There are many things I wish our schools taught, in the way of basic life skills. When I graduated from high school, I was well-prepared for more schooling (college), but ill-prepared for life as an adult. If it were up to me, I’d mandate a course on personal interaction — i.e., how to get along with people. And the most important thing this course would teach? How to recognize abuse.
When self-defense is address, it’s usually designed to prepare you to protect yourself from a stranger off the street. But that’s not where the real danger lies for most women. Far more women are hurt by a husband or partner than will ever be threatened by a stranger. One figure I read states that 1 in 3 women have been physically or sexually abused by their partner/spouse; that doesn’t even count the numbers of women suffering from non-physical abuse. When your husband / partner hits you, you know that’s abuse; non-physical abuse is much harder to identify.
I’ll address “red flags” — warning signs of non-physical abuse — in another post. Here I want to make a plea to all people who teach self-defense: please, please include some material in your classes on how to recognize when you or someone you love is in an abusive situation. If I’d had that knowledge, I wouldn’t have stayed in my marriage for ten years.
Tags: abuse, Self-Defense
