I think it is wonderful that women can access the best combat training in America. Often, women are welcome in classes covering physical defense, edged weapons, and concealed carry training. In addition, women-only classes are also available to help those who may be uncomfortable in mixed crowds. Successful completion of these classes can result in increased confidence, awareness, and security for many women.
Why would I have a problem with that? Well, I don’t. What I have a problem with that there is a big missing piece: women do not get trained in the most common scenarios. Here is my paraphrased summary of the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) for rape from 1993 to 2019:
- Most rape is committed against female victims (over 93% at the lower bound confidence interval). Homes are the primary location, while public areas are almost non-existent. Married women have the most protection against rape, while “Never Married” is the majority case. Rape victims typically do not call the police, and statistics like the Uniform Crime Reports will not count these rapes. In addition, almost two-thirds of the time, rape victims do not seek treatment for their injuries, in stark contrast to injurious aggravated assault and injurious robbery. Offenders who are strangers to the victim
are rare. Overwhelmingly, the offender is someone the victim knows. Weapons are rarely used.
Is women’s self-defense training a good match for these statistics? I would say no. I see the training that women undergo to be primarily focused on a masked armed male acting in a public place. In sharp contrast, my recent review reports that strangers are about 15% of the victim-offender relationship in rapes. Where is the training on the other 85%?
In short – my problem with women’s self-defense training is that it focuses on the minority case and abandons the majority case. It gets even worse with injurious aggravated assault, which resembles domestic violence. Essentially, the most common injurious violent crime, aggravated assault, and the least reported injurious violent crime, rape, are tops for violent crimes against women. Yet, strangers are almost non-existent in these crimes. To put it bluntly, women are actually safer in public areas than they are at home!
These statistics are why I wrote my book. We need better self-defense strategies for women. I hope my book can inspire more research on helping women defend themselves.
If you are interested in my book, you can buy it from all the online retailers. Links are here. In addition, I have my own store for electronic copies – in PDF format and epub format. Also, there is additional NCVS research I did that you can purchase as well. Enjoy!