This month I saw an amazing performance by New Visions: Alliance to End Violence in Asian/Asian American Communities.  This community-based theater group stages scenes in which a husband is verbally abusing his wife in front of family and friends, and then invites audience members to stop the action, step onto the stage in the role of a secondary character, and speak up.

In one re-play, a man stepped into the role of the abusive husband’s friend and spoke to him earnestly, firmly, and kindly about his behavior.  In another, audience members spoke about the power of the mother-in-law in many southeast Asian families, and their desire to see that character break silence in support of her daughter-in-law.

Placing all the responsibility on the victim for ending violence doesn’t work (although of course many survive and manage to get out even without family support). 

Placing all the responsibility on the perpetrator may be ethically or legally accurate, but it also obscures the roles of those in his family and his community who taught him how to abuse women.

And that brings me to this incredible link.  It’s a self-defense project based in a Nairobi, Kenya community with local instructors.  I was enjoying their page of success and survival stories, when I ran across an amazing testimonial from a mother-in-law (Mary Wangui, third story down) fearlessly protecting her daughter from her son.

Self-defense is not just physical - it’s verbal, emotional, psychological, spiritual.  A lot has to be transformed for most women before they can ever defend themselves physically.  We have to believe that we are worth defending, that defense can work, and that we can live with the consequences of setting and defending our boundaries before we can even imagine taking defensive action.  There’s a saying that change happens in this order:

 #1 Awareness

#2 Acceptance

#3 Action

My favorite advice columnist, Cary Tennis at salon.com, expresses this in a wonderful way in his response to a letter from a woman who describes being sexually harrassed by her boyfriend’s “friends.”

 I especially like the way he refers to our innate will to protect ourselves as a “pure moral reflex”.

On August 31, 2008 two young women successfully defended themselves against attempted abduction here in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  Both women were out jogging in a normal, safe, residential neighborhood in a wealthy small town in the Midwest.  The 20 year old fought off a man who jumped out of the bushes.  Later that evening, the same man grabbed a 16 year old and forced her into his van.  She fought back and jumped out.  Both young women probably saved their own lives with brilliant quick thinking, courage, and a fast and forceful response.

Here’s the story in the Ann Arbor news.  May I recommend that you skip the lengthy comments section?  Not surprisingly, the public commentary on these success stories provides a perfect example of victim blaming, hatred of women and girls, and really bad self-defense information.

Lousy Self-Defense Pseudo Tip #1:
Don’t jog at night.

Reality:
The majority of attacks are by men you know, attacking you indoors during daylight hours.  If you’re really concerned about assault and trying to better your odds - you should feel most relaxed outside, alone, at night.

Lousy Self-Defense Pseudo Tip #2:
Females should never be alone.

Reality:
Uhmmm…. What planet are you living on?  No one, male or female, has the option to never be alone!  What is this – the ancient Greek model for protecting women?

These ridiculous suggestions (which seem to always be accompanied by outrage and a false sense of superiority) remind me of a friend of mine in high school.  She’d seen a movie once in which someone drove off a bridge, was trapped in the car by her seatbelt, and drowned.

She never wore a seatbelt again.

The self-defense equivalent is to shout at women “Never go out alone at night!”  It lends a false sense of security at best and at worst tells girls and women that they’re bad for leaving the house and have caused their own attack.

Jogging doesn’t cause rape.
Being alone doesn’t invite abduction.
Women don’t cause men to attack them by flaunting themselves on the sidewalk.

And seatbelts don’t cause traffic fatalities.

The best defense against attacks?  Fight back like they did!

Maybe inspired by the upcoming U.S. election and the 40th anniversary of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about violence prevention.  Some people are surprised to learn that I’m a committed non-violence and peace activist.  After all, the simplest level of what I teach includes how to kick someone in the head until he’s unconscious. 

OK, so that’s violent!

A meditation teacher helped me to reconcile that incongruence .  I’d shown her a video of one of my IMPACT classes, basically some quite intense, realistic and violent self-defense against attempted assault.  Lots of shouting and kicking and knock-out blows.  I have to admit I was nervous about her reaction; I was eager at the time to be perceived as a spiritual and peaceful person. 

We chatted a bit about karma –  including the long-term negative consequences for those who commit violence.  She pointed out that it’s not doing the perpetrator any favors to allow him to harm you, and that “sometimes the most loving thing you can do for someone is to stop him from hurting you”. 

And if that requires you to knock him out, so be it.

And of course the linkage between peace and self-defense is long and deep, here’s a wordy article from the Quaker community detailing the historical use of some of the terms.

Herding Cats

Some would say that trying to get self-defense instructors to work together on a project is like trying to herd cats.  My theory is that we who enter this field tend to be independent, controlling, a little rigid, perhaps a bit defensive?  I’ve had professional experience working with surgeons as well, and I see a lot of similarities.  Teaching self-defense can be an intense field, fraught with adrenaline, a desire to rescue, and a lot of contact with those who’ve had their lives threatened.

So perhaps surprisingly, I really enjoyed a gathering of my people last week - the Association for Women’s Self-Defense Advancement held their annual meeting in Greenville, South Carolina this year.  AWSDA (the acronym that makes everyone sound like a New Yorker) has members across the US, Canada, the UK, as well as Germany, Zimbabwe, and Afghanistan!  If you’re looking for a class, you can search the AWSDA database for instructors in your area.

Setting aside the requisite drama and schisms, I met some wonderful people and learned a ton.  I got to practice some old techniques, learn new ones, ask other instructors what’s working for them and share what’s working for me.  And I was thrilled to teach a class on trauma and some of the gifts and challenges of teaching self-defense to survivors of violence.

Where else but AWSDA can you find energy workers, therapists, NRA members, cops, cage fighters, martial artists, feminists, and social workers working toward a common goal?  As Bernice Johnson Reagon said in 1981:

 “…[working with others] is not necessarily nurturing. It is coalition building. And if you feel the strain, you may be doing some good work…Most of the time you feel threatened to the core and if you don’t, you’re not really doing no coalescing…..There is no hiding place. There is nowhere you can go and only be with people who are like you. It’s over. Give it up.”  Her speech is at that link in its entirety and it moves me to this day.

So if you’re a personal safety proponent, I hope you’ll consider joining AWSDA.  And no matter what your field, I hope you’ll keep helping to build coalitions.

Why don’t more white people effectively act as allies for people of color?

What’s the difference between a straight person who doesn’t hate lesbians and gays, and one who is actually an ally?

What does it take for men to stand up for women’s safety?

Are you a bystander or an ally? 

Most people I know have had a personal experience of witnessing violence against a woman, and doing nothing.  I’ve done nothing more than once.  I remember standing silently on a street corner in San Francisco when I was 19, and watching a man drag a screaming woman down the street by her hair. I didn’t know what to do.
 
What’s the difference between a bystander and an ally?  Is it that the bystander doesn’t care or can’t be bothered?
 
I think it’s fear.
 
Fear that if we intervene, we’ll be hurt too, or killed.  It’s a very real fear.  Police officers have shared with me that the most dangerous part of their job is trying to intervene in domestic violence assaults.  Sometimes the perpetrator turns on them.  Sometimes the victim turns on the ally too, terrified that she’ll be beaten even worse later because someone tried to help her.
 
There’s social fear too.  You may suspect, rightly, that if you say to your sister “I don’t like the way your husband talks to you” or “Have you noticed the kids are afraid of him?” that you won’t be invited over on weekends anymore.  And you might really need your sister’s love, or approval, or a place to go for Christmas.  That’s fear turning a potential ally into a bystander.
 
There are lots of good reasons to learn how to be safe, effective, and meaningful allies, but one that I’m particularly interested in is the trauma that we experience as bystanders.  The experience of failing to act can have devastating, long-term consequences for the witnesses.  It can haunt us, leaving a sense of shame, inadequacy, impotence, even terror.
 
When I finally got realistic and meaningful self-defense training, it not only taught me how to save my own life, but freed me to be an ally.  For the first time in my life, I was free to make choices.  I could choose when to speak up.  When to ask for help.  When to refuse to back down.
 
Knowing I can physically protect myself if someone tries to hurt me has increased my choices in all areas of my life.  Now I know that I can find support, love, and acceptance even if someone rejects me for speaking out.  Now I’m free to tell the truth in all my relationships.  I no longer have to live small and quiet -  whether that’s staying inside because of a fear of parking lots, or shutting up when I hear a racist “joke” or learn disturbing information about a friend.  When we are free to choose, fear no longer gets to run our lives.  We become better allies and safer in the world.
 
“The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.”  Albert Einstein

On March 11, 2008, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control announced that one-quarter of teen-age girls have at least one sexually transmitted disease.  Here’s the press release.

On March 12, 2008, the American media went crazy. 

I have been accidentally exposed to an enormous amount of shouting, blaming, and moralizing on this topic.  (This is something I usually try to avoid, the US media talking about sex and high school or college-aged girls in the same story.)  It was impossible to miss their tones of shock, disgust, and parental disapproval as commentators placed the burden of this disturbing news entirely on the shoulders of girls and young women.  For a comparison, imagine if the CDC had announced 1 in 4 girls has food poisoning… 1 in 4 girls has an eye infection… 1 in 4 girls has leukemia… 

Now there are a lot of different issues here, but I have yet to hear anyone considering these statistics in the light of the high rate of sexual abuse of girls.  Sadly, I think we have to assume that at least some of these girls were exposed to diseases, including the ones that are fatal if left untreated, by non-consensual sex (that is, rape).

Teens answering a survey about sexual health and behavior may or may not be willing to respond honestly about their experiences of sexual assault.  They may or may not even be aware that what happened to them was an assault.  They may be unable or unwilling to even remember it.

And while most people seem to be jumping to the conclusion that 1 in 4 teenage boys also has a sexually transmitted infection – there is good evidence out there that the people who have sex with, impregnate, and sexually assault teen girls are actually adult men over the age of 20.

I did find one quote through Planned Parenthood that offers a hint about what’s may really going on:

“A young woman whose first partner is seven or more years older than herself is less likely than other women to use contraceptives at first intercourse, and she is more than twice as likely to rate first intercourse as unwanted than those women whose first partner is the same age or younger. The percentage of women who use contraception at first voluntary intercourse increases as the levels of wantedness rise (Abma et al., 1998).” (emphasis mine) From Planned Parenthood’s Research page.

Incidentally, I found that site to be a great source, they compiled a lot of studies on a wide range of teen sexual health and behavior issues.  Instead of shouting about morals or blaming girls who have been infected, they give real information, much of it hopeful and pro-girl!  They have a site especially for young women too.  It was such a relief to find some real and useful information.

There’s a great article at Broadsheet, the feminist column over at salon.com, that gets to the core of the backlash against women rape survivors. Tracy Clark-Flory responds to the latest crappy journalism claiming that there’s no real sexual assault crisis on campus, that the very real and well-proven statistics simply represent women who consented to sex and then felt bad about it later.

Do women sometimes consent to sex and then feel bad about it later? Sure.

Does that mean sexual assault is rare? Uh, no.

I’ve taught self-defense and personal safety on college campuses for years, and we have to start every class with a lengthy and detailed discussion of what constitutes sexual assault. Sometimes we spend two sessions, that’s four + hours, on the topic. Even when groups of students are able to come to consensus about the definition of “sexual assault” (sexual contact without consent) they struggle with the definition of “consent”.

Most students I encounter believe the definition of rape is: “When a woman I don’t know is out alone at night, and she’s attacked by a male stranger who uses physical force and usually a gun, and who forces her to engage in a very specific sexual act, and she later reports it to the police.”

Actually, sex without consent is rape.

I’ll never forget the student who told me succinctly one night after our first class together: “I thought I didn’t know anyone who’d been raped, but now I realize that I’ve been raped.”

This month there have been a series of incidents in my town of men standing outside women’s homes, looking in the windows at night and masturbating.  I can’t stand the cutesy appellation “Peeping Tom” – what’s cute about this behavior?  Like most forms of sexual abuse, this perpetrator method has been lauded and mythologized and turned into a sexy little joke in the media way too often.

I know that a lot of men really do not comprehend the chronic, pervasive, and exhausting fear of being raped that women live with every day.  When I taught self-defense classes at sororities this month, no one laughed about these incidents. 

The women wanted to know what to do if one of these guys was outside their house.  Their questions included “What if he grabs me by the neck and chokes me?” and “What if he has a knife?”  and “What if I’m alone and he tries to come in and kill me?”  No one subjected to this abuse thinks it’s cute.

I point out that most of these guys have a slightly different profile than other sexual assailants.  That mostly they’re frightened guys, interested in shocking and observing, not in attacking and killing.  And I also teach them how to physically defend themselves if they have to face their fears.

And of course, it can help to close the drapes at night, keep the doors locked, and
report,
report,
report. 

I would love to see every one of these creeps on the front page of the paper, exposed to the community for the damaged and damaging people they are.

At my local library we can request books online and they’ll be marked with our last name and held on a shelf to pick up.  I love this.  Last night, I went to pick up some novel that Oprah told me to read and guess what?  Right next to the novel on the hold shelf was MY BOOK!  Someone had submitted an online request to reserve My Book, the One I Wrote. 

It felt like a special Be Happy gift from the universe after a long, gray February day.  Not only did someone want to read my book, they reserved it on the very day I would be there, and they had a name starting with M-A so it would be shelved right where I would see it.  I shyly told the librarian how excited I was, and she said “Let’s go look at it together, how wonderful!”

Thanks reader!

(Note to self - I simply must get a cell phone with a camera in it……)