Self-defense for Women
Sure, You are a smart, good looking, and self-reliant woman. Yet face it: life is unpredictable and can turn on you at any given moment. Everyday in the news we hear about women being attacked, women being raped, beaten and murdered on a daily basis. Maybe you know it as a quiet voice in your head or as alarming sensations but the “what if” of violence or an attack is every woman’s fear. Its time for a shift, a revolution in thinking: what if instead of being fearful you learned how to be fearsome. All it takes is a few self-defense tactics to keep you from becoming another victim. Now, you may not be able to stop the violence from happening to every woman out there, but at least you can stop the violence from happening to yourself. All women, disregarding age, should know some type of self-defense or martial arts.
To start off, martial arts is an extensive system of codified practices and traditions of combat that are practiced for a variety of reasons, including self-defense, physical health and fitness. The history of martial arts was originally concerned with preparing men for battle. Some martial arts are considered ‘traditional’ and tied to an ethnic, cultural or religious background, while others are modern systems developed either by a founder or an association, such as MMA. The difference between a martial art and self-defense training is a vast subject. Martial arts training and self-defense are completely different, but they are absolutely the same. For instance, Dictionary.com refers self-defense as anything that is done to provide safety for one’s self. It does not mater the means as long as the individual practicing comes out alive and as unharmed as possible form the altercation. On the contrary, martial arts is a military science of hand-to-hand combat. But yet again it is that same goal, to come out on top as unscathed as possible. Therefore, martial arts and self-defense go hand in hand.
All women should know how to defend themselves because they face, see and hear about a lot more crime today than they did in the past. For example, according to the Uniform Crime Reports in the year 1980 there were a total of 7,020 total violent crimes committed in Phoenix alone. More recently in the year 2005 that violent crime rate increased to 10,695 a year. If you watch the news, you will hear about a lot of crime such as hijackings, killings and kidnaps. Some murders are psychopaths who do not have feelings. They kill people without reason. For instance, the disaster center states that 14,748 murders occurred just the year of 2010 in the United States alone. There are also dangerous situations involving gangsters, drugs and accidents. The world has now developed into a remote killer due to many reasons of violence, war, and terrorism for example. The world is a place of danger.
Life today is so unpredictable; as a result it is an excellent initiative that all women should know how to defend themselves. It would be unfeasible to list all the ways in which life can be unpredictable, being that its unpredictability starts from the moment we draw our first breath until the second we gasp for our last. Life turns on a dime and can change at the drop of a hat. A quote by J. Heschel clearly refers to the world as volatile as well, “The course of life is unpredictable. No one can write their own autobiography in advance”. However, the reality is that while we would like to believe that we would always be safe, life does happen and there are people that wake up in the morning, drink a cup of coffee, read the paper, leave the house and never return. According to New York Times there are 600,000 women who go missing each year. This is only some evidence that proves why women should know how to instinctively defend themselves.
In correlation, these are statistics that prove that it is a good idea for every woman to know at least some type of self-defense. As an illustration, “Twenty-two million