Empowerment self-defense is an abuse and violence prevention strategy that teaches practical skills to de-escalate and interrupt threats, intimidation, and assaults. IMPACT and our collaborators see individual safety skills as part of a broad ecosystem of violence prevention and survivor healing that includes everything from emergency services to political advocacy.
Sometimes called feminist self-defense, this approach gives people who are targeted for abuse and violence the skills to protect themselves without blaming them for being attacked. We understand violence as a political and social problem, not as the fault of those who are assaulted. This approach to personal safety emphasizes choice and agency. We make ourselves safer by resisting the conditions of inequity that often show up in our personal lives as coercion and control from people we know, like, and love.
Self-defense skills are taught to individual people because other systems and structures, like laws and community interventions, are not enough to stop assaults in the moment. Empowerment self-defense gives people practical skills to minimize harm against them. More than that, it helps them experience the power of their bodies and voices. It puts the people who are most likely to experience harassment, abuse, and violence at the center of efforts to stop it.
Empowerment self-defense programs present a range of self-protection strategies and invite people to choose the ones that work for them. The range includes the usual kicks and strikes that people picture when they think of self-defense, but also verbal skills and options for physical escape that do not involve hurting the other person. If we are threatened by people we love, or people who have power over us at work, physically striking them might not be viable.
Even though most violence against women (and a lot of violence against people of other genders) is caused by people we know, a lot of us have been taught to be afraid of dark parking lots or empty stairwells. Because of this, empowerment self-defense teaches viable strategies for many types of harassment, threats, intimidation and assault.
Is it Empowerment Self-Defense?
A checklist comparing non-empowerment self-defense programs to true empowerment self-defense (ESD) programs across three areas, philosophy, teaching approach, and methodology. Showing what genuine ESD looks like versus programs that fall short.
Martha Thompson
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Social and Political Analysis
Empowerment self-defense is grounded in evidence. It focuses on the types of violence that are statistically common. In most groups of teenage girls that means sexual assault by a friend or intimate; Indigenous women are taught skills to resist abduction (in response to the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women); while mostly white groups are taught that abduction is rare compared to abuse from people they know. Self-defense programs that are explicit in their social and political analysis of violence have been shown by research to reduce sexual assault.