This is another post based on Massad Ayoob’s In the Gravest Extreme. It’s also one that I’m pretty sure others have written about far better than I, so I’ll scout around the internet in the immediate future for other writings on the subject and post them.

Pretty much all my life I’ve heard about the self defense courses provided by universities to college-age women. They’re often touted as a kind of feminist activism in and of themselves, or, at least, as a means of empowerment. The reasoning behind that line of thinking is sound, I think. Being able to defend one’s self is and should be empowering. The problem I have, however, especially after reading Ayoob, is that most of what is taught in these classes is useless or worse because women are taught to rely on a series of suggestions that are ridiculous on their face, and told to avoid the one thing that could actually be used to effectively provide self defense.

For instance, women are often told to carry an alert whistle, or other noise-making device. However, as Ayoob points out, the only effect loud noises usually have is to cause folks to shut their windows. I know when my neighbor’s car alarm goes off I just kind of get annoyed until it shuts up. Also, and perhaps more importantly, there is almost no chance that anyone who actually might have the means to help a victim will hear the whistle. Even if someone takes action, it will probably only be to call 911, and, as we all know, there will be plenty of lag time between the phone call and a police presence. Meaning that even if someone hears the whistle/siren and calls the police instead of sensibly ignoring it, that just means the police will find a fresh body and be better able to solve the victim’s murder. This will not be particularly helpful to said victim. Even worse advice comes when women are told to scream like hell. Most any person prone to violently assaulting others is not going to be scared by screaming. In fact, they’re going to expect it, and they’ll probably have some way of dealing with it, like punching the victim in the throat.

The real damage that these classes do, however, is to teach relatively peaceful folks that they can effectively stop a threat from a person twice their size, hellbent on doing them damage or killing them, without weapons. I’ve got nothing against martial arts at all. If you like it, do it. But the fact of the matter is that if a one-hundred-pound person trained in martial arts goes up against a two-hundred-pound person with no training, outside of the movies, that one-hundred pound person is likely to get their head handed to them.

I’ve never been much of a fighter, never boxed nor taken up martial arts of any kind, but I’ve known my share of pretty good fighters. And I’ve known several untrained street fighters who couldn’t count on their fingers and toes the number of serious martial artists they stomped into a puddle for fun. The fact of the matter is that folks who are inclined to visiting violence on other folks for shits and grins are often very good at it. And there’s nothing to say that they couldn’t also be just as trained in boxing or some other martial art as anyone else.

And, with that in mind, it’s worth remembering that what one gets out of college self defense courses is not anything that could be remotely described as serious martial arts training.  One of the primary self defense training enterprises offered at colleges, Rape Aggression Defense (RAD) Systems, describes themselves as providing “the basics of hands-on defense training,” and I’d say that’s even pushing credibility. Here’s a promotional video:

I love the instructor’s line that “we’re teaching them that if they’re in a parking lot by theirselves they know they can hold their head high and they can walk and not have to worry about anything because they can defend theirselves.” That’s borderline criminally negligent, if not just delusional. Obviously, you should fight like hell if attacked, and there’s nothing wrong with practicing that, but to suggest that a couple of minutes of wrestling with somebody in a padded suit — followed by a whole bunch of time watching others wrestle with a guy in a padded suit — is remotely adequate to deal with a violent attack is absurd.

The fact is, in Ayoob’s words, “guns are the only weapons that put a physically small or weak person at parity with a powerful, very possibly armed, criminal.” And many women’s self defense organizations outside of universities include firearms as part of the overall package. The Women’s Self-Defense Institute actually recommends reading the exact Ayoob book on which I’m basing this post, and Arming Women Against Rape & Endangerment (AWARE) offers firearms courses.

The classes taught in universities are not self defense, they’re theater. They may be very useful theater for all kinds of psychological or political reasons, but if you rely on them for practical self defense, you will more than likely get killed. If a woman is seriously worried about rape or murder, and I think the statistics bear out that it makes sense to be worried, self defense with firearms has to be on the table.

This from The Minnesota Daily, which seems like a good place to close:

Use of a weapon, and especially a firearm, is statistically a woman’s best means of resistance, greatly enhancing her odds of escaping both rape and injury, compared to any other strategy of physical or verbal resistance. This conclusion is drawn from four types of information.

First, a 1989 study (Furby, Journal of Interpersonal Violence) found that both male and female survey respondents judged a gun to be the most effective means that a potential rape victim could use to fend off the assault. Rape “experts” considered it a close second, after eye-gouging.

Second, raw data from the 1979-1985 installments of the Justice Department’s annual National Crime Victim Survey show that when a woman resists a stranger rape with a gun, the probability of completion was 0.1 percent and of victim injury 0.0 percent, compared to 31 percent and 40 percent, respectively, for all stranger rapes (Kleck, Social Problems, 1990).

Third, a recent paper (Southwick, Journal of Criminal Justice, 2000) analyzed victim resistance to violent crimes generally, with robbery, aggravated assault and rape considered together. Women who resisted with a gun were 2.5 times more likely to escape without injury than those who did not resist and 4 times more likely to escape uninjured than those who resisted with any means other than a gun. Similarly, their property losses in a robbery were reduced more than six-fold and almost three-fold, respectively, compared to the other categories of resistance strategy.

Fourth, we have two studies in the last 20 years that directly address the outcomes of women who resist attempted rape with a weapon. (Lizotte, Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 1986; Kleck, Social Problems, 1990.) The former concludes, “Further, women who resist rape with a gun or knife dramatically decrease their probability of completion.” (Lizotte did not analyze victim injuries apart from the rape itself.) The latter concludes that “resistance with a gun or knife is the most effective form of resistance for preventing completion of a rape”; this is accomplished “without creating any significant additional risk of other injury.”

The best conclusion from available scientific data, then, is when avoidance of rape has failed and one must choose between being raped and resisting, a woman’s best option is to resist with a gun in her hands.