Empowerment Self-Defense Empowerment self-defense (ESD) is a type of self-defense training that emphasizes a student’s agency and problem-solving skills in their own safety. ESD classes can be as short as 1-hour or as long as 30 hours. ^{[citation needed]}

Basic Principles

In ESD programs (e.g. IMPACT Self-Defense programs, National Women’s Martial Arts Federation Self-Defense Group, and Empowerment Self-Defense Advocacy) NOTE 1 - Talk Page, women and girls learn self-advocacy and self-protection. By increasing their self-defense knowledge and skills, women and girls have tools to build healthy relationships based on consent and directly challenge the idea that violence is inevitable and that aggressors are invincible. A cornerstone of empowerment self-defense programs is building community and social consciousness across age, class, disability/ability, race, and sexual orientation while also heightening awareness of women’s and girls’ survival, resiliency, and resistance. While the emphasis is on empowerment of women and girls, empowerment self-defense makes it clear that perpetrators, not victims, are responsible for violence; promotes trauma sensitive learning environments; and offers compassionate support to victims of violence.

Methodology

In order to empower students these classes share certain attributes regardless of the actual physical skills taught.
Note 3 - Talk Page Classes are led by a female instructor. If the class includes a male instructor, he will follow the lead instructor and model working successfully with a woman in a leadership role.

• The instructor models control and agency, and also models comfort with making mistakes.
  
• Students are taught skills, which are offered as tools that they may choose to use or choose not to use.
  
• Students are never told what they “should” do in a given situation, but empowered to make their own decisions about their safety. A program may point out what USUALLY works best in MOST situations, but each situation is unique and the final decision rests with the person actually confronted by the situation.
  
• Blame for attacks is placed on the perpetrators. Instructors are careful to use language that places responsibility for violence with the perpetrators and emphasizes that victims are never to blame for their victimization.
  
• ESD programs recognize that most sexual assaults are committed by someone the victim knows, so they teach skills for setting boundaries with friends, family members, and other acquaintances as well as for boundary setting with strangers.
  
• Classes are trauma-informed so that students are kept emotionally as well as physically safe.
  
• ESD emphasizes skills appropriate for practical self-defense rather than martial arts, i.e. techniques that are designed to be effective for a smaller person against a potentially larger attacker, that focus on using the strongest parts of the victim’s body against the weakest parts of the assailant’s body, and that are intended to cause damage rather than just pain.
  
• Techniques taught in ESD must be accessible to a wide range of body types, and are not dependent of level of physical fitness.
  
• Students’ choices about participation in the class are always respected, since one of the goals of ESD is to teach students that they have the right to have their boundaries respected. ^[1]

Types of classes

ESD classes may focus solely on verbal boundary setting, or they may include physical safety skills. Some ESD classes use a “mock assailant” instructor to recreate realistic assault scenarios. These classes allow students to learn to manage their adrenaline response and to experience hitting someone with full force. ^[2] There are also classes that use the “mock assailant” instructor that do not follow ESD principles for example Model Mugging, USA Dojo and Various Law Enforcement Agencies Note 4 - Talk Page.

History

ESD is sometimes referred to as “feminist self-defense” because it is taught by women, based on women’s experiences, and directly challenges the idea that violence against women is inevitable and that male aggressors are invincible. ^[3]

In 1990, a study by Elizabeth Ozer and Albert Bandura provided solid evidence that mastery modeling and a sense of self-efficacy (both fundamental components of ESD) are extremely effective both in preventing assaults and in lessening trauma following an assault. ^[4]

In 2015 the results of a major study out of the University of Windsor in Canada were published in the New England Journal of Medicine. ^[5] The study assigned 451 women to take 12 hours of ESD training and a control group of 442 women who were given access to brochures on sexual assault. Those who participated in the ESD class experienced a 46% reduction in completed rape and a 63% reduction in attempted sexual assault one year later as compared to the control group. These results echo those in a similar, smaller study from the University of Oregon in 2013. ^[6]