Paying attention to your personal safety
keeps you beautiful—face and body intact and serene—and there can be more in
your purse than lipstick to help you fight back if you're attacked by a mugger.
Protecting the purse itself is more a
matter of prevention than anything else is. If your purse is clutched to you
rather than dangling from a strap, you will be less likely to have someone try
to take it from you. If someone does either grab or demand your purse, give it
to him; it is not worth risking yourself for whatever is in there!
Women are often at risk for sexual assault
either on the street or road or on a date. If you have ever taken a self-defense
class, you have probably been surprised at just how competently you can defend
yourself once you have some encouragement and little bit of training. If you have
not ever taken self-defense, try it: even if you never need to use what you
learn, you will gain confidence and strength.
Remember, any would be attacker counts on
the fact that, in the face of an attack, many women are overcome by a weird
sense of shame, which makes them quiet and submissive. Battered women are the
ultimate example of people who are attacked and respond with shame and
self-blame, so that they don't want anyone to know what's happening to them.
Keeping quiet about being abused means that the abuse continues until the woman
gains the strength to leave or until her abuser kills her. On the other hand,
women who report abuse to the police often stop being victims. On the street
among strangers too, people who run and scream get attention, and very often
get help.
Self-defense trainers often say that
teaching women techniques to kick, grab, punch the testicles or to claw the
eyes of an attacker is all very well, but when push comes to shove, some crime
victims freeze and can't use the aggressive fighting techniques covered in
their programs. Something in the way women are trained from childhood sometimes
prevents us from fighting back as affectively as we can, even when our bodies
and our lives are at stake. Overcoming the urge to remain still is a large part
of becoming effective at self defense, and part of the information female
students receive in personal safety training involves confronting the
conflicting emotions we feel when under attack.
Every woman should at least have a can of pepper
spray in her purse or readily available. When you are walking alone in the dark
or going to your car in an unfamiliar or unsafe place, keeping your hand on
your pepper spray is one good tip for crime prevention. Even a hardened
attacker cannot fight the vicious stinging of a pepper spray, and every woman,
young or old, fragile or strong, can gain the benefit of time to run away and
scream for help.
