One of the things I do to earn money is teach self defense classes for women. After looking at many different self defense offerings, I ended up putting together my own class. I did that based on my life experiences, and my desire to put something together that would really be useful to my students.
The core idea in the class is that the best self defense is to keep ourselves out of situations that are dangerous. One of the things I really love about holding the classes is that I get to talk to women in the class and hear their experiences. Something I have heard several times that I really agree with is "don't trust people until you know they have earned your trust."
The first time I heard this it was something the woman's father had told her. She didn't get into cars with a single male acquaintance. She often went on group dates the first few times, and she used public places to go out with men she didn't know well.
I want to be clear in stating that sexual violation is never the victim's fault. I think it's sad that there is a need for a class like mine.
And yet, there is a need. 1 in 6 women, and 1 in 33 men have been the victim of rape or attempted rape. Approximately 73% of rape victims know their assailants. The stories I have heard repeatedly speak of victims who failed to trust their instinct and who erred on the side of trusting the possible good of their assailant instead.
We are taught from a very young age to defer in social situations. We are taught to disregard our feelings in favor of behaving in ways that make us easy to control. Our parents, our school teachers, people we trust teach us that we must follow the rules that our society has developed in order to run smoothly. We wait in line. We look to the authority in a leadership position. We don't defend ourselves physically, but turn instead to avenues of remediation like the legal system. "Turn the other cheek" is a concept that is frequently trotted out when we speak about a situation in which we feel we have been harmed.
In the majority of situations, this works very well. But predators also know these rules, and they are looking for victims who will defer to their control. Because of this, I tell my students the best thing they can do to protect themselves is to retain their autonomy at all times.
It is important to practice this daily. There are two parts to this practice. You have to practice trusting your own instincts in a given situation. And you have to practice asserting yourself on a daily basis.
Trusting ourselves looks like not caring whether we hurt someone's feelings when we don't trust them. It looks like making decisions based on our needs. It looks like closing the gap between the life you have and the life you want.
You can practice trusting yourself by starting to assert yourself in your life. We can all find places every day where we can practice asserting ourselves. We can speak up about our political opinions. We can decide to invite friends out to an event. We can tell people how we want to be treated.
As we practice these skills, we start to get a sense of ourselves as people who matter. This is the opposite of what happens in a domestic abuse situation. We find ourselves being built up.
I went to a self defense workshop put on by the police department of my town last year. There was lots of good basic information. But one thing that really bothered me was the answer a woman got to a question she asked. "The problem is that I tend to freeze up when someone is aggressive towards me. How do I handle that?" The man leading the event told her that she was going to have to get past that. She asked how. He repeated that she needed to decide whether she wanted to be a victim or not. At that point I stepped in. Because lots of people freeze up like that, and just telling them not to be a victim isn't going to help them change their behavior. The answer to this is to practice being assertive and little by little get to the point where you trust yourself to defend yourself in situations where you feel threatened. It's a process that takes time, and a simple (though not always easy) thing to learn.
And in the end, we have taken charge our our power and learned to wield it in our own service.