Stopping Rape and Violence Against Women!
Well over 60,000 women have graduated from Model Mugging Self-defense courses worldwide and it is known that 206 have used their fighting skills since taking the program on an average of 2 ½ years after graduating. Of those 205 assaults, 200 (97%) graduates successfully fought off their attacker.
Out of the five (3%) women who did not stop the assault, two women were confronted by armed assailants where one assailant used a gun and the other used a knife. Both of these survivors were intimidated by the weapon and chose not to surrender. (These two women did not take the weapons training which deals with an armed assailant.) The third woman was hit over the head with a club-like object, knocked unconscious and raped. A fourth woman was attacked on a transit bus and was physically beaten but not raped. The fifth woman was blitzed by a mentally ill juvenile client and chose to curl into a protective position until the client’s father pulled him off of her.
Of the 205 women who did fight back, about 40% forced the assailant to flee and about 60% won by knockout. This data should be interpreted with caution because there are individual and personal factors that influence the reporting of both sexual and non-sexual assaults.
A Model Mugging graduate’s chance of being sexually assaulted is significantly lower than women without proper self-defense training. There are various sources pointing to female victimization rates of 30% or higher and many survivors have a greater chance of being victimized repetitively.
Most impressive are the thousands of graduates who have used their boundary setting and de-escalation skills to successfully stop situations from becoming violent; a true testament to the verbal art of self-defense.
There Are Never Any Guarantees:
Fighting back gives women the best results of stopping an attack. Fighting back will not guarantee success and the consequences could result in severe injury and even death. But that holds true for the other three general options as well. Women, who have fought back, both avoiders and survivors, commonly feel better about themselves when recovering. Women who were successful in fighting off an assailant may still feel and suffer the effects of the post traumatic stress disorder, specifically rape trauma syndrome, but with one difference: they were victorious and won!
Knocking the assailant down does not mean the same as knocking him out. You are not safe until you have decisively rendered the assailant unconscious. Even then he may regain consciousness and chase you. Alternatively, he may run away before you are able to finish him off, but you cannot count on that and you must still be cautious because an assailant may pretend to run away, only to return and attack you again, (Thomas, 1995).
