Women’s self defense is typically taught heavy on awareness and avoidance skills, with a few, hard hitting physical tactics. These tactics are generally simple gross motor skills, like knee and palm strikes, which can be effective. However, the minimal nature of them is also a tacit acknowledgement that it’s hard for a smaller person to strike as hard as a larger person. It is also generally explicit that these strikes are to buy enough time for escape.
While escape is a legally desirable approach to physical violence, it may not always be immediately possible. In this scenario, it is important to be able to render an attacker incapable of continuing, even if only very briefly. One effective answer to this attacking vision. While this can be done with something like pepper spray, high power flashlights are a far better answer. Widely available, these can produce temporary blindness, allowing escape, and can be carried into most non-permissive environments. Even better, from a legal perspective, they will do no physical damage, and the effects are very temporary.
Nonetheless, even this may not be enough to thwart an attack. Sometimes, more is necessary. In this case, “stopping power” is essential. This refers to the force to render an attacker incapable of continuing. In this case, this means causing injury to the attacker. This must be proportionate to the violence you are facing, which also requires you to be able to scale the force on the fly. In this case, the bottom line for this is that the only consistently decisive means to stopping power is a weapon.
People will attack because they think they can win. They generally think this because they are bigger, faster, or stronger, armed, or accompanied by accomplices. Faced with superior force, superior force is required. An equalizer is the only reliable way. Firearms can be useful here, but only in very narrow circumstances. Knives can be useful, but have almost the exact same limitations as a firearm. A stick however, offers many more possibilities, and may be the easiest weapon to improvise. A stick can be used to strike, jointlock, or throw an attacker, and may have more deterrence because it is easier (for the attackers) to see.
There’s a saying in Filipino martial arts: steel seeks flesh, wood seeks bone. In the case of a stick, those could be the bones of the foot or ankle, which would prevent an attacker from chasing you. Likewise, smashing the hand of an attacker holding a knife makes it hard to hold it. In Filipino martial arts, this is known as “defanging the snake”. Neither of these really threatens the life of the attacker, which is very good legally.
Another important detail about training with weapons is speed. A stick moves several times faster than the hand. Training against that stimulus rapidly increases reflexes. It’s also generally at greater distance, which requires better footwork to control distance. On top of this, getting hit with a stick hurts more than the hand, so we have greater incentive to pay attention.
Bottom line: When people fight, they fight with weapons, because weapons provide stopping power. Out of 1.3 violent crimes in 2022, more than 1.2 million involved weapons*. This means if you are serious about self defense, you need to train with weapons.
*UCR_Crime_in_the_Nation_2022
