Why A Woman should look for the Self Defense in their Martial Art.
Yes, we all want to stay fit and feel good about ourselves and that is a great benefit in itself. Being fit will help to build confidence in yourself immensely!
Predators specifically look for week victims!
Statistics show that rape is the fastest growing violent crime in America today!.
Rape is also the most under-reported crime with 84% of the victims never reporting the crime to the proper authorities. Those unreported rapists are now free to attack any other woman!
One woman will be forcibly raped every 6 minutes!.
One out of four women had either been raped or sexually abused!
Women at dating ages of 16-24 are at the highest risk of being sexually assaulted!
Most rapists are found to be between the ages of 15-24 years old!
More than 90% of all rapes occur within the same race and social economic class!
Contrary to popular belief, 84% of female rape victims actually knew their rapist (a friend or acquaintance)!
More than 50% of rapes where the women actually knew their rapist occurred in the man’s car or his home!
Now a statistic in favor of women:
Approximately 86% of women escape attempted sexual assaults by resisting and fighting back! Please understand that the old adage of “let it happen so you won’t be harmed” is definitely not true and many times that leads to hazardous results in the long run according to statistics! This 86% is not necessarily women who ever did any martial art training, this is just a general statistic. However, these women did bring out their natural born survival instincts and it worked for them. Martial art training in Gina’s classes will, of course bring out and enhance your survival instincts with fighting skill behind it. Statistics show women who tried to reason with their attacker sustained an increased amount of physical injury. So now you can see the benefits for women learning to bring out their killer instincts. And that is a big part of the training in the women’s martial art classes at the Practical Self Defense Training Center in Waterbury, Connecticut!
We say our classes are beyond JUST being another women’s kick boxing class due to the heavy focus on training in women’s self defense as well as the development of the kick boxing aspects. Learn Thai boxing and Bruce Lee’s actual Jeet Kune Do training methods. Of course this goes along with education in learning how to be streetwise in areas of situational awareness, what to do to prevent a self defense situation from ever occurring to you, how to speak with authority, in other words, to show you mean business when the word “no” or “get the F#$% away from me” is stated, learning how to release yourself from an attacker’s grasp by attacking the would be rapist’s weak spots on his body. All of which gives you that feeling of confidence and and good health!
Who should be taking these martial art classes?
high school students or going into high school
college students or college-bound students
flight attendants
nurses & nurses aids
real estate agents
women in law enforcement
women correctional officers
women who travel for a living
teenagers at dating years
mothers need to protect themselves and their children
grandmothers…older women may be thought of as a victim but not after doing classes like the ones offered at the PSDTC
women of all ages who want to take time out for themselves and their own personal well-being for health as well as self defense!
Rape Prevention Seminars
Please read the information below so you know why we hold so many of these Rape Prevention Workshops every year!
Before you finish reading this, another woman will be raped. (Somewhere in America, a woman is raped every 2 minutes, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.)
REPORTS
The United States has the world’s highest rape rate of the countries that publish such statistics. It’s 4 times higher than Germany, 13 times higher than England, and 20 times higher than Japan.
Only 16% of rapes and sexual assaults are reported to the police (Rape in America: A Report to the Nation. 1992)
The rate of false reports of rape is approximately 2 – 3% which is no different than that for other crimes.
One of every four rapes take place in a public area or in a parking garage.
RAPE
68% of rapes occur between the hours of 6 p.m. and 6 a.m.
In 29% of rapes, the offender used a weapon.
55% of the number of rape/sexual assault victimizations in which self-protective measures were employed by the victim resulted in helping the situation. Self-protective measures hurt the situation in 10.5% of victimizations. In 17.2% of the incidents the result neither helped nor hurt the situation, and in 7.7% of the incidents the situation was both helped and hurt.
In cases where self-protective measures by the victim were helpful, 42.5% avoided injury or greater injury, 37.6% escaped, and 11.1% of the time the offender was scared off.
VICTIMS
1 out of every 3 American women will be sexually assulted in her lifetime.
1 in 7 women will be raped by her husband.
83% of rape cases are ages 24 or under.
1 in 4 college women have either been raped or suffered attempted rape.
18% of women who reported being raped before age 18 said they were also raped after age 18. (Violence Against Women Survey, 1998)
75% of female rape victims require medical care after the attack.
1 out of 5 victims of sexual assault is male
2 out of 5 victims of child sexual abuse are male
Most male rape victims are heterosexual
Approximately 68% of rape victims knew their assailant. [Violence against Women. Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Dept. of Justice, 1994]
Approximately 28% of victims are raped by husbands or boyfriends, 35% by acquaintances, and 5% by other relatives. [Violence against Women. Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Dept. of Justice, 1994]
According to the Justice Department, one in two rape victims is under age 18; one in six is under age 12. [Child Rape Victims, 1992. U.S. Department of Justice.]
Teens 16 to 19 were three and one-half times more likely than the general population to be victims of rape, attempted rape or sexual assault. [National Crime Victimization Survey. Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice, 1996.]
PERPETRATOR
6 out of 10 sexual assaults occur in the home of the victim or the home of a friend, neighbor or relative. (Greenfeld, 1997)
At least 45% of rapists were under the influence of alcohol or drugs.
Most perpetrators of male rape are heterosexual
71% of the rapists were under the influence of drugs (inc. alcohol).
15% reported taking drugs less than 15 minutes prior to the rape.
21% premeditated the rape. 27% committed the rape while committing another crime.
16% were impulsive/spontaneous, “the victim was simply an easy available ‘innocent bystander'”.
7% were committed after an argument with the victim. 6% after sexual foreplay with the victim.
89% of the rapists described the victims as not being provocative, “The victims did not verbally provoke nor were sexually attractive to the attacker”. Patterns of Behavior in Adolescent Rape by Vinogradov et al. in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 58(2) April 1988 pp 179-87.
In rapes/sexual assaults involving strangers, weapons were known to be used in 20.3% of the incidents. Of these, 8.8% used a firearm (hand gun) and 11.5% used a knife. In rapes/sexual assaults involving nonstrangers, weapons were known to be used in 15% of the incidents. Of these, 4.2% used a firearm (hand gun); 5.4% used a knife or sharp object, and 2% used some other weapon.
Of those rape/sexual assault victimizations using physical force, the offender was the first to use force in 87.1% of incidents. The victim was first to use force only 7.1% of the time
IMPACT
25 – 45% of rape survivors suffer from non-genital trauma, 19 – 22% suffer from genital trauma, up to 40% obtain STDs and 1 – 5% become pregnant as a result of the rape. There are an estimated 32,000 rape related pregnancies in the United States annually. (Holmes, 1996) Sexual assault survivors’ visits to their physicians increase by 18% the year of the assault, 56% the year after and 31% the second year after the assault. (Koss, 1993)
Overall, rape has the highest annual victim cost of any crime. The annual victim costs are $127 billion (excluding child sex abuse cases). This is followed by assault at $93 billion per year, murder (excluding arson and drunk driving) at $61 billion and child abuse at $56 billion per year (Miller, 1996).
Less than half of those arrested for rape are convicted, 54% of all rape prosecutions end in either dismissal or acquittal. The conviction rate for those arrested for murder is 69% and all other felons is 54%. (The Response to Rape: Detours on the Road to Equal Justice) 21% of convicted rapists are never sentenced to jail or prison time, and 24% receive time in local jail which means that they spend an average of less than 11 months behind bars (The Response to Rape: Detours on the Road to Equal Justice).
Thirteen percent of all victimizations resulting in loss of time from work were from rape/sexual assault victimizations. However, 23.7% of Black victims reported losing time from work as compared to 9.9% of White victims. Over half (53.1%) of rape/sexual assault victims who lost time from work, lost 1-5 days.
We know this information can be frightening.
It’s always important to be able to defend yourself.
At our Rape Prevention workshops, you will see in the pictures how these girls learned to fight back and fight back hard. They started out learning some basic strikes on the focus mitts. Strikes like head butts, knees, elbows, finger jabs and a few different kicks. Then we teach them some various scenarios where those types of strikes will work. We reflex train them the best way we can in just a few hours and then the guys suited up to attack and try to take the girls down to the ground or cover their mouths and drag them away. Yes, the attackers actually are fighting back…they are not just going in with their arms extended like a walking punching bag!
Notice in the pictures below, the suit the attackers are wearing. They take quite a beating doing this so we use a motor cycle helmet and some old Fist Gear, which are all made to take the beating and to protect the attacker from all the girls strikes. The girls wear bag gloves so they don’t hurt their hands slapping the ear and nose areas of the helmet. And they wear heavy duty elbow pads so they can elbow the head without hurting their elbows against the motor cycle helmet. All the scenario training is so they can go all out randomly at the end of the workshop and unload everything they have learned and trained in against their attacker.