The Lioness
The most important thing I’ve posted for the women and girls in my audience ever:
The National Firearms Association, the Canadian equivalent of the NRA, puts out this amazing pamphlet [PDF] on some very simple self-defense moves allowing you to disable and escape from a would-be rapist.
No gun needed.
The Lioness correctly notes that the most important element of self-defense is not any particular weapon or skill, but simply the spring-loaded decision to meet violence with violence:
When a rape begins, there is no one there but you and the rapist. When it ends, there is still no one there but you and the rapist. When it ends, you will be dead, or alive but physically and emotionally shattered, probably permanently. You may also be pregnant, or under sentence of death from the AIDS infection he just gave you. Rapists don’t use condoms.
The police don’t come during a rape; they come afterward. It is vanishingly rare to find an instance where a rape has been interrupted or prevented by anyone but the intended victim.
When that realization hits you, you have ten seconds. Within ten seconds, your attacker should be incapacitated, unconscious, or running for his life; or you’ve probably lost. A good fight is short, sharp, and decisive, not a movie-style brawl. Would you like to learn how to end your rapist’s career?
If you believe that you cannot injure another human being, this training is not for you.
If you believe that it is proper to stop a violent criminal to save yourself and others, it is.
None of what you have just learned will do you any good whatever, if you wait until the realization hits you to decide what to do. You’ll take too much time to make the decision.
The Lioness may be printed and distributed freely, as long as it unchanged from the original. There are high-quality PDFs of each page suitable for sending to your local printer.
Along the same lines, read Lawdog’s “Appropriate Countermeasures to the Front Chokehold”, which cannot be safely excerpted, and by that I don’t mean “Not Safe For Work”, I mean “might result in accidental injury or death”. You must read the whole thing.
For a very long time, official sources have promulgated the myth that if you are being raped, the best thing to do is to cooperate. Fighting back, it’s been alleged, just makes the guy mad, and results in greater injuries. Purse snatching, mugging, rape, home invasion, doesn’t matter: just give the guy what he wants.
That turns out not to be the case.
Fighting a potential rapist might anger him, but likely he’s acting out of rage anyway, says the psychologist.
Fighting an intended attacker might provoke him, but he’s already trying to force his body into yours, says the criminologist.
Fighting off a man who’s trying to have sex with you against your will might hurt you, but nothing matches the pain of a completed sexual assault, says the rape advocate. ["Rape advocate"? Was the editor on this article on coffee break? -- djm]
Fighting a man hand-to-hand transfers his hair or skin cells onto you, helping police track him down, says the self-defense coach.
And fighting back increases your odds of escaping unraped because most rapists are looking for an easy target, said a prominent criminal justice professor who studies how women avoid rape.
“The odds of getting away are increased when you fight back,” said Sarah E. Ullman, who teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who tracks how women manage to escape sexual assault.
“(Rapists) don’t expect a forceful response. If they get that, they may be quickly deterred and that may be all it takes to stop the assault.”
…
Once a woman has decided to put up a fight, the strategy is clear: Be active, confident and forceful. Attack the rapist’s vulnerabilities: his groin, his eyes. [And ankles and knees and Adam's Apple -- djm] Playing victim won’t work, Ullman said. Neither will begging, pleading, crying or negotiating. Talking to stall when confronted in a public place or business may allow passersby or customers to interrupt the attack, but assertive commands can also buy time and give the woman a chance to run away. And a woman wielding a weapon to a stranger is less likely to have the rape completed.
…
“Women are socialized to not make a scene, to take care of other people’s feelings, to not assume the worst,” Ullman said. “Trust your instincts. If something doesn’t feel right, it isn’t right.
“Don’t worry about making a scene.”
Tags: National Firearms Association, NFA, rape, rape escape, rape prevention, Self-defense