What is Empowerment-Based Self-Defense?
Empowerment-based self-defense is a modern framework for self-defense training, with a focus on growing women’s choices, confidence, and power to advocate for ourselves.
Sound familiar? Conventional, old-fashioned self-defense advice typically includes a lot of fear-based rules for women’s behavior, limiting our freedom and our choices.
Empowerment-based self-defense (ESD) training is different. Rather than focusing on scare tactics or impractical, overly complicated techniques, empowerment-based training teaches practical skills that expand our options and boost our confidence to make the choices that are right for us.
“Don’t go out at night. Never walk down a dark street alone. Always make sure someone knows where you’ll be. Don’t wear that. Never let your drink out of your sight. Don’t let your daughter travel alone.”
At Empowered Movement, our instructors are trained to teach using the empowerment model. This type of self-defense training was designed by and for women, and it includes not only physical self-defense techniques, but also a comprehensive range of skills to build confidence, identify and avoid danger, safely de-escalate conflict, and build both physical and verbal self-defense skills.
Empowerment-based self-defense is the only type of self-defense training that research has proven to be effective for increasing safety and reducing violence. Empowerment principles inform our approach to teaching self-defense, including:
Focusing on expanding students choices and abilities, not instilling fear.
Addressing not only violence from strangers, but also the much more common types of violence and disrespect that can occur at home, in school, or in the workplace.
Placing the blame for violence and violations squarely on the perpetrator, never on the victim or survivor.
Balancing healthy connections to others with the core belief that women and girls are fully capable of defending themselves.
Trauma-informed instructors able to support students who have survived trauma or discrimination in their lives.
Ensuring accessibility and a welcoming environment for all students regardless of body type or differences in ability.
Understanding that women and girls are the true experts in keeping themselves safe, and supporting students to decide the best option for their unique situations.
Click the arrows to learn more about our approach to self-defense, and how it differs from conventional self-defense training.
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Empowerment-based self-defense isn’t just a model; it’s a global movement to empower women against violence and discrimination.
The women’s self-defense movement has deep roots and a long history. The term “empowerment self-defense” was first introduced in the United States during the 1970’s. During this time, the empowerment model was defined by feminist activists as the movement made important gains against gender-based violence, including the creation of the first rape crisis and domestic violence shelter services. Some of these women began incorporating empowerment model principles into self-defense training, and the empowerment self-defense movement was born.
However, women all over the world have been creating community and developing the skills to resist violence since long before the empowerment model was formally developed and named. Today, the empowerment model of self-defense has spread across the world and is taught globally in ways as diverse as its practitioners. Empowered Movement is proud to be part of the long history - and the exciting future - of the women’s self-defense movement.
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Studies show empowerment self-defense training is proven to reduce violence.
+ Women trained in ESD experience fewer and less severe completed assaults and fewer attempted assaults overall (Hollander 2014).
+ Research of 451 women on three college campuses in Canada published in the New England Journal of Medicine found a 50% reduction in unwanted sexual contact, sexual coercion, attempted rape, and completed rape (Senn 2015).
+ A cluster-randomized controlled trial studied the effect of a standardized ESD program on sexual violence outcomes among primary and secondary school girls in three districts of Malawi. Results support the effectiveness of the intervention to reduce sexual violence victimization, and approach the elimination of violence against women and girls (No Means No Worldwide 2018)
+ Empowerment self-defense increases self-confidence and self efficacy, perceived control, assertiveness, physical competence, and disclosure. It also decreases anxiety, fear, feelings of helplessness, and perhaps more importantly, self-blame (Breklin 2008 and Hollander 2014).
+ Girls exposed to an empowerment self-defense program implemented by No Means No reported significant increases over time in efficacy to resist a sexual assault and knowledge of effective resistance strategies. Furthermore, propensity score analyses suggested that girls who received the program reported significantly fewer types of sexual assault and sexual harassment at follow-up compared to girls in the control condition (No Means No Worldwide 2021).
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Empowerment self-defense is different from conventional self-defense training.
+ Conventional self-defense instructors often teach that there is only one ‘correct’ way to use self-defense. ESD supports women and girls to decide the best option for their unique situations.
+ Conventional self-defense training can default to advising women and girls to rely on men, the authorities, or others to provide safety. ESD balances healthy connections to others with the core belief that women are fully capable of defending themselves.
+ Conventional self-defense often focuses on rules and limitations for women (“Never walk alone at night,” for example). ESD instructors work to expand women’s choices and abilities instead of instilling fear.
+ Conventional self-defense often focuses on technical, overly complicated techniques that can only be understood by those with a martial arts background. ESD instructors understand that women and girls are the true experts in keeping themselves safe.
“Learning to defend yourself does not have to be heavy and scary. Before, I would have been more apologetic and worried. Instead, we learned about different options to defend ourselves and say, ‘No.”
— Praise for Empowered Movement’s “She Begins” series, quoted from the Eugene Weekly’s Self-Defense Is The Best Offense