Attacking Back Model Mugging Self-Defense Course Instills Fighting Spirit, Skill In Women
On a warm July evening, only one block from her San Francisco home, Jill Stauffer was grabbed from behind and thrown to the ground. She knew what to do.
“He had me in a choke hold, face down, with my arms pinned and legs curled beneath me,” she remembers.
The only sound Stauffer heard was the roar of adrenaline coursing through her body. But she relied on her Bay Area Model Mugging (BAMM) training and listened to her fighting spirit. Her attacker would have to allow an opening, he would have to move, in order to escalate the attack. She waited.
“I can hardly remember what happened, but I did end up in a kicking position, fending him off, and screaming at the top of my lungs.”
The assailant ran away, but not before kicking her many times in the head and ribs. But she survived without being robbed, raped, or murdered. She fought and won.
Stauffer credits her victory to the self-defense training she received a few years earlier. “If it hadn’t been for BAMM, I feel strongly that I would have had no idea what to do,” she says.
Twenty-six year veteran Spokane Police Officer Jack Pearson agrees that during an assault the victim has a tiny window of opportunity to turn things around. “The brain is a computer,” says Pearson. “If attacked, there is only time to react. There needs to be something in the computer. Self-defense courses teach these skills.”
Model Mugging is only one of dozens of self-defense courses; a program based on its techniques is offered locally.
Many self-defense classes are like learning to swim on dry land. Model Mugging students jump in up to their necks. They learn to sink or swim. What sets the class apart is its emotional intensity. Unlike defense training, such as the martial arts, in which students make the motions of a punch, Model Mugging requires the students to deliver full-force blows.
It is based on the highly specialized self-defense techniques developed by Los Angeles area resident and martial art expert Matt Thomas. The class teaches skills that can be used to avoid assault situations, de-escalation techniques, and how to deliver a knockout blow in defense against a violent attacker.
It is a wicked combination of martial arts and street fighting, centering on strategies such as first jabbing the eyes, then moving in for an uppercut with the knee to the attacker’s groin as he reacts to the surprise eye jab. Abusive, often obscene language is usually part of the staged attacks. This element of reality is crucial to the Model Mugging method. Students train in an adrenaline state while working with realistic and customized assault scenarios so the body and voice remember what the mind may not if confronted with a real assault.
Unfortunately, many people will face a real assault in their lifetimes. According to the Washington D.C.-based National Victim Center and Crime Victims Research and Treatment Center, one out of four Americans has had to defend herself during an assault.
Gwen Jones, a mother of two in her 30s and an Eastern Washington University student, fears for her safety daily. She reports that after completing a Model Mugging course in Cheney last April, she feels more confident in her ability to protect herself. After completing the course, she was approached by a stranger. “Instead of just being fearful, I felt proactive,” she says. “I watched him. Assessed the situation. Instead of sitting in my fear, I knew I could protect myself.”
Only days after Cori Couture, 47, moved into her new Oakland, Calif., home in 1988, police informed her that four assaults had occurred on her block in the last six months. The Oakland police wanted to move a decoy officer into Couture’s dream home.
“For me I decided it was either take the course or lock myself up in my house,” she says. “The price of the course was the price of my freedom.” Couture is now the director of nonprofit BAMM.
Holly Casey, 36, a Spokane registered nurse and massage therapist is an incest victim who has survived rape twice. She understands the oppressive nature of fear and Couture’s desire to empower herself. Her entire adult life she had not been able to live or sleep alone because of fear.
Casey has warm brown eyes. But don’t let her gentle smile fool you. She holds black belts in Tydo and Tae Kwon Do. She is a woman of action. As part of her own healing process after being assaulted, she took a Model Mugging class in Portland in 1992. She planned to offer a similar course to women in Spokane if she liked the program.
Casey was “transformed” by the power she found in the Portland program, she says. She spent $9,000 of her savings to bring Cori Couture and the San Francisco-based Model Mugging classes to Spokane. In 1993, she joined with Cheney Police Officer Mary Gilles and Patrick Moore, who had been a deputy in Lincoln County for 11 years and who is now an EWU student. They formed The Self Protection Connection based on the Model Mugging techniques.
EWU women’s studies professor Carol Vines later became their “administrative goddess.” Three times a year, they, along with instructors Sue Christilaw, an Itron computer engineer, Bob Christilaw, a Spokane sheriff’s deputy, and Connie Pennell, a mental health counselor, offer a four-day, 20-hour course for $100.
The four female instructors have black belts in martial arts and are busy professionals who spend their weekends teaching self-defense because they believe the techniques work. Moore and Christilaw endorse the techniques enough to don padded helmets weighing nearly 20 pounds and spend four hours at a time being punched and kicked by women, while others scream support. They are trained to continue the assault scenario until they believe the student has delivered a knock-out blow.
Last April, close to the EWU campus, The Self Protection Connection empowered 10 women with the Model Mugging techniques.
On the first day all could feel the collective nervousness in the room. Seven of the 10 women had been victims of crimes ranging from assault and domestic violence to rape and incest. Most had never been taught to use force; many said they were uncomfortable with the idea of yelling, even in defense. However, all learned how to perform “eye strikes” and “ax kicks” and had a new feeling of power by the last day. Many became friends along the way.
“I was surprised by (learning) what I was capable of,” says Shannon Mann, an EWU English-as-a-second-language instructor who took the course and learned that her size, 5-foot-1 and 100 pounds, isn’t necessarily a limitation.
Tricia O’Connor, who also took the April course, said, “I feel a lot safer now. I feel like they have given me a guardian angel.”
The beauty of the self-defense course is that it teaches women that they need only look in the mirror to find their guardian angels. Women find their fighting spirit.
The spirit is evident in the words of Jill Stauffer, who says of the attack she stopped in July, ” … I am glad it happened to me and not another woman who had not taken this self-defense class.”
MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: COURSE REPEATS The next 20-hour course will be in Cheney beginning on Sept. 16. The cost is $100. To register contact: The Self Protection Connection P.O. Box 19183 Spokane, WA 99219 (509) 747-3337