Five Reasons Why "Teach Women Self-Defense" Isn't a Comprehensive Solution to Rape

Before I start this post in earnest, I want to make it clear that I am not suggesting that women should not take self-defense courses, that women should not get involved in martial arts, or that there's no such thing as a woman who has successfully defended herself against assault, sexual or otherwise. What this post is intended to address is the exceedingly common recommendation in rape threads that women should "learn how to protect themselves" as the (one-and-only) solution to rape, and the equally frequent comment that people have enrolled their daughters in martial arts classes so they "will know how to take care of themselves."

Self-protection is, at best, one part of a comprehensive solution to rape--and it's not even as straightforward as it may seem. Looking at the complex and practical realities of what teaching women self-defense in regard to rape prevention really means is the focus of this post.

Its raison d'être is the progressively frequent references to rape's inevitability and women's need to learn self-defense as the only surefire way to prevent rape. (See An Angry Old Broad's comment here, in the Bob Herbert thread, as an example of how this meme is disseminated in the media.)* * *

Reason #1 why self-defense isn't a comprehensive solution to rape: Self-defense instructors can be rapists, too.

Increasingly, martial arts classes are being marketed to young women and the parents of young girls as "self-defense," in which is implicit an unspoken narrative about the prevention of sexual assault. (They are also being sought after in the same way; see another comment from An Angry Old Broad, in the same thread.) The brutal irony is that, as ever, sexual predators endeavor to infiltrate programs where they will be given a trusted position and unsupervised contact with a steady stream of victims. And so we end up with stories like this (via Marcella):

A self-defense instructor in Forest Lake, Minnesota has been charged with having sex with a 15-year-old female student.

Ladislao Enriquez, 48, faces one count each of first-degree and third-degree criminal sexual conduct.

According to the charges, the girl told police she took the class because she was sexually assaulted more than two years earlier.

A Yakima karate instructor has been accused of having sex with two underage girls.

Yakima Police say 44-year-old Paul Daniel Barr was charged last week with four counts of third-degree child rape for molesting and raping a 13-year-old girl after he met her while teaching at the Yakima School of Karate.

On Friday, Yakima Police questioned Barr about his relationship with another girl, who says she had sex with him when she was 14-years old. Barr has been charged with second-degree rape and sexual exploitation of a minor in the second case.

I am not citing them to try to discourage parents from enrolling daughters in self-defense or martial arts classes, but because they expose the inevitable problem with treating self-defense as the end-all-be-all of rape prevention. There have been fathers in various rape threads at Shakes who have pointedly said that they're taking their daughters to learn a martial art "so they won't ever have to worry about rape," men who absolutely refused to engage the point of this post, which is that such classes are not a panacea for the rape culture, which is vast and varied and--yes--capable of saturating even martial arts classes.

These stories underline why challenging and undermining the rape culture within your own community--including by insisting that criminal background checks and multiple-adult supervision are required by any instructor of children's extracurriculars--is at least as important as self-defense training (and probably more so).