, duh". In campus studies female students pretty universally structured parts of their lives to reduce their chance of victimization.

The man with the white pajamas and ratty strip of black cloth has nothing to teach most women about recognizing creeps, distraction, disengaging, deescalating, going along to get along or any of the rest of the stuff that most guys talk about when they give self defense advice to women. Girls learn this sort of thing from the cradle. Most of them really are pretty good at it. For every sexual assault that had reached the stage of physical attack women reported several potential ones which had been prevented or avoided before they got to there.

If they need more instruction in prevention, awareness or avoidance they're going to get it better from an experienced, tough-minded woman who's lived a bit and can be more concrete than "be aware of your surroundings". And most women, particularly young ones, are more open to this sort of advice from an older woman whom they respect and who can speak from personal experience. Never underestimate the League of Aunties, Grannies and Big Sisters

 

Nice post tellner.

Just a few questions.

Your post uses the phrase we a lot, and in many places we cannot logically be the same group of people. It would be interesting if you could identify where you mean we to be the general public and we to mean a specific organisation. Can you do that please?

Your post refers to studies but does not indicate who undertook these. The home office? The FBI? Sociologists/criminologists employed by those bodies? Geographical spread of studies etc? Number of people interviewed? This may sound pedantic, but I base what I teach on studies that I can identify and either videos of crime that I can directly see or first hand reports of crime given to me. I wouldn't touch a 'studies report' conclusion with a barge pole. Could you identify the studies you mention for us please?

Most people can be better prepared to defend themselves successfully after 6 hours/one full day of intensive good quality personal protection teaching dealing with physical and psychological strategies, the law, patterns of crime, patterns of attack, escape and success stories, and good contact work, than in one year of regular twice a week training at a normal martial arts club, whatever the art (and in the case of some arts with minimal close contact I'd expand that one year to an indefinite number). Regular training improves and reinforces skills, but normal short classes cannot match intensive courses for their ability to switch people's minds into a gear where they can act and it is the ability to act that is the most important thing in self defence. The best physical techniques are ones that do not need practicing. I realise that this is probably heresy to most martial artists.

 

Sure. The "we" that did the review article was Professors Billie Anger and Margaret Heyden, Tiel Jackson and I.

The "we" that taught was originally Marge, Tiel and I. As Marge neared retirement we took over the class and later started teaching in other venues.

It was a pretty big review article. We pared the final bibliography down to a few score sources. The first time we submitted the paper the editor said "You have way too many sources." That's sort of odd for a review article. Then we found out that the journal was having trouble finding reviewers. They didn't like to have reviewers whose own work was cited.

Most of the sources were academic papers in criminology, sociology, education, women's studies and similar. A few were white papers and reports from government agencies, particularly the National Institute of Justice and other organizations within the Department of Justice (notably the FBI). There was a couple sources from the Centers for Disease Control. We decided not to include them because they were just not that useful.

Eight years after publication I don't know where all of our original sources have gotten to. Marge and Billie have retired and dropped out of contact, and I know that a a few pounds of paper have gone missing in moves.

To summarize: They were almost all academic papers in the accepted peer-reviewed literature. The rest were mostly official government reports from the various branches of the Justice Department.

Pretty much. But I'd say a good twenty hours, not six. To get the best return of effect for time spent it helps to develop a group dynamic. That takes a little time. And it really goes better if they can do something, go away, come back and do it again. I don't know the Exercise Science and PE theory well enough to explain why, but it seems to be the case.

Six hours lets them see. Twenty lets them do.

Yep. But you can get lynched for saying that.

Damn. You captured it perfectly.

The United States Army can take a person off the streets and turn him or her into a professional soldier, capable of a wide variety of basic tasks and ready for advanced specialty training in nine weeks. The Marine Corps does it in thirteen. The intensive program drastically alters the way the recruit thinks, acts and responds. I'll bet that sixty plus years after he got out my father can still strip and clean an M-1 Garand blindfolded. He might be slower, but the habit was deeply ingrained. When I was in the Boy Scouts I got the bugler merit badge. One Saturday morning I played reveille. He was out of bed, shaved, dressed and in the hallway -where he tore me a new one - before he actually woke up. It wasn't the length of training that did it. It was the depth and intensity.

Martial arts is not self defense. Sometimes martial arts are useful as part of self defense. Martial arts is about perfecting and integrating the skills and developing them and everything they imply. Self defense is all shortcuts, field expedients and whatever works well enough quickly. Once a person has the emotional framework, well-taught relevant martial arts become very useful. More practice, better skill, higher efficiency and useful specialized knowledge are always good.

The most important thing about the physical skills is that they reinforce and trigger the emotional state and attitudes. If the goal of survival at any cost has been embedded a (scared, angry) person will find a way to achieve the goal. And if the training is all he or she has is the dozen things you managed to impart that's what will come out. The mystics say "The body trains the mind." It isn't mumbo-jumbo. It's plain simple truth.

 

tellner, thanks for the info. It's always good to know where info comes from.

I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to do a big re-write of my work on haov when the BCS starts include crimes committed by the under 16s. What always interests me is just how shocked young people are when they see rape statistics, particularly rape of males. It startles them into paying attention.

Absolutely. I'd far rather have students in for one full day a month than the same number of hours spread over a month. If the skills are deteriorating massively between those sessions then the fault is in the material being learnt.

Agreed.

 

Its interesting to hear what you are saying jwt and Tellner and it seems to be backed up by some good evidence. Also further emphasising the difference between self defense teaching and martial arts seems to be the training environment you recommend. With nearly all MA (correct me if I'm wrong) the emphasis seems to be on continued training over a long period of time for short sessions, maybe 6 hours a week (spread out) spent refining technique, form and conditioning so gradually you get faster, stronger, have better timing etc.

However when developing a sort of self defense mindset, you recommend say, a day of really intense activity to get you switched on and mentally more prepared for certain situations, probably the opposite to MA style training. This makes sense and you guys seem to know what your talking about. However a common problem with MA training if you miss weeks etc is that you, I don't really know how to say it, loose your groove, your flexibilty goes, timing is off and everything is not what it could be. Does the same thing happen mentally? Do people loose that mental drive and sharpness or does it stay with them. I understand the point you made about the army and the marines but that is 9-13 weeks in that sort of environment, living and breathing it. So do people have to have thier mental edge resharpened? (so to speak)

 

Good question Burnsey.

I would say not. Once people make and accept the decision to defend themselves if they have to backed with an analysis of powerful personal reasons why they will do so, it is there. I would say this only becomes an issue if your main drive to survive is to protect your wife and kids and you haven't changed your goal a while after losing them in a freak accident. Self actualisation needs to be concerned with the present.

Physically strength may deteriorate, timing may get worse, reactions may be slower. But the learned stuff is not so important in a real fight.

 

I understand and agree with the assertions that have been offered about discovering and unleashing aggression being the key to successful self defense, and I understand the difference between self-defense and traditional martial arts training. I think that you (jwt) and tellner have offered tremendous information in this thread, but your contention that a 6 hour course can better prepare a person (regardless of gender) to defend themselves than 104 hours of martial arts training seems dubious.

I understand that if an instructor imparts techniques, forms or classical postures and never addresses and instills the fighter's mindset... if a student gets through a year of MA training without ever having the adrenal's fire... your assertion may be true. And I understand that there are martial arts schools where this may happen, but I don't think they are the norm, and I don't think your blanket assertion is correct.

 

Hi Old Palden,

I'm not referring to the experience of adrenaline so much.

Key areas for me would be:
Knowing and experiencing the most common forms of attacks - experiencing pressure and adrenaline
Empowerment through understanding personal effects of crime/not getting hurt etc
Empowerment through understanding just how supportive the law really is and how much you really can do
Discovering just how hard you can hit
Practicing hitting
Empowerment through stories of how other people have escaped situations - memory programming

I would say that most schools will not touch on these. The mental consent to take part in martial arts sparring is different from having to switch on in a situation that you have not consented to be in. Similarly martial arts training can build confidence and skill that is attack and scenario specific - the problem is that the attack and scenario for self defence is often different. That difference can throw seasoned martial artists.

The Blauer tactical Systems adage is that awareness is empowered by consent (personal and professional) and skill (attack and scenario specific). If you have only consented and trained to fight in particular environments, and only prepared to work against particular types of attack from particular types of attacker, then you will be less prepared than someone who has trained for a far shorter amount of time but concentrated on the situation at hand.

 

What are key features in recorgnising a "creep"?

 

It's a flat French pancake, but that's not important right now :jester:

 

You make some good points, and I recognize that there are many levels of agreement and cooperation taking place in most martial arts training venues, some conscious and others off the radar screen of awareness.

I think one of the things that has happened as Oriental MA are integrated into the west is that they have been (perhaps I should say, are being) increasingly tested and that they are becoming increasingly realistic. The specifics you mentioned should definitely be included in the curriculum of responsible martial arts instructors, and I appreciate your efforts (and tellner's) to make that so.

That being said, I still disagree with your contention that a one day, 6 hour course, however realistic it is, will instill better skills than 104+ hours of martial arts training over a year. I'd be interested in whatever evidence you can offer to support your assertion.

 

That is pretty much how I look at it to. Most martial arts are based around sports not the identifing of the creep.

Nice tellner! More informative way of character identication is all the article seemed to lack.

It does seem martial arts teachers seem to talk that way, this will break the nose so on.