When There is No Way Out: The Importance of Self-Defense Training

Something about the air that night felt really still. My grandmother and grandfather were on the couch watching the baseball game as I shuffled into the kitchen to fix myself dinner. My youngest uncle moseyed into the dining room and plopped himself down in a seat. “Is Kayla* (my oldest sister) moving back home, Daysha?” he asked me for what felt like the 80^th time, and to which I always responded, “I don’t know.”

But for some reason this time it came out differently. The way my voice combined the syllables to form these three simple words didn’t quite hit his eardrum right. And within seconds, I could feel the weight of his breath hitting my face as we stared each other down menacingly. “Move,” he barked, as I got dangerously close. “I am not scared of you,” I shot back, and I knew he saw that truth gleaming in my stare like the way the sunlight’s rays bounce off of a window and glimmer in one’s eyes. It dazed him at first; blinded him. And all he could think about was how to get the light from shining in his eyes. For too long I sat like a dusty windowpane letting his taunts and his anger fits just collect over me. But on that night, I finally found the courage to raise that window high. However, his masculinity was on the line now. So in a furious haste, he attempted to slam that window close.

But I had been true to my words. I was not afraid. When my brother came to my aid within seconds of my uncle’s first blow and broke up the fight brewing between us, a wave of relief washed over my body. I could have backed down in fear and let him disrespect me, but that relief I had experienced was because I was not afraid of what he could have done to me. Thankfully, I had spent the previous semester learning how to recover from such blows studying self-defense with Professor Sean Flynn.

When I first enrolled in self-defense last fall, like many women, I wanted to have the skills to protect myself, but not necessarily have to ever use them. In a way, I believe that taking this class gave me the courage to stand up to my uncle’s unpredictable fits of rage. In retrospect, it was one of the best decisions I have ever made. However, for some people, one huge deterrent from enrolling in self-defense classes is the hefty price tag attached. The class I took happened to be $40, but other classes, like model mugging, can range from $150 to $500. And while $40 might not seem like much to some people, it would be quite elitist to assume that everyone can afford that cost.

I believe that women’s colleges should even go so far as to require that all students take self-defense at no cost. If not, I think that it should at least be offered as a free course. In Core I, a Scripps first year requirement class, students are constantly bombarded with texts and videos about this unsafe patriarchal world that we live in. Yet to force students to have to take on the burden of paying for classes to protect themselves from this world seems absurd.

I understand that places like The Tiernan Field House and groups like It Ends Here, the sexual assault awareness group at Scripps, offer day seminars for self-defense. However, self-defense does not work at its best by picking up a fancy trick or two in a day. Rather it works best when one spends the time developing the mindset to distinguish the difference between a life-threatening or non-life-threatening approach and how to handle it from a variety of vantage points.

In day seminars, it is much harder to retain the information and tips taught. In Professor Flynn’s class, we went through constant drills twice a week on different moves to take down our attackers. He taught us a variety of ways how to combine these movements so as not to get stuck in a pattern. We also went over ways to recover from blows as well as how to best protect ourselves given the resources around us.

After the fight, my mom approached my uncle to figure out why he thought putting his hands on me would ever be ok. He simply replied, “I was trying to teach her a lesson.” The only lesson I took away from this moment was that should a woman get a man mad enough, then that is supposedly all the justification he needs in hurting her. It is “teaching styles” like my uncle’s that not only destroy women’s lives, but also mentally scar and worse, kill, countless numbers of women everyday.

While it is important to reform our education system around the relationships between men and women, for now, women can do themselves a huge favor by acquiring the skills necessary to protect themselves. Remember, you can never control the actions of another. However, you can control your actions and protect yourself from the poorly thought out actions of another. After taking self-defense for a semester, I can truly say that I am not afraid. Every person in this world should have the ability to say the same.