College women's perceptions regarding resistance to sexual assault

The Gender Safety Gap: Examining the Impact of Victimization History, Perceived Risk, and Personal Control

Previous research has documented that, in general, women are more concerned about their personal safety and take more safety precautions than men. However, this study looks beyond gender by examining the association of three overall factors including victimization history, perceived risk of future victimization, and personal control with worry about safety, safety responses, and bystander intervention intentions for 270 men and 821 women. There were four main findings from this study including the following: (a) The two most consistently associated factors with worry about safety, safety responses, and bystander intervention intentions were higher perceived risk of violent victimization and safety efficacy; (b) recent victimization, rather than victimization history, played an important role in safety responses particularly for women; (c) different patterns of factors are associated with different safety responses demonstrating the importance of examining a wide variety of safety responses; and (d) the pattern of factors associated with worry about safety and safety responses do differ by gender but also had some important similarities. Implications for future research and prevention as well as safety planning interventions are discussed.

Sexual Assault of Women

Most North American universities offer sexual assault prevention programs focusing on attitude change. However, the few program outcome evaluations suggest that these programs may not be effective. This review summarizes the research on sexual assault program evaluation. It is apparent that the most promising avenue for sexual assault prevention may be self-defense training, which is presently not an integral component of typical prevention programs. The substantial body of research on risk factors for sexual assault is also reviewed, and it is concluded that existing rape prevention programs could be improved by focusing on these factors.

In Their Own Words: A Content-Analytic Study of College Women's Resistance to Sexual Assault

The purpose of this study was to utilize a mixed methodological approach to better understand the co-occurrence of perpetrator tactics and women's resistance strategies during a sexual assault and women's reflections on these experiences. College women were recruited from introductory psychology courses and completed both forced-choice response and open-ended survey questions for course credit. Content-analytic results of college women's written responses to an open-ended question suggested that women's resistance strategies generally mirrored the tactics of the perpetrator (e.g., women responded to perpetrator verbal pressure with verbal resistance). However, there were some instances in which this was not the case. Furthermore, a number of women expressed a degree of self-blame for the sexual assault in their responses, as well as minimization and normalization of the experience. These findings suggest that sexual assault risk reduction programs need to directly address victims' self-blame as well as create an atmosphere where societal factors that lead to minimization can be addressed.

Martial arts: time needed for training

Purpose

To measure the time needed to teach a series of martial arts techniques to proficiency.

Methods

Fifteen volunteer subjects without any prior martial arts or self-defense experience were recruited. A panel of martial arts experts selected 21 different techniques including defensive stances, arm blocks, elbow strikes, palm strikes, thumbs to eyes, instep kicks and a carotid neck restraint. The critical elements of each technique were identified by the panel and incorporated into a teaching protocol, and then into a scoring system. Two black belt martial arts instructors directed a total of forty-five 45-minute training sessions. Videotaped proficiency testing was performed weekly. The videotapes were reviewed by the investigators to determine the proficiency levels of each subject for each technique.

Results

The techniques were rated by the average number of training sessions needed for an individual to develop proficiency in that technique. The mean number of sessions necessary to train individuals to proficiency ranged from 27 to 38.3. Using this system, the most difficult techniques seemed to be elbow strikes to the rear, striking with thumbs to the eyes and arm blocking.

Conclusions

In this study 29 hours of training was necessary to train novice students to be proficient in 21 offensive and defensive martial arts techniques. To our knowledge, this is the first study that attempts to measure the learning curves involved when teaching martial arts techniques.