OBVIOUSLY it should not be on you to do this!

OBVIOUSLY the dudes in the chat need to talk to each other, because as Dulce Sloan says, all women have experienced harassment or abuse, so who’s doing the harassing and abusing? You gotta know somebody!

Dulce Sloan: “How is it that no man has done it, but it has happened to every woman?”

We are enraged at Gisele Pelicot’s 100 assaults, and we are enraged at the website CNN exposed, and we are enraged at the magnitude of the sex trafficking ring the Epstein files exposed—and the fact that nobody has been held accountable.

In addition to the rage, I’ve also seen a lot of understandable fear.

What’s great antidote to fear? Knowledge and power.

In other words, women’s empowerment self-defense.

First, let’s review what is not working for stopping assaults.

Jail = NOT EFFECTIVE

The criminal justice system was not developed to help women trying to escape violent men, or to bring men to justice when they had attacked women in their lives. In the epic book Credible, attorney Deborah Tuerkheimer explains how the criminal justice system does not take into account victims’ desires or experiences; rather, it is a machine, and engaging with the justice system is like becoming a cog in one of the wheels – i.e., it feels distant and dehumanizing, which often re-traumatizes victims.

The criminal justice system is really bad at its job. See: 25,000 untested rape kits. See: only 2% of rapists will ever go to jail.

Tuerkheimer writes about many problems with our current system and alternatives to it. One point she makes is that our current system is punitive and capricious, meaning that the punishment is severe if a person is caught. But sexual predators know that they have an extremely low likelihood of being caught, convicted, and jailed. This doesn’t deter predators, but creates a gambling effect, instead.

One of Tuerkheimer’s alternatives is a reformed system that instead hands down lighter sentences more consistently. It is possible that sexual predators would be deterred if they knew there was a high likelihood that they would be caught, convicted, and jailed for a shorter period, such as 1-2 years.

That’s why the verdict is: not effective in its current form.

Restorative Justice = TOO FEW RESULTS

Sociologist Judith L. Herman writes about restorative justice alternatives in Truth & Repair, the follow-up to her classic Trauma and Recovery. If the criminal justice system retraumatizes victims, does not deter violence, and sometimes encourages crime, then restorative justice seems like a viable alternative.

While it can produce a better, more healing experience for survivors, it also does not seem to necessarily affect sexual predators. Perhaps it can become effective in the future, but the results are mixed.

According to Herman,

“At present, we have no large studies with outcome data on the comparative effectiveness of RJ alternative disciplinary programs for sexual assault on college campuses. Such programs are too early in their development. . . Of course, even if campus RJ programs are shown to be effective, adapting them to many other institutions and scaling them up to the wider society will still be an enormous challenge. Think of these programs, then, as the first stage in basic social science research on novel methods of implementing cultural change” (Herman 219).

Anti-Rape Programs = MIXED RESULTS

Meg Stone is the CEO of IMPACT Boston, the Massachusetts hub of the national women’s self-defense program. In her tour de force The Cost of Fear: Why Most Safety Advice is Sexist and How We Can Stop Gender-Based Violence, she conducts a meta-analysis of studies on anti-rape programs. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to work, either. One meta-analysis of 16 studies and 13 dissertations found that after taking a sexual assault prevention program, men “showed small improvements” in their attitude toward rape, but “no significant changes” in their “sexual assault perpetration behaviors” (Stone 126; emphasis added). Yikes! Stone says that it is not impossible to create anti-rape programs, but that the current ones do not make a difference.

Stone writes:

“It’s understandable to want to stop sexual violence by teaching men and boys not to rape, but that doesn’t mean it’s always possible . . . When I say that educational programs that teach boys and men not to abuse are mostly ineffective, what I mean is that most of the programs that are quick and cheap enough to attract funders and participants are not comprehensive enough to create lasting change” (Stone 141).

Maybe it’s the curriculum. Maybe it’s the execution. Maybe it’s still possible to create an effective anti-rape program, and we just haven’t figured it out or implemented it properly.

Regardless, the verdict on anti-rape programs is that studies DO NOT find them to be effective at preventing rape in their current form.

The Long-Term Goal

What needs to be addressed, of course, is our culture’s patriarchal system that creates a world in which men feel entitled to use women’s bodies. (Among other problems—because patriarchy hurts men, too.)

How do we address this? There are cooler writers than I with much better ideas: bell hooks. Audre Lorde. Kate Manne, Diana Fox Tilson, Dina Honour, Soraya Chemaly, Dr. Stacey Patton, Celeste Davis, etc. One thing everyone knows is that shifting an entire culture requires playing a long game.

What can we do right now?

THE ANSWER IS BALLBUSTING

I do mean this absolutely literally!!

What can you do right now, today, to protect yourself, to protect your loved ones, and to combat the fear and rage?

PRACTICE BUSTING ALL THE BALLS.

What’s the best way to break someone’s fingers?

Where does your physical power come from?

How much strength do you need to break a nose?

Where are your strongest bodily weapons?

What’s an effective technique to gauge out an eyeball?

What happens when you strike the carotid artery?

STUDY after STUDY shows that women’s empowerment self-defense classes improve women’s lives by:

1. Improving women’s assertive and boundary-setting skills.

2. Fostering women’s confidence in the strength of their own bodies (regardless of fitness level).

3. Reducing the likelihood that they will experience rape.

4. Fostering a sense of peace and safety in the world because women have learned what they can do.

IMPACT and PREPARE are two of the best national women’s self-defense empowerment programs. Please note that this is a very specific type of self-defense class. The studies do not show that regular martial arts or any old self-defense class will work -- it is specifically the women’s empowerment model, because that model is fact-based and fully acknowledges the impact of patriarchal culture (Stone 140). In other words, it focuses on how women can protect themselves from people who are most likely to attack them—friends, family, lovers, and acquaintances—and how to defend themselves against such attacks, which often start with the cozy-up. The DM-slide. The flirty joke that is not welcome from a hiring manager.

Women’s empowerment self-defense programs acknowledge power disparities inherent in patriarchal systems, and help women practice combatting them strategically—with their fists, but even more importantly, with their voices.

So sign up for a class. Take your daughter, your sister, your friend.

Support these programs.

Partner with them. Bring them into your schools and communities, if you are in place to coordinate that.

Smash the patriarchy! Literally, when necessary.

References / Other Resources to check out:

The Gift of Fear by de Becker

The Cost of Fear, by Meg Stone

She Fights Back: Using Self-Defence Psychology to Reclaim Your Power, by Joanna Ziobronowicz.

Fight Like a Girl and Win, by Gervasi

Credible: Why We Doubt Accusers and Protect Abusers, by Deborah Tuerkheimer

Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice, by Judith L. Herman

Get Empowered: A Practical Guide to Thrive, Heal, and Embrace Your Confidence in a Sexist World, by Telsey and Taylor

Sometimes even therapists can get it wrong.

If you haven’t heard lately, @TherapyJeff is rightfully getting a lot of blowback about his Threads post calling for a hotline that men can call in when they feel the “urge” to attack someone, namely, their partners (a la the rape academy).

@TherapyJeff:

“Is there no dedicated national helpline for men who are scared they might sexually assault their partner? Or for anyone, for that matter? Like, if they’re experiencing an urge and are worried their fantasies are turning into plans, who can they call immediately?”

(Please see the response posts by @itsquinnpadilla and @barrettpall who brought the conversation to Instagram, where I saw it.)

This shows that Jeff thinks that men have sexual urges that lead them to sexual violence, rather than realizing that sexual violence is about control, power, and domination.

A better term might be sexualized violence, because it reminds us that we are talking about VIOLENCE, not about sex.

Sex is just the most humiliating tool to attack someone else with: the injuries are internal and psychological. It’s highly unlikely a predator will be caught. Most people won’t believe the victim, whether they are male and female. The attacker can pretend that it was a “misunderstanding” and many people won’t question that. And, if they attacked a spouse, it was totally legal in the U.S. up until the 1990s—and is still legal in much of the rest of the world today.

What @TherapyJeff posted reveals a profound lack of understanding of violence.

(He later posted an apology video and acknowledged this.)

Social violence can be tempting. This is the kind of violence that people—generally men—engage in when they want to gain or keep respect, save face, or prove themselves. Social violence is avoidable violence that prioritizes ego over safety. But it is something that even the most Zen masters may consider in very frustrating circumstances.

Asocial violence, however, is violence that intends harm. That is the goal: to hurt people for the sake of hurting people. Not because it will gain someone respect, opportunities, money, or fame. Not for any reason other than that they enjoy torturing others.

Sexual assault is asocial violence.

Nothing is gained for the predator except pleasure from the victim’s pain.

This is not to be confused with sexytimes. This is not BDSM. This is not previously negotiated or mutually pleasurable.

It is violence. And it’s not something that people experience as “urges” or “temptations” that they would then talk out with a therapist. A person who is thinking about attacking a partner, friend, or relative because they relish that person’s pain is not going to want to be talked out of it.

Security expert Gavin De Becker reminds us that: “It is impossible. . . to transform an ordinary, decent man into a rapist or killer” by directly refusing him something he wants (de Becker 77).

Conversely, sexual predators are notorious for not understanding the severity of their actions. That’s part of the reason why they continue attacking people: they enjoy it, and it’s not a big deal anyway, right?

People can negotiate themselves and others out of social violence.

Asocial violence cannot be negotiated.

Asocial violence must be forcefully stopped in its tracks.

Resources:

Later, in his apology video, @TherapyJeff acknowledged that he is not familiar with violence:

@TherapyJeff: “Moving forward, I will continue reading the actual perpetration research instead of relying on clinical intuition. I’m going to be more careful about which questions I hand to a big audience and which questions I take to a consult group or a colleague first. And when I make content that affects survivors, I’m centering them. You can expect more care, more pause before posting, and a stronger commitment to staying within my scope of expertise.”

To learn more about violence, check out some of these resources:

Criminologist Gershon Ben Keren’s Krav Maga Blog.

Classic The Gift of Fear and Other Survival Signals that Protect Us From Violence, by Gavin de Becker

A feminist response, The Cost of Fear: Why Most Safety Advice is Sexist and How We Can Prevent Violence, by Meg Stone, CEO of IMPACT Boston

Trauma and Recovery, by Judith L. Herman

Truth and Repair, by Judith L. Herman

What is the first line of self-defense against sexual assault?

It’s not learning lethal techniques (though I love that part!)

It’s not situational awareness (which is over-emphasized in public settings – that’s a whole other post).

It’s not even fortitude or perseverance.

First, you have to believe you are worth defending.

The first line of defense against sexual assault is valuing yourself and trusting yourself enough to listen to your gut instincts.

Without valuing and trusting yourself, it’s much harder to physically defend yourself. A 10^th-degree black belt would have all the skills necessary to dispose of an attacker, but even she will not use them if she is unsure about her level of danger, confused about what’s happening, or if she tells herself, “It wasn’t that big a deal” or, “It’s not worth responding to.”

Valuing and trusting yourself can be difficult for some American women, depending on their upbringing and cultural influences, because in patriarchal cultures, many women are socialized to stay quiet, give the benefit of the doubt, make people comfortable, and consider others’ feelings over their own.

In a patriarchal culture, we see rapists elected to the presidency and all the Epstein predators walk free, because society still shrugs off violence against women. In fact, it is normalized, as about 2% of sexual assaulters will ever see prison time. Meanwhile, women like Marissa Alexander have been sentenced to prison for standing up for themselves against violent partners.

Prioritizing your physical safety over others’—and especially men’s—feelings is countercultural in a patriarchal society that lets predators get away with all kinds of sexual assault on a massive scale. (Any arrests after the investigation of a website with 62 million hits teaching men how to drug and assault their own relatives?)

Patriarchal Expectations Keep Women Small

We see this prioritization of others’ feelings play out all the time in the professional world. According to Washington University psychology professor Caitlyn Collins, some women in some circles of the U.S. “have been socialized into understanding that what is most important is that they be perceived as likable and agreeable” (Collins qtd in Dastagir). At the same time, women are aware of the consequences of being perceived as disagreeable or difficult by others, which is not the same thing as being actually disagreeable. “People-pleasing” behavior can also be influenced by other social and cultural factors (@haileypaigemagee). People who feel like outsiders in their communities or workplaces may also act more smiley and agreeable to avoid cultural conflicts and help work run more smoothly. Immigrants, for example, may feel the need to smooth out social interactions, and so may a Black man in a predominately White field, a gay man in a more traditional office environment, or even a new employee who has just transitioned into a new industry.

Power dynamics come into play as well. As we have seen this last year (and every year), powerful men often take advantage of their position to harass and abuse women in their orbit. It may be difficult enough for a woman to deal with a colleague on equal footing with her, but when he is her boss, eminent in the field—say, up for a seat on the Supreme Court—it is much harder to navigate trying to keep a job you love while telling off a creepy, predatory man.

Furthermore, predators will focus on a woman’s self-worth or self-trust when manipulating or attacking her. Some predators tell victims that they are “worthless” while attacking them in an attempt them silent. “You are trash,” or “nobody cares about you,” they may say to shame the victim into not pursuing justice.

Similarly, predators will also use manipulation and gaslighting tactics to make a person question themselves. Predators may say something inappropriate and then claim it was “accidental,” “no big deal,” “just a joke,” or that “you’re taking it wrong” or “reading into it.” They don’t want people to trust their gut instincts, which may very well be warning them that this comment is indication of a controlling and violent person.

In most situations—professional or not—society expects women to be polite, submissive, and accommodating at all times, regardless of the situation, even when saying no, even when declining inappropriate advances, even when she senses that she is in danger—even at the expense of their own health, comfort, and safety.

Standing Up for Yourself in a World That Wants You Silent

Security expert Gavin De Becker agrees with Collins, lamenting that, “Explicitness applied by women in this culture has a terrible reputation. A woman who is clear and precise is viewed as cold, or a bitch, or both. . . [a woman’s response to a man] is expected to be one of willingness and attentiveness” (de Becker 68).

Laura Palumbo, communications director at the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, says that, “For many of us, what may look like ‘people pleasing’ behavior in our daily life was at one point a strategy we learned to stay safe in some way” (Palumbo qtd in Dastagir). Many women accosted by an unpredictable, pushy or aggressive man have chosen to decline him gently or evasively because they are concerned about being attacked.

However, De Becker reminds us that, “It is impossible. . . to transform an ordinary, decent man into a rapist or killer” by directly refusing him (de Becker 77). If you directly refuse someone and they respond angrily, you’ve just dodged one bullet and should now make a quick escape. (Know that if you’ve been in this situation before, and you’re here to tell it, whatever you decided at the time turned out to be a safe choice!)

In fact, it is vital to tell off predators directly, firmly, and loudly.

Because this tactic works!

In her book, The Cost of Fear, Meg Stone analyzes a host of studies about sexual assault and self-defense. In one study of many, Brown University psychologist Lindsay Orchowski, who studies sexual assault, found that 85% of “unwanted advances were stopped by women’s resistance,” which was defined as women “saying ‘Stop!’ or ‘No,’ having a conversation about sexual limits, or using a physical self-defense skill’” (Orchowski qtd. in Stone 129).

But first, you have to believe that you should stand up for yourself.

Buck the patriarchy. Believe that you are valuable and worth protecting at all costs. Know that you can defend yourself, because you absolutely can.

References:

Dastagir, Alia E. “The One Word Women Need to Be Saying More Often.” USA Today, 20 Apr. 2021, https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/health-wellness/2021/04/20/why-its-so-hard-for-women-to-say-no/7302181002/

De Becker, Gavin. The Gift of Fear: And Other Survival Signals That Can Protect Us from Violence. Dell, 1998.

Stone, Meg. The Cost of Fear: Why Most Safety Advice is Sexist and How We Can Stop Gender-Based Violence. Beacon Press, 2025.

Orchowski, Lindsay et al. “Resisting Unwanted Sexual and Social Advances: Perspectives of College Women and Men.” Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 36:7, 2018, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0886260518781805#core-collateral-purchase-access

The legend of Lucretia is that she was a noblewoman who was raped by a prince. After her suicide, the people of Rome revolted, deposed the Roman king, and instituted a the Roman Republic around 500 BCE.

Many Renaissance painters have depicted Lucretia over the centuries. Hollywood loves a rape origin story, and so did Renaissance painters. Titian captures the terror in her eyes. Botticelli created a narrative with the rape, the finding of Lucretia’s body, and the subsequent rebellion. In a testament to the horror and ubiquity of rape, Master of Marradi depicts the attack through a window while daily life continues outside. In 1594, Shakespeare wrote an epic poem Lucrece.

I saw one in Venice, by Felice Ficherelli, on the top floor of the Palazzo Ca’ Rezzonico in Venice. The palazzo is an 18^th Century rococo building that houses the 18^th Century Museo. The painting, circa the mid-1600s, portrays the act itself – Sextus holds her arm with his left hand and holds a long dagger along her hip with his right. Her face is red and her eyes are teary.

The rape story, I could take for truth, but the revolution it spawned seemed unlikely as I looked at this painting in the Ca’Rezzonico museum. How many people hold abusers accountable in their lives? Not many. Hollywood loves a rape origin story, but it’s usually the kind of story that reinforces existing myths and stereotypes about sudden attacks from unknown assailants, as well as the singular hero or heroine who now has motivation for revenge. In reality, Judith L. Herman writes in Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice that rape victims generally do not desire vengeance, but community support and community accountability for abusers. This happens so seldom that the subsequent revolution is what sounds legendary to me.

~

But not a week later, Prince Andrew himself was arrested, and UK diplomat Peter Mandelson was fired and arrested a few days later.

No arrests yet in the U.S., which is not surprising, but it is continually disappointing.

The criminal justice system is not built to find justice for most female victims of violent crime, as Deborah Tuerkheimer writes in Credible: Why We Doubt Accusers and Protect Abusers. 1 in 6 of whom have experienced attempted or completed rape in her lifetime; 1 in 3 will experience domestic abuse, and 98% of those predators will never be punished.

Based on the outcomes, we know that the justice system operates by punishing low income men, especially Black and Hispanic men, who have committed drug crimes, weapons offenses, property crimes, and physically violent crimes that follow simple, familiar scripts. It is not built to punish wealthy people who commit white-collar crimes, nor is it meant to punish the majority of rapists and domestic abusers whose attacks do not follow familiar scripts.

This doesn’t mean that no rapists or white-collar criminals are ever punished. According to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, ten thousand people are currently incarcerated for sexual abuse. But we know that the number of rapes and rapists in the U.S. is far higher, because those ten thousand people represent about 2% of sexual assault perpetrators.

98% of predators “walk free” because “for every 1,000 sexual assaults, 50 reports lead to arrests, 28 cases lead” to “felony convictions, and only 25 perpetrators are sentenced to incarceration” according to RAINN’s summary of the Federal Bureau of Investigations’ 2017 report.

And I’m reminded of Bill Cosby’s release from prison on a technicality after being convicted of three counts of “aggravated indecent assault.” Sixty women came forward with experiences of being drugged and raped by Cosby as adults and as minors, but many were unable to participate in the trial because the statute of limitations had passed.

In a patriarchal system, the house always wins.

~

The real legend of Lucretia is the whole city caring that much about a single assault, a whole city rising in revolt against a single predator – and then affecting lasting change. What a dream!

We already know that there are over a thousand Epstein victims.

Let’s take a page from Judith and make a reality out of these legends.

Works Cited:

“Facts & Statistics: The Scope of the Problem.” RAINN, https://rainn.org/get-informed/facts-statistics-the-scope-of-the-problem/

Herman, Judith L. Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice, Basic Books, 2023.

“Individuals in the Federal Bureau of Prisons.” United States Sentencing Commission, March 2025, https://www.ussc.gov/research/quick-facts/individuals-federal-bureau-prisons

“Inmate Race.” Federal Bureau of Prisons, 7 Mar. 2026, https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_race.jsp

“Prisons of Poverty: Uncovering the pre-incarceration incomes of the imprisoned.” Prison Policy. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/income.html

“Racial and ethnic disparities.” Prison Policy. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/research/racial_and_ethnic_disparities/

“System.” RAINN, https://rainn.org/facts-statistics-the-scope-of-the-problem/statistics-the-criminal-justice-system/

Tuerkheimer, Deborah. Credible: Why We Doubt Accusers and Protect Abusers. Harper, 2021.

You’ve probably read about situational awareness before.

Security experts and martial artists talk about it a lot.

But more comprehensive way to think about risk is to look at patterns of violence in society.

Patterns of Violence

Avoiding and preventing violence is all about pattern recognition, something we seem to be uniquely bad at in the United States. (Maybe in other countries, too, but I don’t live there!)

Safety and security experts talk often about situational awareness, and the importance of knowing your environments’ baseline – in other words, its patterns:

Who do you usually see on your street? How many people walk dogs, smoke on the sidewalk, or sit out on their porches?

Do you know your neighbor kids and their parents?

How often do your neighbors have visitors and at what time of the day?

What kinds of cars drive or park nearby? What are the bust stops or train stations like?

Understanding these patterns tells you when something is off. If you know that your neighbor uses a dog-walker when they’re at work, it would be normal to see someone else entering your neighbor’s front door during the middle of the day. If you know that your neighbor does not use a dog-walking service and they are traveling with their pet for the weekend, then it would be strange to see someone entering their house while they are gone.

(See this post for the issue with situational awareness – it puts the onus on the individual and ignores the societal problems – write this separately???)

But situational awareness of our immediate surroundings is not the only technique that will keep us safe. If we live in an unsafe environment, our likelihood of experiencing violence goes up regardless of how aware we are.

And that’s where the solution of situational awareness has failed Americans.

The focus on situational awareness is individualistic and ignores the safety of everyone else.

You may think to yourself that others’ safety is their concern. Everyone should watch out for themselves!

That’s not how society works.

Focusing so much on situational awareness creates a false sense of safety and control. We feel like we can protect ourselves if only we watch our surroundings close enough. If only we try hard enough, we can control our experiences.

That’s not how violence works, either. It doesn’t stay in neat little decanters. Rather, it expands, spills out and stains everything else, too.

Along with personal safety, security experts should also be talking about how to reduce societal violence.

Much of what’s happening in the U.S. today is not surprising if you look at patterns of violence across society.

ICE & Police Brutality

ICE and police brutality against protesters and observers in Los Angeles and Minnesota?

Black communities have been protesting the militarization of law enforcement, the prevalence of white supremacists in police departments, and police brutality for over 100 years. Unfortunately, the wider society has not cared enough about Black lives to join the Black community in forcing meaningful reforms of law enforcement.

Police brutality is not the result of “a few bad apples,” but is a societal problem that has existed for over a century—and is now more obviously affecting White people.

Epstein & Common Predators

Similarly, the common variety of rapists, pedophiles and abusers are not punished or shunned in American society. When victims tell their communities about rape or abuse, many times the community disbelieves the victim. Even when they do believe the victim, people often do not enact societal punishment the predator for a variety of reasons—but mainly because it makes their lives harder. People would have to find new friends if one of their current friends is a rapist. Colleagues of predators would have to choose to make their own lives harder—by forgoing a promotion, or losing an employee or a contract. Families might have to break up to keep a predator away from children, grandchildren, nieces, or nephews.

Few Americans are willing to take these measures to protect their own kids and friends from predators.

Why are we surprised at the number of billionaires and politicians who associated with Epstein even when they knew he was a sex trafficker?

As a society, we do not shun predators in our own midst.

Why would we expect the world’s rich and powerful to be any different?

Inhumane Treatment & —?

ICE detention centers are inhumane hellholes where people are kept for months, sometimes years. They are notorious for having major, unsanitary sewage problems, dirty water, bug-infested food, freezing temperatures, and little to no medical help for those detained. In 2025, 32 people died in ICE custody. To detail just two of these tragedies: two 44-year-olds who were legally visiting or living in the U.S. both died in detention centers from lack of treatment during a medical emergency. Marie Ange Blaise, of Haiti, died of a heart attack. Maksym Chernyak, of Ukraine, died of a stroke. Neither was given prompt emergency medical care.

This is how we are treating people in the U.S—undocumented immigrants, legal immigrants, like Blaise and Chernyak, and American citizens ICE catches in their dragnet of brutality.

If we look at this violence as a pattern, we know that such inhumanity will not stop with ICE detention centers.

Who will this brutality touch next, and how can we stop it now?

(Check out this list of resources and ways you can help immigrants and communities in Minnesota here — at the bottom of the post.)

How can you identify domestic abuse beside bruises?

Everyone knows to look for bruises, but abuse in real life is generally much subtler. It’s likely you may never even see any bruises, as survivors wear long sleeves, pants, and makeup to cover them up.

In Sleeping With the Enemy, Julia Roberts passes off her frequent bruises as injuries from gymnastics. Her friends at the YMCA never suspect that she is a victim of domestic violence, and, in fact call her abusive husband to offer condolences after she faked her death to escape.

This is not implausible. According to Domestic Violence Awareness Project, “2/3 of Americans say it is hard to determine whether someone has been a victim of domestic abuse,” and “90% of Americans fail to define repeated emotional, verbal, sexual abuse controlling behaviors as patterns of domestic violence and abuse”

Bruises Don’t Reveal Emotional, Sexual, or Emotional Abuse

Physical injuries are evidence that bely just one type of abuse. Looking for bruises means that you may miss signs of other types of domestic abuse, such as psychological, sexual, or financial abuse. Many times, you won’t see bruises or injuries on a domestic abuse victim. Rather, you may notice their behavior has changed.

Instead of looking for physical evidence, learn to recognize the evidence of control over another person’s life. Controlling behavior is abuse in itself and also leads to more extreme physical and lethal violence. When you know the signs of controlling behavior, you can ask your barista, your colleague, your friend or colleague if they are okay.

[Please note that any person of any gender can be abused by anyone of any other gender. People in gay and polyamorous relationships can also be abusive. However, I mostly use female pronouns for survivors and mostly male pronouns for perpetrators, because worldwide, men overwhelmingly abuse women with whom they are in relationships.

In the U.S., 1 in 4 women have experienced “severe physical violence by an intimate partner” — this does not necessarily account for emotional, psychological, or sexual abuse. One in 7 men in the U.S. have experienced “severe physical violence by an intimate partner.” Meanwhile, Safe and Equal reports that 1 in 4 Australian women have experienced domestic violence, while 1 in 13 men have experienced domestic violence. Additionally, 36% of Australians have “experienced violence by a male perpetrator,” while only 11% of Australians have experienced violence from a female perpetrator.]

Signs of Abuse

Here are some signs of abuse suggested by Safe and Equal, an Australian organization that provides services for survivors of domestic abuse.

-“She seems afraid of her partner

-“She seems afraid of her partner or is always very anxious to please him or her.”

• This may indicate that the partner is very controlling and has a temper when little things don’t go their way.

• They have “stopped seeing her friends or family, or cuts phone conversations short when her partner is in the room.”

• > Abusers often isolate their victims from family and friends, so that they have more control over them. If a person sees friends infrequently, they may not notice major changes in mood or behavior that would indicate that there is a problem – such as domestic abuse. Also, person isolated or estranged from their family may have a harder time getting support to leave an abusive relationship.

-“Her partner often orders her about or makes all the decisions (for example, her partner controls all the money, tells her who she can see and what she can do).”

• People often divide up chores and responsibilities based on talent, but a relationship is a partnership between equals. A person who treats their partner as a child who needs supervision and direction in every scenario is abusive.

-“They don’t have access to an ATM card or they have a financial allowance.”

• By taking away an ATM card, credit cards, or cash, people often use finances to trap and control their partner. This prevents the survivor from leaving the relationship, can even prevent them from accessing help, information, and safety. How can they buy personal items without money? How can they drive to a shelter, doctor, or social worker without gas money? How can they leave the apartment if their partner gets violent?

-They often talk “about her partner’s ‘jealousy,’ ‘bad temper’ or ‘possessiveness.’”

• People who are paranoid are convinced that their partner or the world is out to get them—despite all evidence to the contrary. Extremely jealous or possessive partners are engaging in controlling behavior or paranoid fantasies – both of which are red flags for future violence.

-“She has become anxious or depressed, has lost her confidence, or is unusually quiet.”

• These may be signs of emotional abuse; at home, her partner may be screaming, yelling, throwing things, belittling, insulting, and gaslighting her.

-Their “children seem afraid of [their] partner, have behaviour problems, or are very withdrawn or anxious.”

-“She is reluctant to leave her children with her partner.”

• If a person cannot trust their own partner with their children, you know something is seriously wrong.

-“She may have just escaped an abusive relationship if an ex harasses, follows, or stalks her.” She may also receive constant texts or calls, which she may take or let go to voicemail. (“For Families, Friends & Neighbors.”)

It’s important to know these signs, because we often think of people we know, people in our groups, as not being victims of violence. We can’t imagine going to a gym class with an abuser or survivor, or attending church, volunteering at the library, or sipping a cappuccino in our regular spot with an abuser or survivor. After all, you go these places because you feel some kind of affinity with the people there. It’s shocking to think that, statistically, several of the people you see throughout the day are survivors or abusers.

This is why expert Damary Rodriguez, of Esperanza United, reminds us that “you think that it happens to other people, but it actually can happen to anyone” (Rodriguez).

Works Cited

“For Families, Friends & Neighbors.” Domestic Violence Resource Centre Victoria. 2013, https://www.dvrcv.org.au/help-advice/guide-for-families-friends-and-neighbours

“Prevalence Talking Points.” Domestic Violence Awareness Project. Accessed 3 Jan. 2026, https://www.dvawareness.org/sites/default/files/2019-06/Prevalence-TalkingPointsForm.pdf

Rodriguez, Damary. Personal interview. 1 June 2022.

“Who Experiences Family Violence.” Safe and Equal. Accessed 3 Jan. 2026, https://safeandequal.org.au/understanding-family-violence/who-experiences-family-violence/

When was the last time you saw the action classic Taken?

In the most memorable speech of the film, Liam Neeson warns his daughter’s kidnapper over the phone:

“I have a very particular set of skills. Skills that I have acquired over a very long career; skills that make me a nightmare for people like you.”

We can all become nightmares for traffickers and abusers.

Neeson’s particular set of skills – Hollywood-style stunts and shootouts – are a little harder to develop, and crucially, less effective. Tracing traffickers and curb-stomping predators is the last resort. It’s more effective to stop traffickers, kidnappers, rapists and abusers—and save their targets!—before they go violent.

There are many more helpful skillsets that are totally learnable for the everyday person to become a nightmare for predators.

Understanding how abusive relationships develops is one skillset that is easy to learn and applicable to everyone’s everyday life.

Abusive relationships develop slowly. Just like nobody intentionally joins a cult, nobody agrees to an abusive relationship, either. People enter into relationships that they think will grow and flourish, and then one person gradually starts abusing their partner as one would slowly boil a frog. Then, a person is so deep in it—the cult or the relationship—that the predator has made it very difficult to escape.

Even though abusers don’t start off with extreme physical violence, they do exhibit behaviors and tendences that are BIG RED FLAGS that indicate future violence and escalating abuse.

Once you can clock these red flags, you can warn relatives and friends, and keep yourself safe, too.

Controlling Behaviors Indicate Future Violence

One of the main signs of future violence is controlling behavior, which can be abuse in itself. This person may try to control someone’s social life, family life, work, money, location, and physical movements. The partner may very well try to mask this control with worry or loving concern, but it is not. Rather, it’s a desire to feel powerful—specifically a desire to feel power over another person. (You may recognize that desiring power over another person is also the main motivation behind any kind of sexualized violence as well.)

Some signs that your partner is trying to control you include the following.

1. They check up on your day or police your location:

• Texts or calls you to ask where you are throughout the day. He may say it’s “just to say hi” but asks where you are and what you’re doing, even if you already told him this earlier.

• Calls or texts you to confirm that you are where you say you are, as if he expects you to lie about it. For example, he calls your work phone to make sure that’s you’re at work.

• They want to know every detail about your day and routine, for example, they want to know if you’re driving straight home from work, or if you’re going to stop for 10 minutes at Half and Half Express for tea on the way back (and it’s not because they are dying for boba!). They may get angry if you make a stop or change plans in some minor way without telling them (e.g. you got out a little early or late from work, you decided to go to the gym, etc.).

• He checks up on you when you’re a little bit late. It’s one thing to text or call when you are an hour late for a date and he’s worried about you. It’s another thing if you are just a few minutes late because of traffic or you got into a conversation with someone at the gym for a while. This is an unrealistic expectation that you’ll be at his place (or wherever) exactly when you said you would be. He’s checking up on you because he doesn’t trust you.

• If you break routine or skim over some details, they assume you are cheating on them or that you’re planning to leave them.

• He wants to know where you are at all times, and he may couch his questions in interest, in care, but this is not caring behavior – it is controlling behavior and it is a sign of future violence.

2. They don’t trust you to do everyday tasks that they do and/or that you have done most of your life until the two of you met.

• “He uses ‘male privilege’ as a justification for his conduct (treats her like a servant, makes all the big decisions, acts like ‘the master of the house’)” (de Becker 212).

• He doesn’t want you to drive his car or even your car anymore. He may say it’s because he’s worried about you on the road, or the neighborhood is unsafe, or gas is expensive, or another excuse—but the excuse doesn’t matter. He’s trying to control your movements. If you comply by not leaving your home because you don’t want him to “worry” or to have an angry outburst, then he is successfully controlling and limiting your mobility. He has, in effect, jailed you.

• They may “use money to control the activities, purchases, and behavior” of the partner (de Becker 211). They don’t trust you with money, don’t want you to handle any of your money, or their money. (Or your joint accounts if you have already combined them.) They take your money, hide your money, spend your money, or refuse to pay you back.

• He doesn’t trust you to complete basic tasks that involve movement, socialization, or money, such as shopping for groceries, going to the pharmacy, fixing or replacing technology, visiting the doctor, going to a gym class, or meeting with other families for play dates.

• He doesn’t want you to make any decisions on your own, no matter how trivial. He makes you ask for his permission for even the smallest of purchases, which he may justify by saying that money is tight, when it is really that he doesn’t want you to make decisions without his oversight. This is how you treat a child, not an adult. If he does this, he’s showing that he doesn’t want an equal partner and refuses to see you as an equal partner in the relationship. He wants things his way and will not take you into account.

3. They try to control you and/or isolate you by insisting that you stop participating in hobbies or activities, quit school, or quit your job.

• “He becomes jealous of anyone or anything that takes her time away from the relationship; he keeps her on a ‘tight leash,’ requires her to account for her time” (de Becker).

• They complain that you don’t spend enough time with him, says that they miss you.

• He may ask you to change your routine and stop attending nights out with friends or yoga classes, or any other activity that you don’t do with him.

• They may claim that family and friends are a bad influence on you, or that they’re trying to undermine your relationship. They may say they dislike them, talk about them behind their backs, or discourage you from seeing them. They may hide your phone to prevent you from answering calls or texts, or refuse to keep the kids quiet so you can have a conversation. They may sabotage you by hiding your keys or running off with the car when they know you have plans to go somewhere. They do this because when they isolate you from your support network, you are easier to control (“Red Flags of Abuse”). If you never see friends, they won’t question your situation or try to get you help.

• He may pressure you to quit work, sabotage you at work, prevent you from leaving for work on time, or trap you at home indefinitely. He may say that he doesn’t trust someone to babysit the kids, that he wants to support you at home, or that he doesn’t want you to work so hard at a job you don’t like. For different people, these may be good reasons to quit a job, but when coupled with other abusive behaviors, this pressure is meant to further isolate you. When you’re not at work every day, coworkers won’t notice that you have a black eye. And when you’re not receiving your own paycheck, it’s easier to control your access to money. The fewer things that you have going in your life – fewer activities, fewer friends, fewer goals – the more you will have to depend on him.

4. They ignore or disregard your plans when making their own plans; they sabotage you and your activities.

• He ignores your long-term dreams or short-term plans. He may know you plan to go to graduate school next year—maybe you’ve already applied or been accepted—and yet he talks about the future or makes plans that don’t take that into account. He may not even say that he doesn’t want you to go to grad school, but he disregards it and expects you to accept this.

• They disregard your short-term plans, as well. You may go to spin classes on Monday nights, but then they start saying that they want to borrow your car Monday night. You plan to go on an overnight hike with your friends on the weekend, and on Saturday morning they take your backpack for their own plans. Of course, in any relationship there will be mistakes and miscommunications, but if this is something that happens fairly frequently, it’s not a mistake—they’re sabotaging you. (Though they may continue claiming that it was “just a mistake” to confuse you.)

5. They belittle you in public or in private.

• He “criticizes you or puts you down; says you are crazy or stupid, and/or fat/unattractive, or that no one else would ever want you or love you” (“Red Flags of Abuse”).

6. They belittle other women in public or in private, or show “disrespect for former partners.” (“25 Relationship Red Flags”).

• He may say all his former girlfriends were “crazy” or “bitches.”

• He may make sexist remarks about other women that focus on their looks, sexuality, or submission, such as: “She dresses like a slut”; “She’s ugly anyway”; “She was asking for it”; “She probably slept her way to that position”; “I can’t believe they hired a woman for that job”; “You can tell she’s wild in bed”; “She needs to listen to her boyfriend”; “She needs to shut her mouth.” These opinions will reinforce that he sees women as sex objects rather than as people, that he doesn’t believe women can be intelligent or competent, and that he believes that women should be submissive to men.

7. They make “sarcastic comments downplayed as jokes.” (“25 Relationship Red Flags”).

• This could be any kind of hurtful comment that he then claims was a joke, usually followed with, “You’re so sensitive.” In reality, he’s insulting you and then gaslighting you into thinking that he’s not (“25 Relationship Red Flags”). Bullies do this, too, but an abuser will exhibit many other abusive behaviors in addition to this one.

8. They gaslight you.

• Gaslighting is “when someone insists that what you see or remember is not reality” (“25 Relationship Red Flags”). An abusive partner will insist that his abuse is love, but you just don’t understand it. For example, preventing you from seeing your family is really how he shows his love for you because cooking for everyone at Thanksgiving is too stressful for you (even though you want to go!). He will prevent you from driving anywhere and claim that he’s concerned about your safety, rather than admit that he’s controlling you. After a while – especially without the benefit of outside opinions—you may start to believe him.

• They will recount events completely differently from the way you remember them, and then claim that you’re “stupid,” “crazy,” “losing your mind,” or are in some other way completely unreliable. Of course, everyone remembers things differently sometimes, but in healthy relationships, people can discuss them respectfully without making their partner feel deficient.

• He may blame you for the decisions he makes. For example, he may tell you that you two cannot afford to fly home for Christmas. Later, he may tell you that the reason the two of you didn’t fly home for Christmas was because you decided you didn’t want to. (And this kind of behavior cannot be attributed to occasional forgetfulness, but is a frequent occurrence.) (“25 Relationship Red Flags”).

• They blame you for his abusive behavior. They say that you “made” them lose their temper, or that they’re “forced” to control your finances because you can’t be trusted. You “knew” not to leave the house without their permission, so they “had” to discipline you by hitting you. They would stop hitting you if you would just behave, obey, or be a better partner. This is all nonsense. They are abusing you and furthering the abuse by making you question your reality.

9. They “[rage] out of control with you but can maintain composure around others.”

• With others, he stays calm and polite, but the minute you’re alone together, he gets aggressive. He may yell, curse, call names, or hit things. When another person appears, he turns it all off again (“Red Flags of Abuse”).

• If you tell other people about his rages, they don’t believe you because he’s so charming to others. This makes it harder for you to seek help because others falsely view you as the unreliable one.

10. They get violent when they’re angry.

• “He breaks or strikes things in anger. He uses symbolic violence (tearing a wedding photo, marring a face in a photo, etc.). . . There has been more than one incident of violent behavior (including vandalism, breaking things, throwing things).” (de Becker).

• They may be dumping cutlery on the tile, kicking chairs, throwing phones across the room, etc. Eventually that violence may turn toward you.

11. “The woman has intuitive feelings that she is at risk. . . His wife/partner fears that he will injure or kill her. She has discussed this with others or has made plans to be carried out in the event of her death.” (de Becker 211).

• If you feel unsafe at any point, listen to your gut. Don’t discount your fears as overreactions. Rather, take them seriously and make plans to end the relationship or escape.

12. “[They use] alcohol or drugs with adverse affects (memory loss, hostility, cruelty).” (de Becker).

• “He cites alcohol or drugs as an excuse or explanation for hostile or violent conduct” (de Becker). He might say, “That was the booze talking, not me,” or “I got so drunk I was crazy” (de Becker).

• Be careful of people who abuse substances. If they become angry and violent while drunk or high, they may turn that anger and violence on you. Additionally, if they fail to acknowledge the addiction or seek help, it may get worse and they may spend more and more stretches of time angry and/or violent.

13. They move too fast.

• “At the inception of the relationship, the man accelerated the pace, prematurely placing on the agenda such things as commitment, living together, and marriage. . .He expects the relationship to go on forever, perhaps using phrases like ‘together for life,’ ‘always,’ and ‘no matter what.’” (de Becker 211).

• He may pressure you to move in, get married, or get pregnant very quickly, within weeks or months of meeting. He may be controlling but charming during this period, and then become more abusive and violent after you are tied down.

14. “[They refuse] to accept rejection” (de Becker 211).

• He won’t accept it when you say no to him. He will continue asking you on a date and insist that you must join him. If you’ve already been on a date, he will pester you to continue dating. Or if you try to break up with him, he won’t let you do so—keeps calling, visiting, meeting you, dropping in on you, surprising you places, etc.

15. They do not handle conflict healthily, fairly, or respectfully.

• “He resolves conflict with intimidation, bullying, and violence. . . he resists change and is described as inflexible unwilling to compromise” (de Becker 211).

• “He uses threats and intimidation as instruments of control or abuse. This includes threats to harm physically, to defame, to embarrass, to restrict freedom, to disclose secrets, to cut off support, to abandon, and to commit suicide” (de Becker 211).

• They won’t argue his point calmly and respectfully, without losing his temper or manipulating you or the conversation. They accuse you of attacking them, undermining them, not loving them, or not respecting them, so that you get wrapped up with trying to assuage these feelings instead of continuing the original discussion.

• “He projects extreme emotions onto others (hate, love, jealousy, commitment) even when there is no evidence that would lead a reasonable person to perceive them” (de Becker 211).

• He calls you names (stupid, ugly), insists that you are incompetent or useless, claims that you have mental health problems (crazy, overreacting, you need help), or otherwise continually tears you down.

16. They “[believe] others are out to get him. [They believe] that those around his wife/partner dislike him and encourage her to leave” (de Becker 211).

• Paranoid behavior is also associated with violence. Someone who is paranoid will never believe what other people say, even when they have proof. When they are paranoid, they will completely disregard the facts, any facts, including those that show the paranoia is unfounded.

• It’s not effective to argue with someone who is paranoid. What they need is therapy, because they cannot see the world as it is and insist on seeing the world through faulty lenses.

17. They have an obsession with weapons and with using them against others.

• “Weapons are a substantial part of his persona; he has a gun or he talks about, jokes about, reads about, or collects weapons” (de Becker).

• “He refers to weapons as instruments of power, control, or revenge” (de Becker).

There are some men who might do one of these things and are not abusers. For example, a man might shame women for their sexual behavior or call them “females,” and while he is definitely a sexist tool—he may not be an abuser. However, if you know someone who does several things on this list then you do probably have an abuser or future abuser on your hands—or rather, their hands on you.

By learning to spot controlling behavior, you can decline a third date with someone who is clearly controlling, You can get yourself out of a relationship before it’s gotten serious. You can also warn friends, sisters, cousins, and other loved ones. But don’t just warn them: teach them the same red flags so that they can also keep themselves safe.

Let’s use our skills to save people before they are Taken.

Works Cited

De Becker, Gavin. The Gift of Fear. Dell Publishing, 1997.

“25 Relationship Red Flags.” Domestic Shelters, 2022,

https://www.domesticshelters.org/resources/lists/relationship-red-flags/all

“Red Flags of Abuse.” National Network to End Domestic Violence, 2022,

https://nnedv.org/content/red-flags-of-abuse/

On her Substack, Hit Me Baby One More Time, Jessica Knight compared her own experience of domestic abuse to the abuse portrayed in the 2020 Netflix show, Maid, saying that:

“Awareness is not just about purple ribbons or hashtags. It is about deepening our collective literacy and knowledge. It is about realizing that the words survivors use are not exaggerations.

“So instead of asking, “Is that really abuse?” we should be asking, “What does this person need to feel safe, seen, and free? . . . Because awareness without listening is not awareness at all.”

Knight hit the nail on the head. Just being “aware” that sexual assault and domestic abuse are common forms of violence is not enough.

We need to be able to recognize the signs and patterns of abusive behavior.

Control and Domination

Domestic violence, like sexual assault, is all about controlling and dominating another person.

Physical violence is just one of many ways to dominate and control another adult. There are many other ways to do this, which is why there are many different types of abuse. Denying the existence or severity of emotional, financial, or sexual abuse reveals a deep lack of understanding of power dynamics. The YWCA of Spokane characterizes domestic abuse as “a pattern of controlling behavior used to maintain power in a relationship by one partner over the other.”1

Spectrum of Domestic Abuse

Damary Rodriguez, a training and technical assistance coordinator at Esperanza United, sees domestic abuse on a spectrum of lethal and less-lethal violence.

Other experts divide types of abuse into different categories, which usually include emotional abuse, financial abuse, physical abuse, and sexual abuse. Many times, an abuser controlling one area of their partner’s life will expand to try to control all areas of their partner’s life. You can see how these types of abuse relate to each other in the “Wheel of Power and Control” (a few paragraphs down).

Financial Abuse

Abusers use finances to control their partners by taking their paychecks, by “rigidly limiting” or blocking “their access to family funds,” by “allowing the [victim] no say in how money is spent,” and by preventing them from holding down a job by “refusing to provide transportation,” “making them late,” or “harassing them at work.”2

“I think people think well, you know, it’s not that bad,” said Rodriguez about financial and emotional abuse.3 “It’s still really terrible,” she said, explaining that, “slowly, it will escalate over time.” Because money is one of the main barriers that victims must overcome to leave an abusive relationship, financial abuse effectively keeps them at home and under the abuser’s control—both then, and when the abuser escalates to violence.

Emotional Abuse

Abusers prey on their partners by “attempting to undermine or instill fear” in them in a variety of ways, including isolating them from friends and family, barraging them with insults, belittling them in public and private, and giving them the silent treatment.4 They may also blackmail, stalk, “threaten to harm and/or kidnap children,” and “[threaten] physical harm to self, victim, and/or others.”5

Abusers may scream, yell, stomp around the house, break things, threaten, and gesticulate wildly and violently – this behavior is used to control their partner. It is clearly unhinged and dangerous, but in the U.S., it’s still hard to get help escaping from emotional abuse. In the Maid, when Alex tells a social worker that she can’t go back to live with her partner, the social workers suggests that she should have called 911. “And say what?” Alex asks. “That he didn’t hit me?”

Sexual and Physical Abuse

Finally, abusers abuse their victims physically and sexually, and these types are well-represented in the Wheel of Power and Control.

An abuser who is sexually abusing their partner may “[treat] them in a sexually derogatory manner,” coerce the partner to have sex when they don’t want to, or coerce them into certain types of sex acts that they don’t want to participate in.6 Sexual abuse also includes rape, gang rape, and forced prostitution.7 Blurring the lines between sexual and physical abuse is violence such as injuring sexual body parts and initiating or pushing the victim into having rough, painful sex, or sex without STD protection that the victim would prefer to use.

Abusers who abuse their partners physically may start at one end of the spectrum with throwing objects at a wall or breaking things, and escalate to pushing and shoving. They may then inflict pain by pinching, scratching, and burning their partner. Or they may control their physical movements by pushing or restraining their partner, or by blocking exits or locking their partner in or out of the house.8 Physical abuse can also escalate to lethal violence, such as battering, strangulation, and murder or threats of murder.9

Lethal Violence

Domestic violence by a partner is one of the most common types of violence in the U.S. People and women in particular are more likely to be attacked by someone they know, and of the people they know, they’re more likely to be attacked by an intimate partner. According to the Department of Justice, intimate partner violence “accounted for a greater percentage of all violent victimizations,” at 15%, “compared to violence committed by immediate family members. . . or other relatives.”10

Many times, abusers escalate from violence to murder. Of all the women murdered in the 1990s, about 50% of them were murdered by “husbands, lovers, ex-husbands, or ex-lovers. . . more often than by any other type of perpetrator.”11

Let Go of Assumptions and Listen to Survivors

Beyond being “aware” that this is happening, what can we do about it? As Knight says, we should listen to survivors.

Practice listening to others and letting go of pre-conceived notions about relationships and cultures. Many people have trouble finding help when leaving abusive relationships because they or their experiences don’t fit the common story that we tell ourselves about domestic violence.

Many mental health professionals write about breaking the cycle of generational trauma.

But what about generational violence?

Like generational trauma, generational violence can also be passed down through families and through communities.

Violence against Native Americans is one type of generational violence that has been passed down through hundreds of years of American culture. We may not be repeating the exact same dehumanizing phrases coined by military leaders in the mid-1800s, but Native peoples have been living the effects of those words for the last 150 years:

• Native Americans were not considered citizens of the United States until 1924.

• Native Americans were not allowed to vote until 1948. (And are still fighting barriers to representation, such as discriminatory voter-ID laws and gerrymandered maps.)

• Very young Native American children were systematically kidnapped by the federal government and forced into boarding schools away from their families, from the 1880s until as recently as 1978.

The long, snaking fingers of genocide still encircle Native Americans today as a result of European immigrants’ generational violence.

Native Americans Experience More Violence – from Non-Native Attackers

Native Americans are more likely to experience violence than other racial groups: statistics from the U.S. Department of the Interior say that 84% of Native women and 81% of Native men “have experienced violence in their lifetime” (“Five Things”; “Missing and Murdered”). Furthermore, statistics from the Department of the Interior show that of those 84% who experienced violence in their lifetimes, 39.8% had even experienced violence “in the year leading up to the study” (“Missing and Murdered”). Of this violence, domestic abuse is by far the most common type of violence, followed by sexual violence and stalking (“Five Things”).

Native American women and men are more likely to experience sexual or domestic violence than any other racial group. Women and men also experience such violence almost in equal numbers, which is unusual. According to the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 47.5% of Native women and 40.5% of Native men have been victims of domestic violence during their lifetimes (Petrosky et al).

But what’s even more unusual is who the attackers are.

In other racial groups, predators and abusers are more likely to attack one of their own, i.e. most white people are generally attacked by other white people.

While Native Americans also attack other Native Americans as well, Native peoples are a racial group that is more likely to be attacked by non-Native predators and abusers. The abysmal rate of sexual and domestic violence experienced by Native American people in the 21^st Century is our fault, because it’s happening right now, and because the perpetrators are overwhelmingly every race other than Natives. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, non-Native criminals are responsible for 97% of violent crimes against Native female victims and 90% of violent crimes against Native male victims (“Five Things”; Rosay). The percentage of Native victims who have also experienced violence from other Native peoples hovers around 33-35% (“Five Things”).

Why are people attacking Native Americans?

Because of the genocide of Native Americans, there are still deep-rooted systemic legal, societal, cultural, and historical problems that lead to higher attacks on Native Americans now, in the 21^st Century.

Jurisdictional limits on have prevented tribal nations from prosecuting perpetrators even if they were caught. NBC News reports that non-Native criminals are responsible for the majority of violence against Native peoples, as those criminals have “exploited for decades” a “legal loophole”: the law that until 2022 prevented tribes from “[prosecuting] people who are not members of a tribe” (Brewer). This means that though tribes were technically supposed to be able to enforce their laws, they were effectively prevented from doing so because “non-Native Americans,” and therefore non-tribal members, “are responsible for most of the violent crimes in Indian Country (Brewer).

Lisa Brunner, a member of White Earth Nation in Minnesota whose daughter was kidnapped and raped by four non-Native men in 2011, told News21 that “many non-Native people coming onto the reservation know that law enforcement can’t touch them” (Brunner qtd in Bleir and Zolediziowski). “We as native women are hunted, we are deliberately sought after by sexual predators,” Brunner told The Center of Public Integrity (qtd in Bleir and Zolediziowski).

In 2022, when Congress reauthorized the Violence Against Women Act, it also expanded the “special criminal jurisdiction of Tribal courts to cover non-Native perpetrators of sexual assault, child abuse, stalking, and sex trafficking. . . on tribal lands” (“Fact Sheet”).

Racism and Misogyny Lead to Violence

Addressing the legal loophole is far from the only change needed to stop the violence against Native peoples, however, because Natives living on reservations are in the minority. In fact, as of 2018, over 70% of Native Americans live in American cities (Domonoske).

“This is happening to our urban women too,” said Dr. Annita Lucchesi, founder of Sovereign Bodies Institute, which researches missing and murdered Indigenous women. “It isn’t just a matter of [tribal] jurisdiction — it’s a matter of racism” (Lucchesi qtd. in Domonoske).

Like all violence, reducing sexual and domestic violence against Native peoples is a knotty problem to untangle. A slow process, with no quick fixes. We can’t show up, guns-a-blazing, to save the day Hollywood-style as we might like—and in fact, that’s the kind of attitude that is behind the genocide of Indigenous people, and it contributes to the current epidemic of violence.

Rather, what needs to change is society’s attitudes and approach to Indigenous peoples, women, and domestic and sexual violence. The epidemic of violence against indigenous people is fueled by systemic racism and misogyny, which we must pull out by the roots.

The first step towards ending systemic racism and misogyny is listening with respect. Find stories and information about Indigenous experiences written by Indigenous authors. Learn what tribes and Native peoples say they need to solve these problems. Listen to women’s accounts of violence and survival. Cultivate respect for other peoples’ perspectives and experiences, even when they are different from yours, and especially when you find those views uncomfortable or threatening.

Next, stand up for others. Don’t use dehumanizing language when referencing other people, even in jest. Call out racism and misogyny when you hear it in your community. Find out what Native peoples think about candidates or ballot initiatives in your area and support their political goals. Learn to identify the signs of sexual assault, trafficking, and domestic abuse in your community, and offer help when possible.

None of us were alive when European immigrants first landed on the eastern shores and attacked Indigenous tribes, but we are all here now, and where Native Americans have inherited generational trauma, we have inherited generational violence. Together, let’s break the cycle of violence against Native peoples.

Resources for allies:

National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center
https://www.niwrc.org/resources/special-collection/culturalcomp-humility-allies

Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women
https://csvanw.org/advocate-corner/

Cultural Survival
https://www.culturalsurvival.org/news/stopping-violence-against-indigenous-women?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=1442219742

Indian Law Resource Center
https://indianlaw.org/issues/ending-violence-against-native-women

Works Cited

Bleir, Garet, Anya Zoledziowski, et al. “Murdered and Missing Native American Women Challenge Police and Courts.” Center of Public Integrity, 27 Aug. 2018, https://publicintegrity.org/politics/murdered-and-missing-native-american-women-challenge-police-and-courts/

Domonoske, Camila. “Police in Many U.S. Cities Fail to Track Murdered, Missing Indigenous

Women.” NPR, 15 Nov. 2018, https://www.npr.org/2018/11/15/667335392/police-in-many-u-s-cities-fail-to-track-murdered-missing-indigenous-women

“Missing and Murdered Indigenous People Crisis.” Bureau of Indian Affairs, U.S. Department of the Interior, 2022, https://www.bia.gov/service/mmu/missing-and-murdered-indigenous-people-crisis.

“Establishment of the Missing and Murdered Unit.” Bureau of Indian Affairs, U.S. Department of the Interior, 2022, https://www.bia.gov/service/mmu/missing-and-murdered-indigenous-people-crisis.

“Five Things About Violence Against American Indian and Alaska Native Women and Men.” National Institute of Justice, May 2016. Department of Justice, https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/249815.pdf.

Petrosky, Emiko et al. “Homicides of American Indians/Alaska Natives – National Violent Death Reporting System, United States, 2003-2018.” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 19 Nov. 2021. Centers for Disease Control, https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/ss/ss7008a1.htm

Rosay, Andre B. “Violence Against American Indian and Alaska Native Women and Men: 2010

Findings from the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey.” National

Institute of Justice Research Report, U.S. Department of Justice, May 2016,

*November was Native American Heritage Month. (I meant to post this five days ago.)

That’s what I heard in the gym that made me cringe.

A young guy, maybe 18-20, was talking on the phone while resting between weights.

“You gotta stay away from people who bring drama,” he said.

Good advice.

“You gotta hang around good people,” he said.

This friend is on it!

“You know,” he explained. “People who are just trying to get through life without being disrespected.”

Oh my! That’s a very low bar for the definition of “good people.”

But more importantly, that is a highly unrealistic goal. “Trying to get through life without being disrespected” is like trying to get through life without dying.

It’s inevitable. And having a major problem with “being disrespected” means that you may have a major problem with a lot of people, a lot of the time. That’s no way to go through life!

How does this relate to martial arts?

The first line of self-defense is not defending yourself, but preventing potential violence. (The second step is avoiding imminent violence, and the third step is defending yourself.)

Since we can’t control what other people do or how they treat us, what we can do is question our assumptions about other people and adjust our attitudes about the world, in order to change how we react.

One of the problems with the idea of “being disrespected” is that to some people – if you know, you know – will perceive anything as “disrespect.” They’ll experience disagreement as disrespect. They’ll hear “no” and feel disrespected. They’ll experience some kind of discomfort or confusion and call it “disrespect.” They’ll understand that they’re not included in a group that’s not meant for them and register that as “disrespect.”

This obsession can somewhat overlap with paranoia; people with paranoid tendencies think that everyone is out to get them. All accidents are actually personal affronts. Failure at work means that they were sabotaged. Bad luck is the fault of scapegoated minorities, etcetera.

People, and most often men, who are obsessed with “disrespect” are incredibly insecure and emotionally immature.

Question Your Assumptions & Adjust Your Attitude

A man, a stranger, once asked me “how I dealt with all the disrespect” from students, because he said that would be a problem for him.

I told him that I generally don’t see students’ behavior as being personally disrespectful towards me. I’m not that easily insulted.

Students are people. And people are generally thinking more about themselves and their lives and their goals than they are thinking about their professors, or other people in their orbit, and how to personally insult them.

If you assume that your students, or other people in your life, are purposely “disrespecting” you, you’ll have a lot to be angry about all the time.

Let go of that assumption. You are the main character in your own life, but not in other peoples’ lives. They’re barely thinking about you, much less conspiring against you. Instead of assuming disrespect, assume what’s more likely:

Distraction.

Stress.

Fatigue.

Forgetfulness.

Sometimes thoughtlessness.

And even when someone does very purposely insult you in some way, remember that they may very well be the one with the problem. They may be projecting their issues onto you. They may feel indignant, afraid, or devalued in some way, and hope that insulting you will make them feel better.

Martial artist and self-defense expert Wim Demeere writes about remembering that other people are “human, too” and about not being “the bad guy” to other people:

“A large portion of violent incidents can be avoided by simply getting over yourself, by not letting your ego or sense of entitlement make the decisions. Yes, it is your right to be loud and boisterous in a biker bar. But it’s not a smart move is it? It is absolutely your right to give that guy who cuts in line a piece of your mind; free speech and all that. But calling him a ‘shit-for-brains retard’ is probably not going to do much to defuse the situation. And so on.”

Not assuming animosity will lower your stress level. Approaching the world from a more understanding posture and giving people more grace means that you will not be perceiving “disrespect” from all corners. In fact, you will feel more respected overall, because you’ll know that so much of how people interact with you is based on them and their own issues, and has nothing to do with you.

Change Your Reactions

Once you let go of the assumption of animosity, you can also change your own reactions by setting boundaries for yourself. Boundaries are about how you will address a situation, not how you want others to act in a given scenario.

Maybe you find that a person’s tone of voice when talking to you always grates on your nerves. You’ve already approached the person from a position of openness and curiosity and yet the sarcastic or dismissing tone continues.

You can now decide how you want to deal with that. Maybe you want to confront the person and ask them to cut the sarcasm. Maybe you want to limit your interactions with this person to keep your peace. Maybe you want to try both. Any combination helps you practice setting boundaries, improving communication, and keeping your peace – and these all help prevent future violence.

People who communicate well, don’t antagonize others, and aren’t easily angered are people who can better avoid violence.

Chill yourself out to make it harder to get a rise out of you.

Chill yourself out as your first line of self-defense.

How can you predict when someone will be violent?

Criminologists look at several factors, including location, inherent characteristics, and behavior that can point to whether a person will use violence to solve a problem.

Decisions about whether to use violence must take into account several elements. A person who attacks another may assess these elements very quickly—in a matter of seconds—or they may ruminate on them for years.

To predict violence, you can think like a potentially violent person and imagine how they feel about their situation and these various elements.

Threat assessor Gavin de Becker divides this method into the four elements of JACA, which stands for (perceived) Justification, Alternatives, Consequences, and Ability. With this method, you can find JACA elements in the decisions in the decisions to use violence made by everyone from individuals to terrorist groups to governments (de Becker 110-113).

JACA

Justification

Perceived Justification means that the person or group in question believes that they are justified in pursuing violence as a solution to their problem. A person or group may argue that they are justified in choosing violence before an attack, with the aim of persuading bystanders, family, or a community that violence is reasonable.

The perception that there is justification for violence is heavily influenced by personal characteristics and worldview. Let’s look at examples both righteous and inexcusable, personal and national.

Say one man accidentally bumps into and spills his drink on second man in a bar.

But the second man has characteristics that are more common in people who choose violence. Perhaps he has entitlement and a paranoid personality: he believes that he is owed respect, but conversely is also convinced that people are out to get him, and perceives many accidents as purposeful affronts. He’s also sitting at the bar surrounded by acquaintances whom he is eager to impress.

Thus, in his mind, he was standing at the bar, minding his own business, when another man picked him out of the crowd and approached him to purposely shoulder-check and dump beer on his shirt. Now, if that was a premeditated act, one should respond to it firmly and verbally, expletives optional. But the second man perceives it as a premeditated act because of his paranoia, and he doesn’t want to appear weak in front of his friends. In his mind, then they would not respect him either. So in order to stand up for himself, he decides to respond with violence by punching the first guy who bumped into him.

Alternatives

Perceived Alternatives – A person or group who feels that they are cornered and have no other alternatives will be more likely to turn to violence. It doesn’t matter if they do have alternatives—they just have to feel like they don’t.

Say a woman and a man are standing around at an evening networking event with three other men. When the others are distracted, the man gropes the woman’s butt. She now has to consider how to respond. Maybe her first thought is to slap him, but she might briefly consider what her alternatives are. As she sees them: she could yell at him that he groped her, but he may feign innocence and claim that it was accidentally because of the close quarters of the event. Then she’ll be seen as the crazy, angry woman who made a scene over nothing. She does not know the other men well and cannot expect them to stand up for her. She could call security, but again, in a patriarchal society, it’s not at all guaranteed that they would help her. (The majority of sexual predators go unpunished, which is one reason why sexual violence is so prevalent—the consequences are accurately perceived as being practically nonexistent.) Because she does not perceive any acceptable alternatives to deal with this assault, she yells, “Get off me,” slaps the man across the face and walks away.

Consequences

Perceived Consequences – People or groups consider whether there will be consequences for using violence, including how likely those consequences are to find them, and whether they may want those consequences.

Sociologist Judith L. Herman writes about our society’s modus operandi being harsh but inconsistent punishment. The U.S. tends to hand down long, punishing sentences instead of rehabilitating small-time criminals and addicts. However, there’s also a good chance that someone will not be arrested, charged, tried, convicted, sentenced, and jailed.

In the U.S., only about 7% of rapists referred to prosecutors ever see jail time for their crimes (and that doesn’t include rapists who were not arrested or referred to prosecutors), which will influence whether or when a rapist decides to attack another person. If we as a society were as horrified by sexual violence as we pretend to be, punishing a higher number of rapists might actually lead to a decrease in rape and other types of sexual assault. (Instead, American society has generally accepted staggering rates of sexual violence as normal or tolerable.)

Similarly, the insurrectionists on January 6^th firmly believed that Trump was the rightful president and that would be able to attack Congress and stop the certification process without being punished. First, white protesters are not used to being attacked by the police the way black protesters are, so they correctly assumed that they could besiege the capitol without being shot by the Capitol Police. Additionally, they believed that they would be rewarded for their so-called bravery.

And they were, four years later, when Trump pardoned all January 6^th insurrectionists, including the violent ones who had been convicted and sentenced for attacking police officers with lethal force.

For other people, the perceived consequences of the use of violence may be a positive. For example, many mass shooters plan to shoot themselves anyway. They know that shooting up a school will likely end in them being shot by the police, and they see this as a positive consequence because they get to die notorious instead of anonymous. (Some criminologists suggest that the press should refrain from repeatedly showing killers’ names and faces so that notoriety will be less of a motivating factor.) Along the same lines, suicide bombers can perceive death as a positive consequence because they will be martyrs who go straight to heaven.

Ability

Perceived Ability means that the person or group must believe that they can achieve the violent outcome they’re considering. As de Becker says, “People with weapons or other advantages perceive (often correctly) a high ability to use violence” (de Becker 112).

A person who wants to kill themselves, a partner, or school children, knows that they can actually do this if they already have a gun. This is why purchasing a gun after a breakup, job loss, or other major, negative life event is a factor that generally predicts violence. That person did not have the means to pull off their attack, so they bought a gun to do so.

Perceived ability can also include whether they can access and hurt they person they want to attack: for example, can they find that person in a big city, can they sneak into their house, can they actually swing that bat hard enough to break a bone, etc.

Use JACA to Both Predict & Prevent Violence When Possible

Not only can you predict violence using JACA, but it can be used to prevent violence, as well.

De-escalation tactics are often based on giving people “outs,” which in JACA terminology, means lowering the perception of justification and increasing the attraction and number of alternatives to violence. In the bar example, the man who accidentally spilled his drink on the other can work to diffuse the situation by apologizing and offering to make amends by buying the angry man a drink or a new shirt. An apology and a free drink may soothe the angry man’s paranoia enough that he accepts the alternative and decides against punching the first man.

Discouraging violence often rests on decreasing ability and increasing consequences. For example, when ICE agents tackle women and children in the street, righteous folks come out of their homes to film and yell at them. By standing around in the streets and sidewalks, they are working on decreasing ICE’s ability to throw people into unmarked cars and get away quickly. By filming them, they are documenting the abuse in hopes of eventually increasing the consequences for their actions.

Thinking in terms of JACA can help you ascertain whether someone poses a threat to you and others—and it can also help you figure out what to do about it.

Works Cited (hard copy):

De Becker, Gavin. The Gift of Fear: And Other Survival Signals That Protect Us. Dell, 1997.

Did you know that you—yes, you!—can predict violence?

Sociologists, criminologists, and folks working in martial arts and violence prevention can recognize the combination of characteristics, behaviors, and situations that likely lead to violence.

But you don’t have to be a professional to do it.

Predicting violence is a skill that you can learn—that anybody can learn—to keep themselves and their neighbors safe.

Likelihood by Environment

Predicting violence based on the environment is the most common method of prediction. We use this method any time we avoid walking down a sketchy street by ourselves.

Most people recognize that some crimes are more likely to happen in certain locations or situations – such as gas stations or convenience stores late at night, or outside of bars or clubs after they close at two in the morning.

As Americans, we can also predict that gun violence is far, far, far more likely to occur here than in most other developed countries. This is a major environmental factor that contributes to the approximately 43,000 people who die from gunshot wounds every year in the U.S. (Pew reports that in 2023, 58% of those deaths were suicides, and 17,927 were homicides.)

But you can also predict violence based on characteristics and behavior. Oftentimes, violence prediction involves combining knowledge about the character traits of violent people with specific incidents and their recent behavior. All my peeps who have read the bestseller The Gift of Fear, by Gavin de Becker, know about this!

Character Traits

People who are more likely to become violent towards their significant others, friends, or family also have certain characteristics. Those characteristics can be summed up as a strong desire to control other people—a desire so strong that they will manipulate, gaslight, neglect, and attack others to get their way. They are also more likely to be paranoid, to entertain wild, unfounded suspicions that other people are “out to get them” or cheating them in some way. They also are entitled and have grandiose expectations. They feel like the world in general or specific people (like women, their boss, or neighbors) owe them respect and deference, or sometimes sex or success. As you might guess, violent people are also more likely to be misogynists who believe that women should be submissive to men in their lives (or to them, at least), that women should not have as much of a say in relationships or the workplace, who are obsessed with the idea that men should be dominant in all fields and scenarios—excluding the care of children, of course. People with these character traits are more likely to beat or kill their significant others or families.

And if you think to yourself, “Well, that’s within a family—luckily not mine,” remember that violence impacts everyone. The tacit acceptance of spouses hitting each other has effects that ripple through society.

Behavior

Let’s pull back: gun violence is also very predictable—both mass shootings and assassinations.

Mass shooters and assassins most of the time come from the demographic of young white males with access to guns. 99% of shooters are male. 55% of American mass shooters are white, the remainder are split between Black and Hispanic men. The majority of shooters are between the ages of 20 and 40 years old. They generally share the same character traits listed above: desire to control and manipulate, paranoia, misogyny, and entitlement or delusions of grandeur. They all have easy access to guns.

What are the behavioral signs that someone may become a mass shooter or assassin?

Domestic violence is an indicator that a young man may become a mass shooter. A young man who is violent towards his girlfriend, friends, or family is more likely to turn that violence on the wider world, too.

Animal torture is another signal. A young man who enjoys hurting pets or other small animals has a high likelihood attacking people to get his kicks, too.

The one thing that all mass shooters have in common is an obsession with other mass shooters. Future mass shooters study past mass shooters and learn from them.

And the final commonality among mass shooters is situational: easy access to guns. Other developed countries also have violent, entitled, disaffected young men. But because they don’t have easy access to guns, those countries experience far, far fewer mass shootings.

It’s Up to Us

Learning about the predictors of violence can help you recognize and avoid violent people in your own life and your family’s lives. Start by reading about the signs of violent behavior, here or in The Gift of Fear. Then, consider people you know. Look at them with an objective eye. Do you recognize some of these traits in people close to you?

While many of us are concerned about getting caught in a mass shooting at school, church, the grocery store, a concert or movie theater, we also have a responsibility to notice the signs of violence in people around us.

In April 2024, the parents of a school shooter were convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to 10 years in prison for not stopping their son, Ethan Crumbley, from killing three people and wounding seven more. The school called in the Crumbley parents to discuss a violent drawing on their son’s math paper from that morning. They dismissed the schools’ concern, but their son already had a gun in his backpack—and he shot up the school after they left.

In what was meant as a defense of herself and her husband, Jennifer Crumbley further revealed the extent of her ignorance and stupidity. In the courtroom, she stated: “The prosecution has tried to mold us into the type of parents society wants to believe are so horrible only a school or mass shooter could be bred from. . . We were good parents. We were the average family.”

Shooters are “normal” in American society. They come from “average” families and can even be raised by “good parents.” The fact that Crumbley thought a shooter couldn’t come from “good parents” and an “average family” is precisely why she and her husband missed all the major red flags leading up to her son’s mass shooting.

Coming to Terms with Violence

It’s difficult to acknowledge that we might know someone who has character traits or exhibits the behavior of a violent individual.

But the reality is that everyone knows someone who has been violent at some point.

We constantly mingle with violent people: according to the National Domestic Violence Hotline, a quarter of women and 13% of men have experienced “severe physical violence by an intimate partner in their lifetime.” Similarly, about a quarter of both women and men experience sexual violence at some point in their lifetimes.

These perpetrators are not in jail. They are one of our friends, a relative, a colleague down the hall, or the neighbor across the street.

We need to be able to see violent characteristics and behaviors clearly so that we can prevent violence when possible, so that we can protect our friends and neighbors.

(Please see Part II and III for expansion on violence prediction and more specific red flags.)

In Part I, I covered how you can stay safe in an Uber by paying attention to your route and speaking up for yourself. But this will not dissuade predators who are determined, and you may need to move onto to the next level self-defense: physical attacks.

Say you’re in a rideshare or taxi and the driver will not stop the car when you ask to get out. Or, they’re driving off-route and not giving you an acceptable explanation (like obvious road closures). They may even already be attacking you in the car. This has then moved into an assault-and-kidnapping scenario.

When Speaking Up is Not Enough

First, if the driver is driving you off-route or not stopping when you ask, you can call 911 from the back seat and report yourself kidnapped. Tell the police where you are and give them all the driver’s info—such as his name, license plate, and car model—that you have from the app.

If calling 911 for kidnapping does not induce him to stop the car, then your next step is to injure him so badly that he cannot continue driving.

If the driver started attacking you on your route or before you could get around to calling 911, then you will also need to attack the driver and injure him badly enough that he can’t come after you anymore.

You’ve already used force Levels 1-2: presence (paying attention to the route) and voice (telling the driver to stop, calling 911 if you are able).

Next up is Level 3: physical force – only for use when you are in physical or life-threatening danger. Now, the first application of physical force should always be to RUN! But if you’re cornered—if the car is going too fast for you to jump out without seriously hurting yourself—then it’s time to fight. If you’re in a car with a driver who’s not listening to you, not stopping or slowing down, who ignored your call for help to 911, or who is actively attacking you, then yes: you are in physical or life-threatening danger and you should fight back accordingly.

Leveling Up to Physical Force

In an assault- or assault-and-kidnapping situation, fight back as hard as you can. Use your fingers, fingernails, fists, edge of your wrists, elbows, and heels to get out of that car or to stop the driver from driving or attacking you.

The targets you will hit include the eyes, nose, ears, neck, and throat, with the top two targets being eyes and throat. Your goal is to maim the driver so that he has to stop the car, and then you can jump out and run for your life.

(Please note that if the car is moving, try to keep your seatbelt loosely fastened. You need to be able to reach them and move your body, but your attacks on the driver may make him slam on the breaks or drive erratically.)

Take out the eyes:

If you’re in the front passenger seat, reach across their face and claw their eyes with your fingers. Keep raking and scratching your hands across their eyes. Even if they close their eyes, the lids are very sensitive, and they may also instinctively slow down or stop since they can’t see—giving you a chance to escape.

From the back passenger seat, reach both hands around the sides of their head and hook your first two fingers (on each hand) into their eyeballs or eye sockets. Pull their had backwards against the seat rest by their eye sockets. Again, they will probably instinctually slam on the breaks because of the pain and distraction. Once you know you can get out of the car, let go of them and run.

If they let go of the steering wheel and struggle against you, you can keep reaching around and scratching at their eyes—or jump out if they’ve stopped.

Chop the neck:

From the front passenger seat, punch them in the side of the neck. Line up and strike their neck a few inches below their ear. This disrupts blood flow and can knock them out.

From the back passenger seat, swing your arm in a chopping motion to hit the same place at the side of their neck. Fold your thumb under your fingers and strike with the inner edge of your hand. (Or use your fist for a hook punch if the headrest is in the way.) Don’t just hit once—keep plowing your hand into their neck with as much force as you can muster. Turn your hips!

Injure the ears:

From the front passenger seat, punch or palm-heel the ear facing you.

From the back seat, strike the ear as hard as you can with the palm of your hand.

If you’re facing each other, you can slap both ears at the same time, or grab them and push their head back, or forward, right into your knee.

Use your feet:

If the driver is attacking you or trying to drag you out of a car, lie back against the seat or wedge yourself against the door, and kick the kidnapper away. Bend your bottom leg like an L for support; then, bend your top leg and keep your toes pointed up toward the ceiling. In this position, your knee should be close to your face and should block out or nearly block out your view of your own toes. Then, kick with all your might, hitting with the heel of your foot. Kick them with force in the nose, the chin, the throat, or the groin.

Use your elbows:

If they attack you in the car, swing your elbows back and forth like baseball bats across their face – aim for the temple, the ear, the nose, the jaw. Remember to imagine the follow-through: that you’re not just hitting them in the temple, but you’re plowing your baseball-bat-of-an-elbow through that temple and out the other side.

Crush the throat:

These are lethal moves that you should only use in a life-or-death scenario. Perhaps things have gotten much worse: he’s pulled a gun. He’s said, “I’m going to beat you down.” Or he’s turned and is attacking you. Then you move up to the final level of lethal force.

From the front passenger seat, swing your arm in a chopping motion to hit them in the middle of the throat. Fold your thumb under your fingers and strike with the inner edge of your hand. Follow through with this strike! You’re not just hitting their throat but plowing your hand all the way through to the seat rest.

From the back seat, wrap an arm around their throat. If you know how to do a sleeper hold or other chokehold, you can do that. If not, just position the edge of your right forearm in the middle of their throat. Grab your own wrist firmly with your left hand, then yank back as hard as possible and hold it. Put your feet or knees against the seat and use it to push your body back, pulling harder on the throat. This makeshift technique can collapse the windpipe and cause death.

Run!

Once you maim them enough that they stop the car or stop attacking you, open the door and run for your life. (Thankfully you’ve probably already called 911, but do so again!)

(Check out Staying Safe in an Uber: Part I here.)

Last week, The New York Times reported on the prevalence of sexual assault in rideshare apps. While Uber claims that sexual assaults occur in less than 1% of rides, employees also admit that sexual assaults are underreported – as we all know. Even with a 1% rate, that adds up to a lot of sexual assaults. According to The New York Times investigation, “From 2017 to 2022, a total of 400,181 Uber trips resulted in reports of sexual assault and sexual misconduct in the United States, court documents show” (Steel). Examples of sexual assaults cited in the article included drivers who drove off route, unbuckled, and moved to assault passenger, or drag them from the car.

Uber and Lyft studied their rides and reports. They know which rides are “high risk,” and they also know that requiring cameras in cars reduces sexual assault of both riders and drivers. But because the apps want to do everything they can to classify their workers as contractors rather than employees, they have refused to require drivers to install cameras in their cars.

Emily Steel wrote for the Times that “Uber has found that sexual assaults follow distinct patterns. Women most often are the victims, whether they are passengers or drivers. The attacks typically occur late at night and on the weekend, with pickups originating near a bar. In the vast majority of cases, the offenders are men — drivers or passengers — with records of sexual misconduct complaints and low ratings, the internal documents show. Intoxicated passengers are especially vulnerable.”

Pay Attention and Speak Up For Yourself

Stay safe in an Uber by paying attention to what’s happening and being assertive with the driver. Defend yourself physically when necessary. (I will cover this in a separate post.)

A note on location sharing: this can create a false sense of security. Sharing your location with others doesn’t actually keep you safe. Sharing a location is only helpful after an assault if you decide to press charges. However, it does not keep you safe from assault.

Similarly, Uber and Lyft’s attempts to “check-in” with the passengers is ridiculous and does not keep you safe. How are you going to answer a call or a text from the app when you’re fighting off a driver? It’s a way for the rideshare apps to appear like they’re working on safety.

Tips for Staying Safe in an Uber

Avoid This:

-Try not to get too drunk while you’re out. Reports show that intoxicated or very sleepy passengers are more likely to be attacked by male drivers.

-Try not to fall asleep in the car.

-Don’t sit in the front seat unless you are traveling with a group of friends.

Do This:

-Share your location, but know that this is for future reference.

-When you call your car, get a general idea of the route that you will take from the app’s map. Ascertain the direction you need to travel in and what main streets or freeways will or will not be necessary. A driver might opt to take a highway or freeway that parallels the surface streets that lead to your destination. That’s OK. However, you want to be aware that, for instance, the 405 freeway leads in the opposite direction of your destination, so a turn onto that freeway would be cause for alarm.

-Watch the road and the route during your ride. Speak up if there’s an unscheduled turn: ask, “Why are you turning off Main Street?” It could be that the driver is just confused and lost—I’ve witnessed this before! But you want them to know that you’re paying attention to what they are doing, and you will speak up about it.

-Get out of the car if they don’t answer you or if their explanation is unsatisfactory. Get out at the next stop, or say, “Stop the car. I want out now!” Get out immediately. I don’t care what neighborhood you’re in, or that you don’t know where you are. You will figure it out.

Kidnapping or abduction doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ve put a gun to your head. Kidnapping means someone is controlling your movements, which is what a driver has done if they purposely go off-route for no reason.

As an example, Cornell Law School cites Model Penal Code §212.1 as saying:

“A person is guilty of kidnapping if he unlawfully removes another from his place of residence or business, or a substantial distance from the vicinity where he is found, or if he unlawfully confines another for a substantial period in a place of isolation, with any of the following purposes. . . [emphasis added]” Those purposes include “to inflict bodily injury on or to terrorize the victim or another.”

-If the driver refuses to stop, or they drive off-route and stop somewhere you don’t want to go, call 911 immediately and get out of the car.

In the event of a driver ignoring your request to leave the car, or unbuckling to assault you, you can fight back using lethal force: see part II!

Works Cited:

“Kidnapping.” Legal Information Institute of Cornell Law School. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/kidnapping

Steel, Emily. “Uber’s Festering Sexual Assault Problem.” The New York Times, 6 Aug. 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/06/business/uber-sexual-assault.html

What was he missing? The same things that ICE agents are always missing: official identification. Neither Goodnight nor ICE agents display ID badges or patches with last names or ID numbers.

ICE agents are even easier to impersonate than police officers or sheriffs, because they are rarely seen in any kind of uniform or even carrying typical law enforcement paraphernalia. Many times, they’re seen wearing various types of skinny or bootcut jeans, trainers, and almost any color of white, black, gray, or blue t-shirt. The only consistent uniform is the bulletproof vest and coward’s balaclava to hide their faces.

When faced with a suspected police impersonator, you can keep your doors and windows locked and call 911 to confirm with the dispatcher that you’re talking with a real police officer. However, ICE agents don’t share information about their movements with other law enforcement agencies, so if you aren’t sure whether someone is an ICE agent or an impersonator, the dispatcher may not have any information to help you out. Additionally, as we’ve seen multiple times, ICE agents will break windows and violently drag people – including U.S. citizens – out of their cars for arrest.

This cruel, reckless behavior endangers everyone, including fellow law enforcement.

ICE agents withholding their identities makes it more likely that faux-cop criminals can successfully kidnap someone, convincing them that they’re under arrest. It also makes it more likely that civilians may feel that it’s worth it to resist arrest, because they have no guarantee that this violent asshole shattering their window is a real agent.

Real ICE agents’ behavior during arrests further endangers everyone, because it is violent and capricious. They pick up illegal and legal immigrants. They take working people who are paying taxes. They go after people following the laws in court. They’ll accuse people of made-up crimes to justify their detention or deportation. They’ll go after kids. They’ll trap citizens if they’re brown enough or speak too much Spanish. And finally, they’ll deport you to a country you’ve never been to for no reason other than cruelty.

Complying might help you, but not necessarily. Following the law or being a citizen may not guarantee your safety, either. This unpredictability breeds chaos.

When people have trouble deciding the best course of action because they aren’t sure how things will turn out for them, they may feel confused, helpless, and desperate. This is exactly how authoritarians want people to feel, so that they’re more likely to isolate themselves, more likely to accept disinformation about their neighbors, more likely to feel defeated before they even try to push back. As Audre Lorde says, “We must recognize the despair oppression plants within each of us—that thin persistent voice that says our efforts are useless, it will never change, so why bother.”

But she also reminds us that, “We are making the future as well as bonding to survive the enormous pressures of the present, and that is what it means to be a part of history.”

Call your congresspeople to tell them to support the No Anonymity in Immigration Enforcement Act, which would ban law enforcement officers from wearing masks or hiding their identification numbers. If you are in California, New York, Pennsylvania, or Tennessee, please contact your state representatives as well to voice your support for state-level laws against anonymous policing.

In April 2025, a soccer coach sexually assaulted and killed a 13-year-old boy in Los Angeles. Different groups immediately responded by blaming other groups for this killing. The mourning family of the boy reflected that they were from a small village in Honduras, and that “we don’t have people like that there.” Meanwhile, Republicans, of course, latched onto the immigration status of the murderer in order to reinforce their narrative of an America plagued by immigrant violence. (Even though immigrants account for fewer violent crimes than the native-born population.)

Many people disbelieve that such violence occurs in their communities, because they are religious people, righteous people, conservative people, progressive people, critical thinking people, good-hearted people. But amongst all groups, we can find the controlling behaviors, dehumanizing attitudes, misogynistic beliefs, and power differentials in which violence grows and flourishes. The fact is that sexual and domestic violence is pervasive across all races, classes, and religions, as well as states, counties, and communities.

But we can do more to protect, prevent, and help people at risk or experiencing sexual and domestic violence! The first step is to let go of the denial, because it only hurts our efforts to help others. As long as people believe that sexual and domestic violence “doesn’t happen here” or “doesn’t happen to people like us,” then victims will be questioned, disbelieved, dismissed, and possibly ostracized. This attitude serves the perpetrators: they may even reinforce that idea in interactions with others – that sexual violence “can’t happen here.” An unshaking belief that you and your community is different and permanently safe is a great cover for a predator.

Additionally, this attitude of denial allows people to shield themselves against the heartache of the world—at the expense of those experiencing the heartache. Denying that sexual violence happens is selfish, because it allows (seemingly) unaffected people to continue with their lives as they have before, without helping the victims or working to prevent harm from continuing. If a person or community doesn’t believe that sexual violence can happen in their midst, then they don’t have to confront their beloved coach, favorite neighbor, charismatic pastor, or helpful uncle about their controlling or violent behavior. Denying that sexual violence happens in their communities allows people to avoid the hassle of reporting suspected abuse to the police, or testifying in the rare event that a predator is put on trial.

The first step communities can take toward helping survivors and preventing abuse is to sit with these facts and accept them. Eat some chocolate. Take a nap. Sit with a friend. But accept that such violence happens everywhere, and put that acceptance into practice. The next time that you hear or witness something suspicious, stop your questions in their tracks and ask if there’s something you can do to help.

One of the greatest psychological and physical opportunities for women in martial arts and self-defense is to be celebrated for loudly taking up space.

Owning your space is a necessity in martial arts and self-defense. For the art, you must command your space in the same way that a performer does on the stage: a good kata is strong, dynamic, compelling, and focused. In traditional martial arts, the kata stances should always be wider and lower. (“Lower. Lower!” is a familiar refrain in dojos.) For self-defense techniques to be effective, strikes must follow through the target. You are not punching the nose, but punching through the nose to the back of the head. To be successful in either endeavor, you have to make big moves, own your body, your bubble, yourself—and theirs, too, when necessary. And when you strike, you are yelling. Always, you are yelling.

Society’s Competing Expectations of Women

This can feel transformative, because society so often tells women to stay small and thin, quiet and polite, cheerful and accommodating. When Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde preached Jesus’s message of love and mercy from her own pulpit in her own cathedral, small misogynists across the nation attacked her for taking up any space at all. Wimpy men described her sermon as “ripping into” the president or “spewing” opinions, while fascists suggested she be “deported.”

This backlash was not unusual, though the vitriol has increased in the angry age of Trumpism. According to Caitlyn Collins, a psychology professor at Washington University in St. Louis, some women in some circles of the U.S. “have been socialized into understanding that what is most important is that they be perceived as likable and agreeable” (Collins qtd in Dastagir). In USA Today, Dastagir reports that “experts in gender say women are socialized to serve and acquiesce” and “conditioned to believe that their existence is for the consumption of other people” (Dastagir).

Conversely, women who are more dynamic, assertive, or commanding are often perceived as being aggressive in work situations. The Harvard Business Review reports that “a wealth of research shows that female leaders, much more than their male counterparts, face the need to be warm and nice (what society traditionally expects from women), as well as competent or tough (what society traditionally expects from men and leaders)” (Zheng et al). Attempting to fulfill each of these competing societal expectations can be very difficult because, Zheng explains, “these qualities are often seen as opposites” (Zheng).

In a Dojo, You Don’t Have to Make Yourself Small.

Thus, the martial arts’ singular focus on assertive moves and a commanding presence is a relief. No sensei is asking for a kata that looks both commanding and cute! No sensei wants an attack that also looks accommodating! In martial arts and self-defense, you are expected to embrace your size, your space, your voice, and your power, and wield it to protect yourself.

As you practice taking up space physically, you get used to it over time, and your attitude toward taking up space may well follow. In her viral 2012 TED Talk, psychologist Amy Cuddy argued that people should adopt expansive poses in order to increase their confidence. Subsequent research has shown that these effects may be less significant and more nuanced. But “contractive” poses do seem to be associated with “negative” psychological effects. According to a 2024 study in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, contractive poses are defined as “closed, slumped, and submissive postures, making the body appear smaller. . . are associated with negative and maladaptive behavioral outcomes” (Mikkelsen).

Own Your Space

In martial arts and self-defense, you are encouraged to develop a commanding presence and expansive movements by following these methods:

· Take a big stance. Keep your feet at least hip-distance apart to be stable, and many martial arts traditions practice stances much bigger than this.

· Hold your hands up in front of you, palms out, arms partway extended to protect yourself should they enter your space.

· Step back or to the side to keep your bubble intact if someone encroaches on it. Bat a hand away if they reach into your space.

· Kiai — yell loudly. Practice yelling louder than you think you should. You can kiai according to your dojo customs, or you can yell, “No!” or “Stop!”

· When you fight back, claim their space as yours. Palm heel through their chin to the back of the head. Kick through the testicles to the butt, or up and through to the stomach. When you elbow someone across the face, follow through as if you were decapitating them.

In any action, commit to your move and own that space. When you physically practice commanding your space for self-defense, you will develop a stronger feeling of ownership of your space, as well. Commanding and owning your space, rather than shrinking and relinquishing yourself, is a healthy, valuable attitude to have for self-defense and other situations as well.

Works Cited:

Dastagir, Alia E. “The One Word Women Need to Be Saying More Often.” USA Today, 20 Apr. 2021, https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/health-wellness/2021/04/20/why-its-so-hard-for-women-to-say-no/7302181002/.

Crede, Marcus. “A Negative Effect of a Contractive Pose is not Evidence for the Positive Effect of an Expansive Pose: Comment on Cuddy, Schultz, and Fosse.” Meta-Psychology, 9 Sep. 2019, https://open.lnu.se/index.php/metapsychology/article/view/1723

Cuddy, Amy. “Fake It Till You Make It.” TED Talk, 8 Jul. 2016. YouTube.

Zheng, Wei et al. “How Women Managed the Gendered Norms of Leadership.” The Harvard Business Review, 28 Nov. 2018, https://hbr.org/2018/11/how-women-manage-the-gendered-norms-of-leadership

Leading up to the 2024 election, many Republicans downplayed Trump and denied that he would actually act as he said he would on the campaign.

One of his most memorable campaign claims was that Christians “won’t have to vote anymore” after the 2024 election.

MAGA Republicans insisted that Trump meant that Christians wouldn’t have to vote for him in 2028, because his term would be over. But that’s not what he said.

In fact, four days later on Laura Ingraham’s show, he doubled down on his comments, saying: “Don’t worry about the future. You have to vote on Nov. 5. After that, you don’t have to worry about voting anymore. I don’t care, because we’re going to fix it. The country will be fixed … We won’t even need your vote anymore because, frankly, we will have such love.”

Republicans held that we could not truly take Trump at his words, or at his actions. They claimed that neither were predictive of how he would behave in office.

This is classic denial – the kind that encourages predators and enables violence.

“He Didn’t Mean That”

The idea that a person’s words or actions are not predictive of their character or future behavior is plainly laughable. If people actually believed that, there would be no use for credit checks, background checks, or employer-required drug tests: these are all based on the idea that a person with many missed rental checks, prior arrests for violent crime, or a history of drug use may not be a reliable tenant or the safest first-grade teacher.

Conversely, we also use past behavior to predict future healthy, pro-social behavior. College and job applicants must present themselves as hard-working, dedicated, and knowledgeable or coachable. Society predicts that students with good grades and job-seekers with impressive work histories are likely to continue to get the job done.

The idea that past behavior can’t predict future behavior flies in the face of reason and MAGA’s own pronouncements about “returning” to “meritocracy.”

However, many Americans of all types also engage in this kind of cognitive dissonance when it comes to abusers.

Why Society Dismisses Survivors

Our society routinely denies that a person’s words or behavior could indicate that they are a sexual predator. Survivors experience this all the time: they share their story of sexual violence, and friends, family, or colleagues respond by dismissing their experience. People frequently assume that survivors are mistaken, remembering wrong, or falsely accusing others. When a person shares a story of sexual harassment, the predator’s words are also dismissed. They cannot be used to judge his character. We saw this twice on national TV when Christine Blasey Ford and Anita Hill told of how two current supreme court justices abused and harassed them. Ford described how Brett Kavanaugh held her down, and laughed at her, while he groped her and kept his hand over her mouth. Hill testified that Clarence Thomas spoke about “such matters as women having sex with animals and films showing group sex or rape scenes” while at work. Four other women attended to support Hill’s testimony, but they were not allowed to speak.

Congress and a good chunk of the nation decided that this disgusting, dehumanizing behavior did not reflect the judges’ character. They were exempt from their own actions. Everyday women also experience this denial, dismissal, and subsequent punishment when they bring to light bad behavior that’s just considered too banal to appear on the news.

Research by psychiatrists and psychologists Lindsay Orchowski, Katherine W. Bogen, and Alan Berkowitz support this. According to a literature review in 2020, “To protect ourselves from ongoing awareness of personal vulnerability, we tend to adopt an optimistic bias, mistakenly assuming that traumatic experiences are rare, and that ‘it wouldn’t happen to me,’ thereby re-affirming our desire to believe we are safe in the world [and] in order to avoid recognizing dangerous or negative information” (Orchowski et al).

Why does MAGA, and much of society, turn to denial when faced with signs or acts of sexual predation? Because then nothing has to be done about it. Nothing is required of us.

Society ignores women’s statements about sexual violence because if it listened to women’s accounts and believed them, people would have to accept reality and respond. That acceptance and response would require challenging personal beliefs, accepting that we know sexual predators, confronting those sexual predators, and rearranging our lives to account for this new information. Ignoring women’s accounts of sexualized violence means that we can deny that we have a responsibility to make families and communities safer spaces. As a society, we are perfectly willing to let women suffer physical and sexual violence so that we can avoid this reckoning.

According to Orchowski’s literature review, people “bury their head[s] in the sand” because they “may find it difficult to accept information that someone they care about or look up to has committed a sexual assault. If an individual is presented with information that someone they know and associate with engages in violent behavior, they may also be driven to discount the allegation in order to protect a belief about themselves; that they associate with ‘good people’” (Orchowski et al).

MAGA already showed their willingness to dive headfirst into denial when they elected Trump the first time despite the Access Hollywood tape. That denial of danger was on full display again in 2024 when Republicans lined up behind their nominee who had since been found liable for rape in civil court, convicted of 34 felonies, and impeached for incitement of insurrection. Not only is violence against women acceptable for the GOP—as further evidenced by Pete Hegseth’s appointment—but the GOP is also willing to overlook criminal and treasonous behavior, pretending that these are not indicators of character or future behavior. They already know that they brush Trump’s threats under the rug at our risk – but it’s now at their own risk, too.

“Our greatest fear may be the stranger who is behind us as we walk home late at night, but in statistical reality, it is the friend or acquaintance in our own home or somebody else’s who poses a greater threat.”

– Gershon Ben Keren

There’s a story that goes around martial arts circles:

Someone asks a martial artist if they’ve ever used their training—referring to whether or not they’ve gotten in a fight outside the dojo.

The martial artist replies, “Yes, I use my training every day”—referring to the mental elements of their training.

Though we tend to think of martial arts mainly as a a set of physical skills, becoming a martial artist actually starts in the mind. Development of mental habits and skills is the foundation.

This applies to self-defense, too. Every time you see a sketchy situation developing and remove yourself from it, you are practicing self-defense. After all, the best way to survive a physical confrontation is to avoid one altogether (when possible!). If you are interested in learning self-defense, before learning any physical techniques, you can start at the beginning by learning the mental elements at home. This should include learning behavioral red flags, understanding how violent people think, making your plan ahead of time, and committing to action. The resources below are classic works on self-defense that I refer to and recommend in Lethal Moves for Ladies + LGBTQ, my self-defense seminar.

The Gift of Fear: And Other Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence, by Gavin de Becker

Despite its title, this classic is less about fear and more about tapping into and trusting your instincts—which can be expressed as fear, as well as persistent thoughts, hesitation, suspicion, dark humor, gut feelings, or anxiety. De Becker teaches readers to recognize and avoid the predators that are statistically most likely to attack them, rather than focusing on only the vague idea of a stranger in the dark. For women, a man jumping out of the bushes to attack us in a deserted field or alleyway is not statistically likely to happen. It certainly does happen, but it is not how most women are attacked, so it does not make sense to focus on what is a rare occurrence.

Rather, most women are attacked by people they know: relatives, boyfriends, husbands, friends, colleagues, classmates, and acquaintances. Most people, though, worry much more about being attacked by a stranger than someone they know.

The reasons for this are many, but an important one to remember is that nobody likes to consider the possibility that they are friends with or spending time around people who are violent. That’s why people tend to gloss over red flags they perceive in others by thinking, “They’re just joking,” or, “I’m probably reading too much into this.”

On the contrary, de Becker warns us: if something feels off, it often is off. Violence can be predicted when you can recognize the red flags beforehand. De Becker’s tour de force teaches you how to do just that: to recognize the warning signs that can help you recognize and avoid many different types of violent people, such as predators, abusers, stalkers, and more.

Fight Like a Girl . . . and Win: Defense Decisions for Women, by Lori Hartman Gervasi

Read Lori Hartman Gervasi’s book to prepare yourself for self-defense by making decisions, making plans, and developing a self-defense mindset. Gervasi tackles some of the initial decisions that women must make when they plan to get serious about self-defense, such as deciding that you are worth fighting for and that you will inflict serious injury or death when necessary. You must commit to these decisions. If you aren’t sure that you are worth fighting for, you may waver when literal push comes to literal shove.

You need to decide that you are willing to injure, maim, or kill someone else who is trying to injure, maim, or kill you—because it may be the only way to stop them. Escaping the situation should always be the first choice, but in some cases, it is impossible without removing the person obstructing the exit. If a threatening date has you trapped in a small dorm room, can you pick up the baseball bat in the corner and swing it at that predator’s head until they are out of your way? Your physical safety should be paramount in any situation. That thought is something to sit with and acclimate to, now, in the safety of your own home.

Gervasi then extrapolates modes of thought to adopt, such as how to be more aware, how to take ownership of your safety, how to think about protecting your space, how to be active rather than reactive, and how to think creatively about escaping from or injuring a threatening person. She also describes many examples of women who got themselves out of deadly situations and discusses the lessons we can learn and strategies to consider. While The Gift of Fear drops knowledge on assessing other people as risks, Fight Like a Girl is a reflective book that impels you to do the internal work of learning about yourself and developing the mindset that’s necessary for self-defense.

SEPS Women’s Self-Defense: The Situation Determines the Solution

SEPS, which stands for Situation Effective Protection System, is a free online women’s self-defense course created by Gershon Ben Keren, a security expert, criminologist, and instructor in Krav Maga (a hand-to-hand combat self-defense system) with graduate degrees in psychology. This fantastic course is divided into nine modules covering rape and sexual assault, abusive relationships, stalkers, financial predators, home security, and de-escalation. Each module features in-depth information about the nature of violence and how predators think, which is vital to understand in order to make accurate risk assessments. The SEPS program also dispels misinformation and includes surveys you can take to test your knowledge before and after completing the modules.

After reading these solid, researched books on self-defense, the next step in your self-defense journey is to enroll in an in-person class with a women’s empowerment self-defense program such as IMPACT, or a class at a local dojo or women’s center. While there are many videos online detailing physical techniques, it is a myth that you can master a contact sport just from reading books and watching videos. (You wouldn’t expect to learn how to play football via YouTube.) In in-person self-defense classes, the instructors can help correct your technique, show you how it works in relationship with another person’s body, and you can practice actually hitting something—in a self-defense situation, you won’t be striking the air!

Not all self-defense seminars are effective or supportive. If you cannot attend an IMPACT course, look for a seminar taught by another women’s self-defense program or a Krav Maga school. When assessing possible courses, look for these signs of a good course and instructor:

• The course should empower women students. There should be absolutely no victim-blaming or sexist jokes.

• The course should discuss levels of force, including boundary-setting and verbal responses to set in place to deter predators in your life and to help you avoid having a physical altercation at all.

• The course should be anchored in reality and statistics. The instructor should not be preoccupied with the boogeyman rapist, such as the one who jumps you in an alley.

• The course should preferably be a series spread out over a week or a month, or a class that you can attend a few times, rather than a single one-hour class (which is the bare minimum).

• The course should focus on combinations of simple moves to help you injure, maim, or kill an attacker, and should include easy-but-brutal techniques, such as strikes to the eyes, nose, throat, and ears.

• The course should not focus on multiple-step wrist-locks, armbars, or aikido throws meant to “stop” an attacker without injuring them. Instructors can make them look easy because they have perfected them over the years and continue to practice them weekly or daily, but complex techniques cannot be learned in one to three hours of class.

• The course should include some very simple ground techniques to help you get someone off you.

Basic self-defense does not require you to lift a hundred pounds, run a five-minute mile, or spend hours every day in a dojo. Rather, you already have all the tools you need, because protecting yourself is like any other skill: it’s something you can learn with knowledge, practice, and determination.