rape prevention, i could be wrong

please elaborate.

 

I believe there are some arts that lack grappling, not so much groundfighting. It is just as important to train striking in the context of groundfighting rather than to focus on a BJJ approach. Your purpose of being able to strike effectively while on the ground is to get back onto your feet ASAP.

 

KickChick, I really appreciate that you are contributing to this thread. I'm just not sure what you mean by BJJ approach? Could you clarify how a BJJ approach is any different than the approach of the majority of other martial arts out there?

Look, this thread is supposed to be targetted for an audience of women. I'm not sure at what level in martial arts these women have achieved whether beginner to master, but I am trying to target the women martial artist that is beginner to intermediate. Those that have been in the martial arts less than a few years.

My message is to these women is that nearly all martial arts start with a stronger "sport" aspect in training. Especially BJJ, but not excluding most of the karate out there and other martial arts programs. By sport I do not mean only competition but I also include any training limited to using "safe" techniques rather than focusing on "Street" techniques.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with enjoying and participating in this training. And it can help in a self-protection situation. We had one girl kickboxer that used her training to punch, kick, and fend off a larger guy that was grabbing her inappropriately a few years back.

However, in my opinion, if it is self-protection training that you want, you absolutely should seek out additional training in RBSD (Reality Based Self-defense) and other training specifically targetted for it. There are BJJ based SD programs that include some of the groundfighting with striking, with standup grappling and striking, with the same things addressed in other SD programs.

Competition and sport training can vary greatly because of the rulesets, however, self-defense training no matter what the martial art it is based on (if even based on one) tends to overlap and be similar across the board. Why, because they are training basically for the same reasons.

Is SD training some uber secret path? No, not really. What it can and often does do is simply increase awareness and give the women options and experience that they did not know before. One woman I took to some RBSD training later told me that it changed her life. She had never known before just what it was like until she attended the class. The class went over only the very basic of techniques and focused on the use of pepper sprays, role-playing, the law, and awareness.

After saying all this... and I realize this long post may not even be read... I come to address why I feel some training arts such as BJJ is important for women. I feel that BJJ is one of the few outlets of training that still focuses on applying good jiu-jitsu grappling from the beginning.

What I often have seen in my experience is that many martial arts schools will teach some grappling but in the end, the technique isn't all that good. Not having good technique is not that important if you are relatively the same size and ability, because people can use speed and strength to compensate. However, when the attacker is stronger and much larger than the woman, the woman needs more... better technique.

BJJ (and some other grappling arts) cover many "what ifs" situations with technique work that aren't covered as much in striking arts. Such as what if the larger and stronger attacker grabs me and forces me against a wall and I find he has taken away my ability to use strikes effectively? Then I try to break the grip but the attacker rolls with it and grabs me a different way? For every situation there are options and BJJ is one of the few arts that work the techniques to cover as many options as possible, step by step.

The step by step is important because that seems to work best for most beginners when trying to learn.

 

No, only bring someone into your guard (between your legs) as a last resort. My reasoning is that you should avoid allowing anyone that is larger than you to get on top of you where they can strike down and use their body weight to give them an advantage.

Very few have the skill to fight from the bottom position effectively against someone much stronger and larger than them. It is good to work that position so that you have options, but primarily I recommend learning to fight so that you can avoid being stuck on the bottom -- in other words, don't volunteer to be on the bottom (well not in a fight at least ).

 

No problem.

A self defense class a martial arts program have different students, different goals, different time frames and different training methods, to name a few.

First, consider the students. A typical martial arts student is young, male, reasonably athletic. Double or triple that for your average MMA trainee. A women's self defense class is likely to have a much wider range of body types and physical abilities. Training methods and technique that are optimized for the first will almost certainly have to be modified for the latter. Here's an example. When we were teaching at a local university we did some stuff jointly with a wrestling coach who had taken up MMA. The escape he showed from the rear mount worked great for him. But the students started shaking their heads along about the time he said "Then you push up off the ground onto your hands and feet with your butt in the air."

My informal best guess is that a good quarter of the students have been sexually assaulted at some point whether or not the assault was completed. This is not the case for most guys in martial arts class. It makes a huge difference in how to train them. That's a whole different topic.

Then there's what you're training for. Yeah, people will say "The Street(tm)" or competition. If it's competition there are some pretty big assumptions that people don't think about much less train around. You will probably be up against someone roughly the same size whose reputation or uniform will give you a pretty good idea of what he is going to do. You will square off at a set distance wearing clothes optimized for fighting your fight in an environment designed to let you fight safely. You will both fight until someone has submitted, time has run out or one competitor can no longer continue. None of these assumptions holds in the sort of self defense situation most women find themselves in. The point of their training is or should be how to keep a violent crime from happening and probably escape safely when the situation is resolved.

If it's teh d34dl33 5tr33t it's closer, but most guys are training for a "street fight", and many if not most of the trainers have that in mind. Not so much pure self defense as achieving dominance in an informal and dangerous situation, often with alcohol involved, quite possibly over a woman, loyalty to a group or status. Again, the goals are different.

A martial arts student will almost certainly stop within the first year, but the ones who stick with it can be there for a long, long time. In a good martial arts program the training methods are progressive. They build over time. Some only really come into their own years down the line. You don't have that luxury in a self defense program, particularly a women's self defense class. You have to cut corners and do things that won't work as well over the long haul but will give quicker returns. Technique is secondary to developing intention and learning to deal with fear and adrenaline in an encounter with someone who is almost certainly bigger, stronger and more used to violence and aggression than the student.

It's not that things from martial arts aren't useful for women who want to defend themselves. Far from it. After a self defense program I strongly urge students who are serious about it to take up long term training with a good martial arts instructor who has a practical outlook. But the two games are different. And the differences and assumptions can get someone raped or dead. The two sorts of training have to be different, at least initially.

 

I have trained in BJJ for over a year and SOMETIMES it was with Royce himself. My primary style is Shou Shu which I have been learning since I was 4 by my dad then joined a martial arts school that taught it at 8 years old.

AciDRaiN

 

i didnt feel like having your whole post on my relpy so i cut it short.


even though i have my arguements about training for short periods of time and never training again. i must agree with you that most women will not train for an extended amount of time(more than a year)

 

my mistake :woo:

 

As I said, neither do most men. And you have to do the best by your students as you find them whether it's what you'd prefer or not.

It's really pretty amazing what short term work can do. Under stress we tend to revert to our deepest training. If all you have is a couple basic things and that's all you know, odds are you'll react with them (whether or not they're actually appropriate). That's why a certain amount of stress and adrenaline are important parts of self defense training, assuming you don't overdo, misuse or cause flashbacks to that Really Bad Day. If you can do just one thing as an instructor and change the basic response to aggression from shrinking to fighting you've done the most important thing imaginable. In the end it's not about technique. It's about that special alchemy of "Fear Into Anger".

 

You really want to get back to your feet, every time, even when you're facing someone who's a really good boxer but doesn't really know what to do on the ground?

 

Again, I'd rather not hypothesise here.

Any time you go to the ground you want to be able to get up to get away.... whatever the situation not dependant on the fighting style of your attacker.... (unless of course you're real good at doing the "worm" and can squirm away on your belly )

 

Im not trying to be gross here but, something I heard once...

Stick your finger down your throat and vomit on yourself. The idea here is that it will kill the "mood".

 

That's implying that rape is about sex... it's about power and control usually.

 

People say this all the time, but can somebody actually substantiate this claim?

 

Well think about it - anyone can get sex. Even if your an ugly so and so you can get a prostitute. How can rape be only about sex when there are so many non-violent ways to get that. So you're left with power and control, which are the real motivators.

 

I was reading a bit in the Journal of American Psychiatry (not a habit mind you )
.... "Accounts from both offenders and victims of what occurs during a rape suggest that issues of power, anger, and sexuality are important in understanding the rapist's behavior. All three issues seem to operate in every rape, but the proportion varies and one issue seems to dominate in each instance."

The research (accounts from 133 offenders and 92 victims) showed that the offenses could be categorized as power rape (sexuality used primarily to express power) or anger rape (use of sexuality to express anger).

There were no rapes in which sex was the dominant issue; sexuality was always in the service of other, non-sexual needs. Studies of convicted male rapists indicate that more than 60% were married and virtually all had normal sexual relationships with women at the time they committed the assault.

There has been a biological theoretical study that put forth rape as being a byproduct of men's adaptation for pursuit of casual, non-committal, and consensual sex.

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/vaw00/theories_of_rape.html

"At this point in time, we do not know which is true--whether rape reflects rape-specific adaptation or arises incidentally out of an adaptation for pursuit of consensual sexual variety. On theoretical grounds, however, the rape-specific adaptation hypothesis is more likely. This is because of the large costs of raping to the rapist and thus the expectation that rape exists because of rape's overcompensating benefits to male reproductive success in human evolutionary history."
BIOLOGICAL THEORY: Randy Thornhill, The Biology of Human Rape, 39 Jurimetrics J. 137(1999) at 143

 

There is also this link; http://www.hoosiertimes.com/stories/2000/01/11/news.000111_A4_MCW80871.sto which unfortunately requires membership to read, but the title is in contrast to that claim. I also have to wonder with the number of rapes that go unreported and unconvicted, if rapes that are purely based on sexual desires might be in that group and that rapes based on anger/power would be more traumatic and/or violent which would lead to more likelihood of conviction.

 

i once was at a rape prevention siminar that the instructor there told the girls one thing that may help is acting like a child.

if someone is trying to drag you off/abduct you, then sit right down on the ground and say in childess voice "I DONT WANNA GO" powt, that sort oif thing. even when you re alone and someone is out to get you. if they feel you are stupid or somehow disfunctional, it takes away some of there feeling that they have control over you. they are no longer controling some bit@#$, they are controling a fool.

supposedly it work very well to defend against abductions.

 

i believe the most practical way is to simply fight back. scream, wail, and flail. kick the nads, headbutt the face, stomp the toes. pull hair, bite the nose off, gouge the eyes... run. for goodness sakes do something. lock your feet together... women are usally pretty good at keeping their legs closed if they want to.

my friend has been teaching pa kua, hsing-yi, longfist, and tai chi chaun for 35 years... she was raped 3 times before she was 16 in detroit(which is why she started the martial arts). so naturally i'll take her advice to share. fight back ladies... fight back.

 

That is bang out of order.