#18 – SEPTEMBER, 2016 – Page 2

What Counts As Primary Prevention? – Martha McCaughey and Jill Cremele

The 2014 White House Task Force on Sexual Assault on College Campuses has mandated that in order to continue to receive federal funding, colleges and universities must step up their game, including providing rape prevention education. The 2014 “Not Alone” report outlines the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) public health model of sexual assault prevention, and reiterates the need for evidenced-based programming to combat rape and sexual assault.

The CDC’s public health model defines the terms and levels of prevention, and articulates what “counts” as primary prevention – namely, bystander intervention training and psychoeducation to shift rape-supportive attitudes. As we describe in detail elsewhere (see McCaughey & Cermele, 2015), despite the overwhelming evidence that self-defense (training and enacting it) works both to stop rape and to shift rape-supportive attitudes, the CDC does not discuss or recommend self-defense training in its public health model.

On the surface, the omission of self-defense training from the category of primary prevention is perplexing, considering the CDC’s own definition. Primary prevention is defined as thwarting violence before it happens, while secondary prevention includes strategies and responses that immediately follow victimization, such as counseling or medical care, to address the short-term effects. The CDC has consistently and openly argued that while teaching (often male) bystanders to intervene in and thwart sexual assault is an established primary prevention tactic, teaching women to intervene in and thwart sexual assault targeted against themselves is not.

This stance is flawed for two main reasons. First, both self-defense training and bystander intervention training target sexual violence at the same point in time – when a sexual assault is imminent or in progress. So while both meet the criteria for primary prevention, they differ on one important dimension: who is encouraged to intervene. Bystander training requires the presence of a (presumably) benevolent and engaged third party to thwart rape, contributing to the erroneous belief that the woman targeted for sexual violence cannot, or should not, intervene on her own behalf.

Self-defense training, on the other hand, disrupts the script of sexual violence by offering women a range of verbal and physical strategies to thwart rape, which, although it can include soliciting bystander intervention, does not require the presence of a bystander in order to prevent assault. Given that both methods of rape prevention education target sexual violence at the same point in time, with the same goal and even potentially similar methods, it stands to reason that they must be in the same category – they are either both primary prevention, or neither are.

Second, only one of these meets the CDC’s second criteria, that rape prevention education be demonstrably effective – and that is self-defense training. The data are clear—and reviewed in our article (McCaughey & Cermele, 2015)—that self-defense is effective in thwarting sexual assault. In addition, numerous empirical studies have documented that self-defense training is what the CDC calls a protective factor, and that women who have taken self-defense training are at less risk for sexual assault than those who have not, reducing risk of sexual assault by as much as 40%.

Furthermore, self-defense training creates positive behavior and attitude change, including feelings of empowerment in women. Finally, women’s participation in self-defense training and the enactment of effective resistance strategies directly challenge the attitudes that permeate rape culture: that the safety and integrity of women’s bodies exists at the whim of men’s bodies. Women who learn to defend themselves learn to take themselves and their safety seriously in realistic ways, rather than simply following an unsubstantiated list of “don’ts” – don’t wear this, don’t go there, don’t be alone. Instead, they assess situations better than they did before their training, are more likely to identify situations that could be dangerous, and have the skills to respond if necessary.

We also reviewed the data on bystander intervention training (see McCaughey & Cermele, 2015), which are much less promising. There is some research demonstrating that participants in bystander intervention rape prevention education reported positive changes in attitudes and increased intent to intervene or increased self-reports of intervention. However, there is as yet no empirical data to suggest that bystander intervention programs are effective in actually thwarting rape and sexual assault. And yet, the CDC maintains its stance that bystander intervention training meets the criteria for primary prevention, and self-defense training does not.

This cannot continue. By the CDC’s own criteria, training women in self-defense is a demonstrably effective primary-prevention strategy in preventing rape and sexual assault, and is entirely consistent with the goals of a public health model in combatting the crisis of sexual assault on college campuses. At a time when so many organizations and task forces are looking to the CDC’s public health model for combating sexual assault, the CDC must begin to pay attention to the data and acknowledge women’s capacity for and right to resist sexual assault. Self-defense training belongs at the forefront of their recommendations for sexual assault prevention on college campuses.

Citation: McCaughey, M., & Cermele, J. (2015). Changing the hidden curriculum of campus rape prevention and education: Women’s self-defense as a key protective factor for a public health model of prevention. Trauma, Violence, and Abuse, online pre-print, 1-16. DOI: 10.1177/1524838015611674 tva.sagepub.com

Jill Cermele is a professor of psychology and an affiliated faculty member of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Drew University. Her scholarship, teaching, and activism are focused on gender and resistance, outcomes and perceptions of self-defense training, and issues of gender in mental health. With Martha McCaughey, she was a guest editor for the March 2014 special issue of Violence Against Women on Self-Defense Against Sexual Assault. McCaughey and she also write the blog See Jane Fight Back, where they provide commentary and analysis on popular press coverage of self-defense and women’s resistance.

Martha McCaughey is a professor of sociology and an affiliated faculty member of the Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies Program at Appalachian State University. She is the author of Real Knockouts: The Physical Feminism of Women’s Self-Defense and The Caveman Mystique: Pop-Darwinism and the Debates Over Sex, Violence, and Science. With Jill Cermele, she guest edited the special issue of Violence Against Women on self-defense against sexual assault and blogs at See Jane Fight Back. www.seejanefightback.com

The article can also be found at http://seejanefightback.com/.

Institutionalization of Flukes – Rory Miller

Last month, I wrote about normalization of deviance, the process by which cutting corners and skipping established protocols becomes simply “business as usual.” This month we’re going to look at the other side of the coin.

Violence presents a perfect storm for ignorance. The events themselves are rare. You will not often meet someone who has personally experienced a hundred assaults. Violent events tend to be quick— the internet is happy to give you numbers such as “6 seconds” or “3-8 seconds.” Assuming that’s true (most of mine took longer, but that ‘applying handcuffs’ step can be slow) a hundred fights would add up to a grand total of five to fifteen minutes of experience.

Further, anything experienced in this five-to-fifteen minutes of experience tends to be experienced in an adrenalized state, with all the sensory, cognitive and memory distortions that implies.

Acts of violence are complicated on multiple levels. An attacker in a rage is different than one with a plan, even if both are active shooters. Two shooters may have wildly different goals, training, ability, equipment… the list goes on. And the intended victim is also a very complicated and often unknown quantity. Then there are the bystanders. And the environment. And…

Violence is complicated. And idiosyncratic (sometimes downright weird). Frequently, things that make good sense and work in class fail spectacularly in the real world.

But also, very rarely, the stars align and a technique that has no business working saves the day.

These weird successes can happen for a number of reasons.

Sometimes, there is an abnormality in the person performing the technique. Bare knuckle boxers used the term “heavy hands” to describe a boxer who could reliably hit an opponent in the head without breaking his metacarpals. I believe there may be entire systems based on the genetic gift of one practitioner who died long ago.

Sometimes, there is an abnormality in the person receiving the technique. A lot of things work on drunks that fail on sober people, and vice versa. A stomach punch is an entirely different thing to a threat with a full bladder. Accidentally striking or gouging an existing injury can get an unexpected reaction.

And sometimes, it is just dumb luck. Maybe the effortless takedown was awesome or maybe the bad guy just slipped. Maybe your gouge made the grappler spring away… but maybe he flinched when he knelt on some broken glass.

Then there’s the twilight zone stuff. Everyone I know who has survived a close-range knife ambush broke the rule that “action beats reaction.” Several of us have done things when it counted that we were never able to replicate in training.

Institutionalizing a fluke is to make something unreliable part of your tradition or procedure. Assault survival— real self-defense— is very high stakes, very hard to pull off successfully, and there is a dearth of good information.

Tradition is the mechanism humans use for accumulating and passing down rare but important information. Kano Jigoro (I was told, might have been someone else) said, “We must learn from the mistakes of others. We will never live long enough to make them all ourselves.” Tradition is the accumulated successes and failures, the collected knowledge, of a long-standing group.

Tradition— the memory of the system— is incredibly important when information and reality checks are rare. If your tribe faces famine every twenty years, people remember what to do. If your tribe faces famine only every thousand years, what to do must be passed on.

When unexamined and untested, you simply can’t tell the flukes from the effective techniques. Especially when people in positions of authority can’t bring themselves to admit ignorance and invent plausible reasons for stupid things.

There are a few schools of kempo that use a fist with the little finger knuckle extended. They are imitating a famous instructor who demonstrated with a broken finger. Some throw the shuto (knife hand strike) with the little finger bent, imitating a famous instructor who has a severed tendon.

Life-or-death combat also skews knowledge and tradition towards the positive. If something worked, you’ll come back to the training hall and tell everybody. Whatever worked will become part of your tradition. If something failed, however, you don’t get to come back and spread the word. Techniques (and flukes) accumulate, they are rarely weeded out.

This is very different for combat sports. Non-lethal encounters and spectators make for tons of information from multiple perspectives. Sports are also driven by tradition, but it is the accumulated tradition of success and failures; not dependent on the memory of a single adrenalized person and; subject to extensive analysis and experimentation. Sport arts evolve very quickly.

There are two dangers with flukes. The first is obvious. If flawed information has crept into your syllabus over time, you have weaknesses and points of failure to which you are blind. It kind of sucks when your never-fail technique fails and your ass is hanging in the wind.

The second is when the results of a fluke are so desirable that there is a push to formally require others to follow suit. To mandate “luck” as an essential part of the system. In 2013 a man slipped into the Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Center, a grade school, with a semi-automatic weapon. Antoinette Tuff, a front office worker, talked him down. Kids didn’t get shot. The gunman didn’t get shot. Responders didn’t get shot. A perfect win— no injuries in a dangerous and highly volatile situation.

And there were a few voices using this as an example that anyone could be talked down, by anyone. That force should never be an option. Do you think none of the victims of Columbine or Newton tried to talk? Tried to reason or argue or beg? Only the successes get reported.

Without more real world experience than an individual could survive, it’s hard to find your flaws.

I’m not going into finding flukes, because, believe it or not, I don’t think that’s the problem. The biggest problem is that people defend their flukes, explain them away, ignore or support them.

People invest not only time and money, but also identity in their high risk games. People rarely “practice martial arts” but are far more likely to say, “I’m a martial artist.” I had a huge amount of identity invested in being a tactical team leader. When humans have invested time and identity, sometimes sweat and blood, it’s really difficult for us to admit that some of it might have been wasted. We tend to double down on the stupid.

I learned the pronated straight punch of traditional Japanese karate. Every wrist injury I saw on a heavy bag was from that punch. It shortens your range slightly. Despite what I saw, including real injuries, I couldn’t admit it was a flawed technique… until a very old Japanese man (and for my psychological purposes he had to have been both old and Japanese) explained that it was intentionally introduced to make the wrist weaker because the Japanese were not as tolerant of the occasional training deaths as the Okinawans.

Don’t get your panties in a bunch if I just offended you. It’s not about you or the system. It’s all about me. When you invest identity, you will sometimes discount personal experience. We work to protect our own flaws.

When boxing gloves were introduced, head punching became the center piece of boxing. It wasn’t in the bare knuckles days, largely because hitting people in the head is more likely to do permanent injury to the hand than even stunning damage to the head. But head punching has become so iconic that it will be part of MMA for a long time to come, and will require gloves and handwraps to make it viable.

Once upon a time, someone tried to stab me in the back. It was done with a lot of resolution and appreciable skill. The only reason I am alive is because I saw a reflection. What I did physically was spin, clap my hands together over the blade hand, and twist.

Awesome. We have one example of a technique actually working in a worst-case scenario. Yay. Let’s teach that. Except…

I couldn’t do it again in a million years. I’ve tried to replicate it in training. As near as I can tell, it’s not possible. The time framing doesn’t work. You can’t spin and get one hand around the weapon so you can hit it from the outside and the inside simultaneously hit it from the inside before a lunge (which started first) can be completed. Can’t be done. But it happened.

To try to make this a centerpiece or even one technique in a system would be to institutionalize a fluke. It would make the students weaker.

Comment by Erik Kondo
The following video shows a fluke.

Autumn Attitude Adjustment – Toby Cowern

As I write this article in the third week of august, Autumn has already arrived here in the Far North of Sweden. The first frost thankfully brings an end to mosquito’s season, the birch leaves yield from green to fiery reds and yellows, and the berries ripen to allow the pre-hibernation feasts to begin.

We often joke here in these latitudes, that you ‘need two of everything’ to deal with the annual extremes. Two wardrobes, two sets of wheels for the car, two completely different set of tools etc, such is the contrast between summer and winter. 24hr daylight gives way to 22hrs of darkness and temperatures drop by 60 degrees Celsius (108 degrees Farenheit)

Autumn is definitely seen as the time to adequately and thoroughly prepare and transition from summer to winter. Along with the physical changes, it is also a powerful shift in mindset. In winter you will dress differently, drive differently, even walk differently and items you routinely carry or ensure you will have with you also change and typically grow in size and number.

With such a significant annual transition and ‘mental switch’, people here will routinely review how the previous year’s plans worked and if any changes need to be made. Yes, somethings will be routinely the same, but more often than not things that get lost, broken, damaged over the summer in storage will get replaced or upgraded and technology will also continue to press new solutions into the market (albeit with mixed results)

One of the things I routinely reinforce to students in training is to ‘continuously interrogate your equipment’ meaning, understand the purpose, limits and versatility of any and all things you carry, combined with is it ACHIEVING what you want it to?

As I have previously written I am not a fan of generic Every day carry (EDC) lists, and equally do not believe in carrying an item just because ‘somebody else does’. You need to ensure your EDC items work for you and are carried in a way that are conducive with their anticipated use.

In the spring I encouraged you all to complete a routine maintenance check of your EDC, for the autumn I’ll ask you to sit down and review your EDC and honestly ask what changes and improvements can be made?

I had the privilege of hanging out with an exceptional group at the Violence Dynamics Seminar in California early this year and received an overwhelming input and discussion on carry items, which I am still processing 4 months later. What I can say, is I have been modifying things since then, that have worked well for over the last 10 years, but now work better or more effectively than ever before. Some changes were minor; I now carry certain clothing items draped over a shoulder instead of tied around my waist. Other have been major, one example being a total change in carry style and blade orientation of edged tools.

The summer has given us a number of stark examples of how quickly everyday situations can turn extremely bad, most notable of which have been incidents in various major airports around the world (Although many other significant incidents have occurred, all with essential lessons) It is worth noting in all of these situations persons involved have been reliant on themselves and their own equipment for prolonged periods of time to ‘manage as best as they can’ before any additional support was available.

Now is the time to ensure you are not carrying ‘Tacticool Talisman Tools’ but genuine items that will help boost your everyday resilience.

So, expose yourself to some new and different ideas, do some research, listen to the excellent advice coming from the authors here in CRGI and Conflict Manager Magazine. Get involved in the facebook discussions, most importantly see how you can adapt and improve your current habits…