Before Sandra Scott left home for college, her mother asked her to take a self-defense class — just in case she “encountered a situation where someone wanted to hurt” her. The 19-year-old Stanford University freshman from New Port Richey, Fla., did some research but never got around to signing up. When she got to Palo Alto, Calif., the sun-splashed campus seemed perfectly safe. Yet, when her resident assistant mentioned a new, student-run self-defense seminar starting the next quarter, Scott enrolled in it — partly out of a sense of obligation to her mom. In the company of 15 females, Scott says the class’s candid discussions opened her eyes to a different reality at the college.
“I had generally felt safe on campus. … I wasn’t exposed to anything — or to that much — but hearing from other women and how it had affected them, I realized sexual assault is a problem at Stanford,” Scott tells NationSwell. After taking the nine-week class, “I don’t know if I would say that I feel safer, but I definitely feel less naïve.”
Current student Daly Montgomery, a senior double majoring in aeronautics and African-American studies and rugby player, created “Protecting Your Bubble,” a self-defense course to empower female classmates to protect themselves. The class provides context about the prevalence and psychology for campus rape at large, explains the response systems in place at Stanford and teaches physical techniques to disable an attacker. Montgomery stresses that most participants probably won’t ever have to, say, knee a guy in the groin or scratch him, but that’s not the point. Rather, it encourages a woman to define her personal space — aka, her “bubble” — and to assert herself and feel she has the strength to back it up when someone tries to violate it. (In previous sessions, Montgomery also taught men and gender-nonconforming students.)
“If you are feeling unsafe, you are allowed to do something,” Montgomery tells her students. “That’s something they haven’t heard before. I realized through the class how important that was and how it’s not really emphasized anywhere else,” she says. “Much of what I aimed to do in my class was empower my students to realize they know more than they might think.”
As universities across the country revamp their sexual assault prevention education to comply with federal law, self-defense classes often aren’t included — despite strong evidence proving their efficacy. This student-led class at Stanford adds a new dimension to prevention on a campus that’s struggled with sexual violence.
In 2013, according to campus crime statistics made public by the Clery Act, the university disclosed that 26 students experienced a forcible sexual offense — equal to the total number of robberies, aggravated assaults and car thefts on campus, combined. (In 2014, the most recent year available, Stanford students reported another 26 rapes and four cases of fondling.)
Clery Act data can be problematic: A comparably high number of reports may be evidence that a school has created an environment where reporting is encouraged, rather than hushed up. (Or, it could indicate a real problem.) Conversely, a low number could underrepresent the number of criminal acts. An official campus climate survey at Stanford in 2015 suggests the former: 6.5 percent of female undergraduate seniors reported being raped, and 36.8 percent reported sexual misconduct.
Led by the provost and philosophy professor John W. Etchemendy, Stanford’s administration responded to the violence and student outcry by overhauling the school’s reporting process for rape survivors and by mandating students take an online module about “upstander” (Stanford’s preferred term for bystander) intervention before they arrive on the palm tree-lined campus. The majority of the 11 students NationSwell interviewed at length over a four-day visit to campus this January, however, felt Etchemendy’s response did too little too late. (A Stanford spokeswoman, Lisa Lapin, denied several requests for interviews.)
In response, student-led initiatives, including “Protecting Your Bubble,” began popping up across campus, centering their discussions on Stanford specifically. In Montgomery’s class, Scott says that hearing anecdotes from upperclassmen made sexual violence real for the first time, in a way completing the online course “from home on a computer” had not. Students in the course picked one session as their favorite: the fifth week’s module on “sticky situations.” In it, the group brainstorms hypothetical situations when someone else’s actions would make them uncomfortable (someone follows you home or touches you on a plane ride or public transit). In pairs, the girls act out how they would respond.
Thinking over a solution to each hypothetical dilemma made junior Esther Fan Melton realize that “self-defense is not about the other person, it’s about me and protecting my space.” Lex Schoenberg, one of Montgomery’s rugby teammates who took the class, echoes her, saying, “I think the most important lesson I’ll take with me is that I don’t have to feel powerless in uncomfortable or threatening situations.” She continues, “I now feel more confident in my ability to recognize and get out of certain sticky situations before they escalate too far.”
Schoenberg’s sense of empowerment aligns with clinical research on self-defense classes. A review of empirical studies shows that women who forcefully resist are more likely to prevent a perpetrator from completing a rape. In the past two years, a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine and one conducted by the University of Oregon found that a seminar-based university course like Montgomery’s could effectively reduce rates of sexual assault. With college campuses full of sexually active, young people, “there’s lots of opportunities for hooking up and partying,” says Martha McCaughey, sociology professor at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C, and author of “Real Knockouts: The Physical Feminism of Women’s Self-Defense.” In that environment, “there is certainly a need for both sex ed and rape prevention education on campus,” including self-defense training.
Despite these results, self-defense itself remains a sticky situation, hemmed in by opposition from all sides of the ideological divide, McCaughey says. Offering self-defense classes seems to be a natural fit, so why are they excluded? Some feminists take issue with placing moral responsibility on women to fight off an attacker, rather than on the perpetrator himself, while other left-leaners emphasize a nonviolent approach. And then there’s the group of gender traditionalists who contend women aren’t strong enough to defend themselves (or don’t want them to be), perpetuating a damsel-in-distress narrative that underlies some bystander intervention trainings, adds McCaughey, who also runs the blog See Jane Fight Back.
Those concerns quickly fade away with properly designed classes that empower women, like “Protecting Your Bubble,” which situates self-defense strategies within a broader look at the forces that either facilitate or discourage sexual violence. Interestingly, both its instructor and its students also report wanting to participate in the larger movement to change Stanford’s policies and procedures. When NationSwell first spoke to Montgomery in January, she noted that she hadn’t been “hugely involved in the broader campus response, just my little piece of it with my class.” But three months later, halfway into her second quarter of teaching, Montgomery says she feels more invested. “Before, I would say, I felt kind of disconnected from the overall activism. Teaching the class made me realize I have a very real stake in this — this is something I can contribute — and I’m more interested in trying to fit my portion into the overall movement.” Kaelyn Varner, a junior studying the intersection of science, technology and society echoes her sentiments. “I feel like I finally have knowledge and a platform to speak from.”
Graduation is only one week away for Montgomery. She doesn’t know who, if anyone, will take her spot leading “Protecting Your Bubble” next year — a perpetual problem in the four-year cycles of campus activism. (SARA, the Office of Sexual Assault & Relationship Abuse, Stanford’s direct services for survivors, has asked Montgomery to develop programming they could teach.) Effective methods to promote self-defense are clearly in place; it’s up to underclassmen or the university to see that the benefits reach future students.
MORE: This Proven Method Is How You Prevent Sexual Assault on College Campuses
Tag: self-defense
These 5 Smart Gun Technologies Could Be the Future of Firearms in America
Would anyone shopping for a new car buy one that wasn’t equipped with seat belts? Live in a house without smoke detectors? Use a chain saw without a safety brake? It goes without saying that consumers expect products to be safe. But when it comes to one of the most deadly objects — a gun, which killed more than 30,000 Americans in 2013 — people are hard-pressed to find one with state-of-the-art safety features.
That’s not because the technology isn’t readily available. Back in 2000, Smith & Wesson agreed to manufacture handguns with a built-in lock, but boycotts curbed sales. More recently, in California and Maryland, stores stocking the leading smart gun in production were met with vicious backlash online, protests and death threats. Some question the reliability of smart guns, and others believe that they threaten the Second Amendment. But Stephen Teret, a policy expert at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, says unequivocally, “Smart guns are going to save lives. They’re not going to save all lives,” he continues, “but why wouldn’t we want to make guns as safe a consumer product as possible?”
Many Americans share his sentiment. In 2014, through the Smart Tech Challenges Foundation, Silicon Valley luminaries like Ron Conway pledged $1 million toward research and development of smart gun technologies, and last month, President Barack Obama signaled his support. Which devices are the most promising? NationSwell interviewed five leading inventors about their prototypes.
TriggerSmart by Robert McNamara
Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology keeps guns from firing when they’re in the wrong hands. TriggerSmart’s small wireless transmitter (disguised inside a ring) “talks” with a circuit board in the firearm’s handle. When they’re within less than two inches of each other, the gun unjams. (The technology works nearly identically to keys that remotely unlock car doors.) And unlike fingerprint recognition, the signal communicates through material, like a glove.
Robert McNamara, founder of the Florida-based company manufacturing the technology, started investigating how to build a smart gun after wondering why he could remotely lock and disable his iPhone, but not his gun. He approaches the issue of gun violence with a foreigner’s eye. Uncomfortable with the regularity of shootings of America, this level of gun violence “doesn’t happen every day in Ireland,” McNamara points out, speaking with the thick brogue of his homeland. “We never hear of a child shooting themselves or their mother, or a police officer being overpowered.” Recognizing that U.S. politics around smart guns are “a bit of a hot potato,” McNamara hopes to capitalize in an industry avoided by many. Previously working in construction and property development, he now spends his days courting big investors with the hopes of soon bringing TriggerSmart into final states of testing.
Dual:Lock by Timothy Oh
Dual:Lock is a throwback to traditional safety measures, but with a contemporary twist. In essence, the device is simply a high-tech, wall-mounted gun safe. Rather than punching in numbers or spinning a dial, the safe opens with a fingerprint scan. Dual:Lock’s stainless steel core looks like a knife block; its carbide retaining pin locks the weapon in place.
With relatives in law enforcement, creator Timothy Oh says that he was raised with an ingrained sense of the devastation gun violence can cause, as well as the importance of firearm safety. The native of Orange County, Calif., and current student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., built his first smart gun in high school. After uploading his idea to an online forum and receiving extremely negative feedback, he started listening to consumers’ desires and conducted 500 interviews with military, law enforcement and civilian gun owners. Many told him that they keep their guns loaded and unsecure in case there’s an emergency. “Immediate access and security are two values that are conflicting right now in the current market,” Oh explains. For these gun owners, Dual:Lock provides faster access than traditional closed-door safes (the device opens within 0.8 seconds). A prototype will be tested at the Los Angeles Police Department gun ranges this fall, and eight gun stores in the Albany, N.Y. region, have signed letters of sale intent.
gUNarmed by Chloe Green
Columbine High School, Virginia Tech, Oikos University, Sandy Hook Elementary School, Umpqua Community College. Fifteen-year-old high school student Chloe Green says she’s read too many news reports about, “children being killed and the families being torn apart by gun violence.” Green comes from a family of gun owners, but thought she could bypass the political divide and enhance “safe, responsible gun ownership” with technology.
Her early-stage device, gUNarmed, will use satellites to track a gun’s location and automatically jam the magazine when inside schools and government buildings. (The owner can program additional excluded areas.) When a firearm is detected in a prohibited space, a motor on the magazine prevents bullets from entering the chamber and could send an alert to local law enforcement. Currently, Green has mapped out the electronics in a breadboard prototype, but she doesn’t know when she will advance to the next stages since her young age makes it difficult to network professionally. Still, she doesn’t plan to let that derail her. “I’ve always been interested in the process of making, tinkering and inventing things,” she says, hoping to save American lives from firearm deaths while also getting other young women involved in STEM.
EverLokt by John William Stein
Pennsylvania resident John William Stein believes that smart guns will only sell if they are attractive to gun owners. The one-time biotech inventor for pharmaceutical companies knew little about firearms, but he was moved into action by the Sandy Hook massacre. (A few weeks after the shooting, dozens of kids walked onstage at his church to sing Christmas carols, and he could only think of the other children who had been lost.) The 75-year-old’s first device was a safety round hooked up with a motion-sensor that pinged parents by cell phone if shaken (a sign that a child or an intruder had found their gun). But that device seemed too simplistic to motivate firearms enthusiasts.
So recently, Stein decided to take advantage of today’s increasingly compact processors and cameras and installed a miniature lens into the head of the bullet. Using its ability to detect distances, this smart bullet would not fire if a person is less than three feet away or if a child is looking down the barrel. At the same time, however, the bullet would release if aimed across a room in the direction of a home invader. Still in the early stages of development, Stein’s bullet could also film the incident for law enforcement, and a second camera in the back could snap a picture upon discharge to show who fired the gun.
Ægen Technologies by Kai Kloepfer
Boulder, Colo., teen Kai Kloepfer describes the 2012 Aurora movie theater mass shooting, where 12 people died at a sold-out midnight screening of “The Dark Knight Rises,” as feeling like his September 11. The loss of life was close — he had visited the Century 16 theater with his friends — so the self-taught electronics nut who participates annually in the local science fair focused his next project on something socially relevant: creating a smart gun. His first attempt involved iris recognition. But that idea foundered when he realized the sensor would be incompatible with sunglasses, thick eyeglasses or shooting in the dark. The next logical alternative? Fingerprint recognition.
Going on four years later, Kloepfer’s biometric sensor is located on a gun’s grip. It captures an image of a person’s fingerprint and checks it against a database of authorized users. If the system finds a match, the gun unlocks. As soon as the owner releases it, the device relocks — a vital feature if the firearm is used in self-defense or is stolen. “The whole goal is to remove human error from the equation as much as possible,” Kloepfer, now 19, says. Kloepfer’s current 3-D printed plastic model unlocks within a span of 1.5 seconds, but he aims to reduce it to just half a second. Just weeks away from his first live sample, Kloepfer is already a long way ahead of most high school science fair projects.
MORE: This Lifelong Hunter Aims to Make Guns Safer — By Making Them Smarter