'Defend Yourself' Workshops Teach Rape Prevention
The black high heel Vanessa Schutz is holding suddenly looks pretty menacing.
“Temple! Throat!” she shouts, aiming at the air.
“Good! What are some other things we have in the office that you could use if you had to?” instructor Lauren Taylor asks the circle of 11 other women on a recent Monday night in Chinatown. They are starting session three of eight classes on rape-prevention with Defend Yourself, Taylor’s self-defense group.
They are full of suggestions: A book to the head. A water bottle to the nose. A pen to the eye.
“You don’t need to go through life thinking about being attacked,” Taylor tells them. “But you do need to be resourceful.”
Taylor’s workshops feature some things you might expect from a self-defense class: pummeling of padded targets, how to break a bear-hug from behind. But most of the techniques aim to stop an uncomfortable situation from progressing to an assault in the first place.
“People tend to think of self-defense as hitting,” Taylor says. “They think of feeling vulnerable walking alone in a parking lot - what would they do?” But most assaults against women, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, are committed by someone the victim knows -- a coworker, a date, a person who knows their daily routine.
This is why, before eye strikes and groin kicks, Taylor first leads the group through verbal limit-setting. It doesn’t come easy - the “please step back” exercise takes several rounds for everyone to sound convincing to their “attackers.”
“Women in our culture learn to be accommodating,” she says. A guy on the bus offers to walk you home - and seems to already know where that is? You find yourself faking a smile while your stomach does flips.
“To be a nice person, you’re trained to say ‘yes’ in many ways. Our outrage has been socialized right out of us.”
But it needs direction. Cram the fear down, and it can surface in ways that don’t protect you, says Taylor.
“Two times in college, I yelled back at street harassers and got punched in the face,” she recalls. “Now, I have more of a range of ways I can respond.”
Taylor has worked building D.C.’s women’s community for nearly 30 years. She was one of the founders of the city’s first hotline for victims of domestic violence in the late 1970s, which grew into My Sister’s Place, still one of only a handful of women’s shelters in the area. She helped start what became the Whitman-Walker Clinic’s Lesbian Services Program. She’s Taken Back the Night more times than she can count.
A black belt comes in handy for that. Taylor earned hers over a period of years at the D.C. Self Defense Karate Association. Later, she helped form the National Women’s Martial Arts Federation, a network for female trainers and students to share skills.
Defend Yourself grew out of community self-defense classes Taylor taught at DCSDKA, which dealt with the psychological elements of self-defense as well as the physical, and were based in feminist concepts.
One of those concepts is that women should look out for one another.
“Go ahead. Be that uptight D.C. professional woman and butt in when you see someone stuck in a really uncomfortable encounter,” laughs Taylor. “She might thank you.”
Visit www.defendyourself.org for more information on classes and for resources on handling street harassment and assault.