People need treatment in our society, full stop. We need to prevent this shit from happening.
As the parent of an 11 year old, prison would be the safest place for a person who tried that on my kid.
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A 3-strikes law in Mississippi gets this Black man a ‘life’ sentence for possessing 1.5 ounces of cannibus.
Maximum sentence in Florida for kidnapping: 30 years
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Now if only we could teach men to treat women like people, but sadly, that’s apparently a bridge too far… better to teach women to fight back and if they don’t, blame them for whatever happens to them… /s
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Of course it shouldn’t be, but what was the alternative in that situation?..To preemptively arrest all creepy men?
Yes, that is pretty much exactly correct.
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Well, that fucker is well and truly fucked. Good.
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Of course we shouldn’t have to, you’re preaching to the choir, but how does that help MY daughter’s RIGHT NOW?
Are you saying that I shouldn’t tell them to fight if such a thing happens? That I should instead… go over to other parents house and raise their sons better?
I don’t see why we can’t work to make a better society (or just wish for it magically, which is all I understand from posts like this on the internet, but perhaps people do other things) AND applaud the girl who did this.
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I get what you’re saying. This is something that should never happen and yet it sadly does happen. Both statements can be true. We all need to strive to create a society in which this kind of thing really doesn’t happen, but we can do so while acknowledging that our society is not there yet.
Self-defense classes exist for a reason, and they are not going away until our society really does get better. It is a sad state of affairs, but acknowledging the sadness does not have to be an admission of defeat about the possibility of making society better.
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For every instance in which fighting is the ‘right’ answer, there will be another instance in which fighting results in greater physical trauma or even death. An individual can’t know which it will be, so even if one manages to have the presence of mind to ‘choose’ the response method they think will work, they might have chosen incorrectly;
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Statistically, most attackers of children are their parents, other family members, close family friends, and other trusted adults such as priests or coaches. A stranger on the street is so rare that it makes the news;
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Requiring a young child to undergo self defense classes can cause its own type of trauma. Having to stay on high alert at a time in life when they should be concentrating on blue slime instead is stressful. And having the pressure of knowing one is supposed to be able to protect oneself from an unknown adult assailant is, frankly, a horrible demand to make on a child.
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What a strange thing to say. We’re talking about how a child can forestall a violent attack, not what her “job” or responsibility is. Why in the world wouldn’t you encourage kids to fight off hostile attackers and praise someone for succeeding in doing so? Modelling and encouraging self defense is a useful thing to do. This girl’s response would have worked well had she been attacked by a rabid raccoon, too.
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…and that is where you make a mistake. Child abductions are even in the US very rare. The idea not to give a child freedom to roam because some creep might assault them is not more sensible than not letting them eat because they might choke.
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Bad analogy is bad:
We don’t live in a society that fosters and enables rabid raccoon attacks.
We do, however, live in a society that shrugs its’ collective shoulders rather than admit that perpetual toxic masculinity is a detriment to the very fabric of our so-called civilization.
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A child cannot. If they are lucky the attacker may give up. Or maybe evidence such as significant blood loss or their corpse will be left at the primary scene so there is more chance of finding the attacker. That is all they can hope for. Can we please for the love of god stop acting like a child in a traumatic situation can or should be expected to behave like anything but a child in a traumatic situation?
This is getting beyond gross.
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There was no corpse in this video. So we can hope for more than finding corpses. I don’t think fostering girls’ confidence and encouraging them to defend themselves enables violence against them, or blames them if they are attacked. I think it does the opposite. When I was young, I was fearful of dangerous people. Learning that there were things I could do when in danger that might help me escape it made me less fearful, without making me feel in any way responsible for the violence committed by other people.
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You should, but how does that help the girl who find herself standing face to face with a man who hasn’t been taught that or simply didn’t take that lesson to heart? It’s not about shifting blame, it’s about surving in the world we live in rather than the utopia we would want to live in.
Victims of attacks, especially sexual assaults, almost always feel guilt. Survivors very frequently feel like they didn’t do enough to fight back. It is a major problem in our framing of victims that we need to work on as a society.
Believing that you know how to avoid attack or fend off attack is often very reassuring to people who have never been assaulted or to people who were nearly assaulted but quickly escaped. Of course that can feel empowering but we also have to consider the feelings of victims who did not escape and the conversations that we have about assault.
It is not correct or helpful to imply that a potential victim is actually in control of the outcome of a potential assault.
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A lot of people here have said that self-defense classes are too much for children, and perhaps they are right. On the other hand, I do think that learning karate, taekwondo or some other martial art can do wonders for a child, provided that it is done in the right way (by which I mean: martial arts as sports with a strong emphasis on discipline, self-restraint and confidence).
On another note, though (and in response to everyone): I think that we can all agree that it is a miracle that this girl is still alive and unharmed. We are never going to come up with an answer for what a child should do in this situation because no child ever should be put in this situation. Let’s just be thankful that the girl was okay in this case and not try to generalize some rule of thumb for what to do in these situations.
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I’ve had my safety and the safety of my son threatened by a person who had and has motive and means. The only other witness who heard that man threaten me is now dead (natural causes). I went to the police and named names; no report was filed by them, unfortunately, apart from a general description of “harassment” with no names. Apparently, in my county in Texas, police have wide discretion re what and how they write up a complaint. I had to call my son’s school to let them know about the problem.
And of course, I had to let my son know.
I took him with me to the county police substation when I made my complaint and had him listen in.
My son had already been taking self-defense classes anyway, prior, having occasionally been the pacifist part-Asian punching bag used by other kids in his school. At some point, I said to him “the culture we find ourselves in, here, now, rewards the powerful, who can and will try to consume the weak–and you are not to be food for those who would prey on you.”
Yep.
Pretty much exactly what I said.
I threw away my peace-love-and-granola hippie cred and with his consent got him involved in martial arts. [My ahimsa practice is one thing (and does not forbid self defense). My son’s path is his own. No child is supposed to be an extension of her/his parent.]
All this to say, if I may, I’d like to append your list with this:
- Not all families or caretakers are in a financial position to pay for self defense classes for their children. If self defense courses were offered as phys ed options in public schools, that may be a partial solution for those who have barriers to self defense classes. Participation in such classes assumes able-bodied kids whose perception, sight, hearing, arms and legs are all fully functional, and is therefore discriminatory and not ideal either.
It is entirely absurd to expect every child to successfully fend off an adult attacker/abductor. One can’t even argue that every adult can successfully fend off an attacker. Not all humans under duress are brave. Not all are lucky.
The only way to start to put handles on all this horror is for parents, teachers, cops and others who are responsible for children’s safety to take children’s complaints deadly seriously. Kids know–their radar is way better than most grownups.
May all those grownups not lose their own lesson, and pay attention, and believe what kids tell them.
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Yes, I can imagine self-defense classes being counter-productive if they give kids an exaggerated feeling of danger. And there is no one answer to what to do in every situation. I balk at agreeing that it’s a miracle she survived, though, because miracles are unreliable. I hold out hope that we can find practical ways to help girls (and boys) feel safe, and to help them actually be safer. One way is to stop instilling violence in men, as many people have said here, and to do it without instilling learned helplessness in girls and women.
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Seeing as you both asked so politely “but what about my daughters now!?”
Quit stirring, stop trying to be right on the internet, quit talking over the women in this room.
You tell them their dad is the one most likely to assault them.
Then their brothers.
Then their uncles and friends.
Ask me how I know.
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That man could have easily killed her, despite her fighting back.
Most of us who are fighting back against this nonsense ARE WOMEN. So fuck off with that.
But maybe they’re just trying to teach us to fight back? /s
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