http://www.backwoodshome.com/articles/ayoob63.html
This may not be a new article but it was new to me. Ultimately each individual should be responsible for their own defense. I don't mind help but do not want to be "taken care of." Food for thought.
Article by Massad Ayoob
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A little reading:
http://www.aware.org/selfdefense.shtml
____________________________________________________________
Arming Women Against Rape & Endangerment
About AWARE
Mission
History
Our people
Newsroom
Contact AWARE
Quizzes
Self protection
Stalking
Courses
2006 Schedule
Assault prevention
Basic pistol
Basic shotgun
Defensive aerosol
Defensive handgun
Defensive shotgun
Handgun retention
Persuader
Responsible use...
Annie Oakley
Registration form
Self-Defense
It's important
Why should you care?
Is self-defense OK?
Should you? Could you?
Crimes
Carjacking
Children
Domestic violence
Purse snatching
Rape
Stalking
Threats
Tools and Techiques
Your brain
Aerosol sprays
Alarms and whistles
Dogs
Firearms
Improvised weapons
Martial Arts
Stun guns and tasers
Persuader-Kubotan
Unarmed fighting
Books and web sites
Success Stories
Want to help AWARE?
Contact AWARE
Search
Self-defense is important
Women in Serious Danger Need Serious Help
All women live with a certain level of risk of violent crime. Statistics show that a woman now 21 years old has a 1 in 4 chance of experiencing a violent crime in her lifetime. For them, much information is already available about how to reduce their risk ("stay alert") and how to respond if something bad happens ("fight back").
Being in Danger
But some women are at an unusually high risk of serious assault or even murder. Just watch your local news carefully, it seems that every month or two a woman is murdered, usually by abusive ex-spouses or ex-boyfriends. Most of these tragic deaths could have been prevented.
Betsy McCandless Murray knew her ex-husband was out to get her. She did everything that women are conventionally advised to do, including obtaining a restraining order, filing criminal charges, going into hiding, changing her address, hiring a private investigator, and taking a self-defense class. Despite all these precautions, she was murdered by her ex-husband.
Janice LaCava of Worcester, MA also used the normally recommended avenues for protection, filing two restraining orders against her estranged husband. Yet he murdered her in the parking lot of her apartment building in Worcester.
Shelters and other programs offer much information on personal security matters, ranging from what to pack in an "emergency get-away bag" to how to go into hiding. That is good and useful information, because it is always better to avoid a violent attack than to try to survive one. But as Betsy McCandless' situation has shown, hiding doesn't always work, and someone else can't be there to protect you every minute of the day and night.
Helping Yourself
Sometimes, violence comes despite the best possible avoidance measures, and when it does, there is often no opportunity to summon help. In those cases, a woman is forced to face her attacker alone, using only her own resources and knowledge to survive. Fortunately, women who are properly trained and confident in their ability to protect themselves can do so quite effectively.
After the McCandless Murray tragedy, the media was full of stories that said things like "Betsy's murder is proof that safety is not reliably within reach." But this is not the right conclusion to draw, as evidenced by a Letter to the Editor in the Boston Globe written by Ellen Gugel: "I've heard the claims. To make women safe, we must change the judicial system, police departments, the way little boys and girls are raised, society's ideas of marriage. . . A woman in a violent attack doesn't have time for that; she needs to be able to defend herself."
"Fighting back" is a difficult and uncomfortable subject for many women to think about, but it does not have to be that way. The concept is easy to understand, and was expressed eloquently in the article "Teaching My Daughter to Fight" by Margaret Dean Daiss in Ms magazine: "Maybe, I reason, if more girls -- the next generation of women -- learn to defend themselves physically, harming their attackers instead of walking away or crying, then maybe, just maybe, they could begin to turn the tide of abuse from themselves and their sisters. Maybe if boys and men knew that they could be seriously hurt if they lifted their hands or opened their pants against the opposite sex, their abuse could be kept at bay."
Crime rates? Who cares?
Who cares? Really. Do you care whether the violent crime rate is one per thousand or two per thousand? People tend to use crime statistics in one of two ways: to scare people into thinking that they are likely to be a crime victim, or to convince people that they are so unlikely to be a crime victim that they don't have to do anything to protect themselves.
AWARE isn't in the business of scaring anyone. We believe that every woman should know that a crime might happen to her, and she should know how to avoid it, if possible, and how to deal with it if avoidance isn't possible.
Do you know the rate of fires in US households or businesses? Probably not, but you know some basics of fire prevention and what to do if you find yourself in a building with smoke or flames.
However, if you really, really, really do want some statistics, you can get boxes of them from sources such as the Uniform Crime Reporting Program of the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Remember that some statistics are based on reported crimes (and thus tend to underrepresent crimes like rape and stalking that are underreported). Other statistics are based on surveys, and are historically only as good as the survey methods and sample size used.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Why should you care about self-defense?
You should care about self defense because:
If you are a woman, you are a target for certain kinds of criminals.
The best self-protection for most crimes is prevention.
If prevention fails, your best chance is to fight back. But you must know HOW to fight back.
AWARE can teach you to avoid situations and, when necessary, how to fight back.
Here's what one violence survivor has to say in response to the question, "What can we say to convince people they ought to care about self defense?"
The first thing that comes to mind is describing what a miserable feeling it is to have been attacked, assaulted, hurt by someone.
Tell them to learn self-defense so they never have to experience the terror and helplessness at the moment when you realize you are not strong enough... and he's too strong.
Tell them that the side effects of being the victim of a violent assault can be non-trivial. Fighting back is justified because it can save you from having the mental and physical scars of an assault to deal with for the rest of your life.
Tell them they have to learn how to fight back for themselves because the ugly reality is that people would rather turn their heads than come to your aid if you're in trouble.
Tell them that being a victim stays with you for life, that you cross through a turnstile at that point, and that you will never be the same person again.
Tell them that by successfully defending yourself, you help to make the world safer for ALL other women, because you prove, to at least one criminal, that NOT all women are easy prey.
Tell them that learning self-defense is better than waking up screaming and crying at night from nightmares.
Tell them about the 1993 Brandeis University study that found conclusively that women most apt to be raped or harmed were those who did NOT fight back.
Make analogies. Look at how much people pay for types of insurance that they are not very likely to ever use. However, how many people are willing to invest in the "insurance" of self-defense training to protect themselves from the very real risk of criminal assault?
Say that the prospect of going to jail is no deterrent to criminals. Criminals know the chances of them getting caught, charged, tried, convicted, sentenced, and having to serve time is very small. Essentially the ONLY deterrent they see is that the victim could pose a risk to their life or well-being.
If they talk about not wanting to be paranoid, ask them if they are "paranoid" about getting into an accident because they have car insurance, or if they are morbidly afraid of fire because they have fire insurance?
It's not as hard as you think to learn how to defend yourself. It is much harder than you think to recover from rape or assault.
Learning a trained counterattack is a woman's best chance of avoiding rape and surviving an assault.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Is self-defense OK?
Avoidance of danger is your first moral responsibility. But when you find yourself in a dangerous situation you could not avoid, defending yourself is absolutely the most moral and ethical course of action. It is also the most effective!
Knowing your attacker does not change your right to self-defense, and it should not change your conviction that you are worth defending.
Traditionally women have been given a selection of options that are either impractical, ineffective ("Spray him in the eyes with hairspray", "Get a rape whistle"), or don't cover the whole spectrum of possibilities in which self-protection might be necessary. For example, advice such as "Don't go into dangerous areas at night, stay home" ignores the fact that a high percentage of rapes occur when the woman is in her home, and also ignores the fact that some women must work after dark!
This advice also ignores the fact that some women are being targeted for violence by assailants who will not be deterred by casual protective measures which would work against random crime or low levels of threat.
Where can a woman who wants to learn about self-protection go for information and advice? Not to the police, who are often bound by department policy not to even mention the higher levels of protection in their talks to the public. Where can she meet women who have experienced being sprayed with pepper spray, or hit with a stun gun, to learn the pros and cons of those methods of self protection? Where can she talk with women whose range of expertise includes practical defensive tactics or even firearms, and who deeply understand more than one method of self-protection?
"Fighting back" is not an effective option unless you are taught precisely how to fight back - where can you meet women (and men) who have had extensive training equivalent to that given to police, and who are certified to teach the same skills to other civilians?
The answer is: AWARE.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Should you? Could you?
Is it better to fight back, or not?
It's virtually always better to fight back, particularly if you are trained in how to fight back appropriately. Women who fight back are injured less often, are more successful in stopping the attack, regardless of what kind of attack it is, and feel better about themselves afterwards.
I could never fight back.
People who've never been in a situation where they wanted to fight often think that they couldn't fight, but you will find, if you're faced with a life or death situation, that it's very easy to fight. But you need to know how to fight back in order for that instinct to be effective. Getting training of the type that AWARE and other organizations can provide can be critical to overcoming that emotional resistance to fighting.
What can I learn in a few hours or days?
A tremendous amount. It's not necessary to take years of training in order to become an effective fighter or in order to develop a personal protection plan that works for you. In a couple of hours or a few days, you can become proficient in a number of different techniques and learn something about how you apply them.
Home About AWARE Quizzes Self-Defense
Crimes Tools and Techniques Courses Books and web sites
Success Stories Want to help AWARE? Contact AWARE
Copyright © 2001 - 2005
Privacy Policy Legal Notice
Powered by
http://www.aware.org/selfdefense.shtml
____________________________________________________________
Arming Women Against Rape & Endangerment
About AWARE
Mission
History
Our people
Newsroom
Contact AWARE
Quizzes
Self protection
Stalking
Courses
2006 Schedule
Assault prevention
Basic pistol
Basic shotgun
Defensive aerosol
Defensive handgun
Defensive shotgun
Handgun retention
Persuader
Responsible use...
Annie Oakley
Registration form
Self-Defense
It's important
Why should you care?
Is self-defense OK?
Should you? Could you?
Crimes
Carjacking
Children
Domestic violence
Purse snatching
Rape
Stalking
Threats
Tools and Techiques
Your brain
Aerosol sprays
Alarms and whistles
Dogs
Firearms
Improvised weapons
Martial Arts
Stun guns and tasers
Persuader-Kubotan
Unarmed fighting
Books and web sites
Success Stories
Want to help AWARE?
Contact AWARE
Search
Self-defense is important
Women in Serious Danger Need Serious Help
All women live with a certain level of risk of violent crime. Statistics show that a woman now 21 years old has a 1 in 4 chance of experiencing a violent crime in her lifetime. For them, much information is already available about how to reduce their risk ("stay alert") and how to respond if something bad happens ("fight back").
Being in Danger
But some women are at an unusually high risk of serious assault or even murder. Just watch your local news carefully, it seems that every month or two a woman is murdered, usually by abusive ex-spouses or ex-boyfriends. Most of these tragic deaths could have been prevented.
Betsy McCandless Murray knew her ex-husband was out to get her. She did everything that women are conventionally advised to do, including obtaining a restraining order, filing criminal charges, going into hiding, changing her address, hiring a private investigator, and taking a self-defense class. Despite all these precautions, she was murdered by her ex-husband.
Janice LaCava of Worcester, MA also used the normally recommended avenues for protection, filing two restraining orders against her estranged husband. Yet he murdered her in the parking lot of her apartment building in Worcester.
Shelters and other programs offer much information on personal security matters, ranging from what to pack in an "emergency get-away bag" to how to go into hiding. That is good and useful information, because it is always better to avoid a violent attack than to try to survive one. But as Betsy McCandless' situation has shown, hiding doesn't always work, and someone else can't be there to protect you every minute of the day and night.
Helping Yourself
Sometimes, violence comes despite the best possible avoidance measures, and when it does, there is often no opportunity to summon help. In those cases, a woman is forced to face her attacker alone, using only her own resources and knowledge to survive. Fortunately, women who are properly trained and confident in their ability to protect themselves can do so quite effectively.
After the McCandless Murray tragedy, the media was full of stories that said things like "Betsy's murder is proof that safety is not reliably within reach." But this is not the right conclusion to draw, as evidenced by a Letter to the Editor in the Boston Globe written by Ellen Gugel: "I've heard the claims. To make women safe, we must change the judicial system, police departments, the way little boys and girls are raised, society's ideas of marriage. . . A woman in a violent attack doesn't have time for that; she needs to be able to defend herself."
"Fighting back" is a difficult and uncomfortable subject for many women to think about, but it does not have to be that way. The concept is easy to understand, and was expressed eloquently in the article "Teaching My Daughter to Fight" by Margaret Dean Daiss in Ms magazine: "Maybe, I reason, if more girls -- the next generation of women -- learn to defend themselves physically, harming their attackers instead of walking away or crying, then maybe, just maybe, they could begin to turn the tide of abuse from themselves and their sisters. Maybe if boys and men knew that they could be seriously hurt if they lifted their hands or opened their pants against the opposite sex, their abuse could be kept at bay."
Crime rates? Who cares?
Who cares? Really. Do you care whether the violent crime rate is one per thousand or two per thousand? People tend to use crime statistics in one of two ways: to scare people into thinking that they are likely to be a crime victim, or to convince people that they are so unlikely to be a crime victim that they don't have to do anything to protect themselves.
AWARE isn't in the business of scaring anyone. We believe that every woman should know that a crime might happen to her, and she should know how to avoid it, if possible, and how to deal with it if avoidance isn't possible.
Do you know the rate of fires in US households or businesses? Probably not, but you know some basics of fire prevention and what to do if you find yourself in a building with smoke or flames.
However, if you really, really, really do want some statistics, you can get boxes of them from sources such as the Uniform Crime Reporting Program of the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Remember that some statistics are based on reported crimes (and thus tend to underrepresent crimes like rape and stalking that are underreported). Other statistics are based on surveys, and are historically only as good as the survey methods and sample size used.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Why should you care about self-defense?
You should care about self defense because:
If you are a woman, you are a target for certain kinds of criminals.
The best self-protection for most crimes is prevention.
If prevention fails, your best chance is to fight back. But you must know HOW to fight back.
AWARE can teach you to avoid situations and, when necessary, how to fight back.
Here's what one violence survivor has to say in response to the question, "What can we say to convince people they ought to care about self defense?"
The first thing that comes to mind is describing what a miserable feeling it is to have been attacked, assaulted, hurt by someone.
Tell them to learn self-defense so they never have to experience the terror and helplessness at the moment when you realize you are not strong enough... and he's too strong.
Tell them that the side effects of being the victim of a violent assault can be non-trivial. Fighting back is justified because it can save you from having the mental and physical scars of an assault to deal with for the rest of your life.
Tell them they have to learn how to fight back for themselves because the ugly reality is that people would rather turn their heads than come to your aid if you're in trouble.
Tell them that being a victim stays with you for life, that you cross through a turnstile at that point, and that you will never be the same person again.
Tell them that by successfully defending yourself, you help to make the world safer for ALL other women, because you prove, to at least one criminal, that NOT all women are easy prey.
Tell them that learning self-defense is better than waking up screaming and crying at night from nightmares.
Tell them about the 1993 Brandeis University study that found conclusively that women most apt to be raped or harmed were those who did NOT fight back.
Make analogies. Look at how much people pay for types of insurance that they are not very likely to ever use. However, how many people are willing to invest in the "insurance" of self-defense training to protect themselves from the very real risk of criminal assault?
Say that the prospect of going to jail is no deterrent to criminals. Criminals know the chances of them getting caught, charged, tried, convicted, sentenced, and having to serve time is very small. Essentially the ONLY deterrent they see is that the victim could pose a risk to their life or well-being.
If they talk about not wanting to be paranoid, ask them if they are "paranoid" about getting into an accident because they have car insurance, or if they are morbidly afraid of fire because they have fire insurance?
It's not as hard as you think to learn how to defend yourself. It is much harder than you think to recover from rape or assault.
Learning a trained counterattack is a woman's best chance of avoiding rape and surviving an assault.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Is self-defense OK?
Avoidance of danger is your first moral responsibility. But when you find yourself in a dangerous situation you could not avoid, defending yourself is absolutely the most moral and ethical course of action. It is also the most effective!
Knowing your attacker does not change your right to self-defense, and it should not change your conviction that you are worth defending.
Traditionally women have been given a selection of options that are either impractical, ineffective ("Spray him in the eyes with hairspray", "Get a rape whistle"), or don't cover the whole spectrum of possibilities in which self-protection might be necessary. For example, advice such as "Don't go into dangerous areas at night, stay home" ignores the fact that a high percentage of rapes occur when the woman is in her home, and also ignores the fact that some women must work after dark!
This advice also ignores the fact that some women are being targeted for violence by assailants who will not be deterred by casual protective measures which would work against random crime or low levels of threat.
Where can a woman who wants to learn about self-protection go for information and advice? Not to the police, who are often bound by department policy not to even mention the higher levels of protection in their talks to the public. Where can she meet women who have experienced being sprayed with pepper spray, or hit with a stun gun, to learn the pros and cons of those methods of self protection? Where can she talk with women whose range of expertise includes practical defensive tactics or even firearms, and who deeply understand more than one method of self-protection?
"Fighting back" is not an effective option unless you are taught precisely how to fight back - where can you meet women (and men) who have had extensive training equivalent to that given to police, and who are certified to teach the same skills to other civilians?
The answer is: AWARE.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Should you? Could you?
Is it better to fight back, or not?
It's virtually always better to fight back, particularly if you are trained in how to fight back appropriately. Women who fight back are injured less often, are more successful in stopping the attack, regardless of what kind of attack it is, and feel better about themselves afterwards.
I could never fight back.
People who've never been in a situation where they wanted to fight often think that they couldn't fight, but you will find, if you're faced with a life or death situation, that it's very easy to fight. But you need to know how to fight back in order for that instinct to be effective. Getting training of the type that AWARE and other organizations can provide can be critical to overcoming that emotional resistance to fighting.
What can I learn in a few hours or days?
A tremendous amount. It's not necessary to take years of training in order to become an effective fighter or in order to develop a personal protection plan that works for you. In a couple of hours or a few days, you can become proficient in a number of different techniques and learn something about how you apply them.
Home About AWARE Quizzes Self-Defense
Crimes Tools and Techniques Courses Books and web sites
Success Stories Want to help AWARE? Contact AWARE
Copyright © 2001 - 2005
Privacy Policy Legal Notice
Powered by
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