Public Safety holds women’s self-defense class

Cheers and congratulations rang through the Centennial Center this past Wednesday as GCSU Public Safety taught a self-defense class for women sponsored by the Nu Tau chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Inc. Fourteen women and one man showed up for the class, sparring in bare feet as they learned various hitting, kicking and escape skills. Officer Gary Purvis led the group of participants in the hands-on class.

“You don’t know if the guy living next door is safe or if he’s someone that would attack you so being prepared and feeling more confident going out and doing the things around campus without feeling worried about someone attacking you” Purvis said.

Participants learned the proper stance, feet shoulder width apart, knees slightly bent, weight on one leg, ready to fend off an attacker. If close enough to face, grabbing behind the ears and gouging the eyeballs it’s quite effective.

If necessary, a knee to the crotch will disarm an attacker long enough to get away.

“If he doesn’t let go, just keep on (kneeing),” Purvis said. “You want to drive the crotch to the head.”

The self-defense program is offered on-demand whenever Public Safety is asked to do it.

“We’ve always had it, it’s just underutilized,” Sgt. Greg Williams said. “I wish people would take more advantage of it.”

Nu Tau president Shondra Williams participated in the hour-long course. “I feel confident,” Shondra Williams said. “I actually really learned a lot like a few techniques on how to use body parts to defend a person. We wanted to do this to encourage females to be more independent and be confident and not always have to depend on someone else to come to your rescue in those situations.”

Senior marketing major Brandon Kennon held his own in the self-defense course. Despite being surrounded by all the females in the class, Kennon was very supportive of the ladies.

“I think its a safe thing to do because I’ve been here for three and a half years and I’ve heard of a couple of stories of girls that got taken advantage of whether it’s downtown or just regular walking around,” Kennon said. “It’s good we have a self-defense class for them to learn how to defend themselves.”

Nu Tau hopes to collaborate with Public Safety in the near future to offer the self-defense course again, hopefully attracting more of the student body. But for the night, changing the lives of 15 individuals is a success for Nu Tau. You just change one group of people at a time” participant senior Anastasia Brown said.

Posted by Lissa Speer on Mar 12 2010. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry