Getting defensive:
Martial arts courses teach techniques to tackle violent confrontation
By Chris Bergeron
Tuesday, January 29, 2002
You're trying to unlock your car door without dropping your grocery bags when an unshaven man grabs your elbow and pulls you toward the shadows.
Could you jam your cars keys into his eye? Kick him in the groin?
Or just scream like Kitty Genovese, hoping someone will hear? Bonnie Sancomb has heard reports of rapists haunting the Ashmont subway Station in Boston and doesn't want to be a victim.
But the 36-year-old consultant from Medway realized "There's not one fighting technique I know I could definitely rely on."
"I have friends who've been attacked," Sancomb said. "I wonder what I should do if I was in that predicament."
So she stopped by the Ken Sho Ryu Karate studio in Medway to check out a new program that promises to teach women "how to defend yourself in a bad situation."
The first thing Sancomb saw was a statuesque blonde woman with purple toenails kicking instructor Mike Cappi in his knee.
For the next few minutes, she watched as Paula McSweeney, a 47-year-old mom, social worker and personal trainer, enacted some very un-lady-like scenarios, digging her fingers into Cappi's Adam's apple or ramming her elbow into his nose.
Like many others, Sancomb and McSweeney are all too aware violence against women has become an unfortunate modern factor of life.
A writer and young mother is fatally stabbed in her Cape Cod home. Several women have been sexually assaulted around the Ashmont Station in Boston. A young woman and her friend are carjacked, taken to a Rhode Island golf course and shot to death.
"Safety is an issue in my life. I work in two professions that bring me into other people's houses," she said. "It's a scary world out there."
Over the last several years, many martial arts studios have been offering condensed self-defense courses that offer a handful of effective techniques to help a person escape a violent confrontation.
McSweeney is the most recent graduate of Cappi's four-week PDQ, or Personal Defenses Quickly, Street Self Defense for Women Course.
A sinewy bearded man with a first-degree black belt in kenpo karate, Cappi explained what PDQ teaches.
He makes it clear he's talking about survival and not turning Soccer Moms into the suburban equivalent of Charlie's Angels.
"Self-defense is when you strike quickly and get away," he said. "It isn't karate or martial arts. It's not an aerobics workout or Tae Bo."
Cappi described the four-session, month-long PDQ course as a "program designed to give women choices in adverse situations."
He explained that learning any martial arts or karate system, which usually include hundreds of strikes, takes several years.
For Cappi, the goal of self-defense is the mastery of a few versatile "basic skills and simple moves" to help teenage and adult women avoid and escape dangerous situations.
At the first session, he teaches eight basic practical techniques, "anybody can do regardless of age" which are reinforced throughout the next three sessions.
Cappi's fundamental PDQ techniques are the eye flick, ear slap, throat jab, oblique kick, knee strike, head butt, elbow and bite.
For these techniques to be effective, women, who may have been culturally conditioned to be passive or "lady-like," have to learn to apply them in an aggressive way that will cause pain or injury.
"Changing women's mind set is the hardest thing. They have to overcome their acquired tendency to hold back," he said.
Yet Cappi also teaches women how "not to look like a victim," how to prevent attacks by increased awareness and how to prepare themselves psychologically to respond effectively to an assault.
As the 135-pound McSweeney has learned, these basic techniques - if used instantaneously and aggressively - allow her to stun a larger male and escape his grasp.
Cappi teaches all eight techniques in the first class and then reinforces them in the remaining sessions.
But, before students use the techniques, he emphasized they should learn to evaluate what he calls the four "phases of threat": psychological, verbal, physical and lethal.
As the threat escalates, Cappi teaches his students to be assertive, maintain eye contact and control, and use necessary force.
His essential advice for women being attacked is "strike and get away."
"Women take self-defense courses for two reasons," Cappi said. "They've had a bad situation. Or they don't want to be in a bad situation. I hope these techniques will help them if they do."
How much protection does a month-long course of even the most basic self-defense provide?Janice Reichert, who has been learning taekwan-do from former Brazilian champion Marcos Starling, believes some critical aspects of self-defense can be mastered quickly.
"You never know until push comes to shove," said the 42-year-old. "It's important for women to know how to maintain control and how to hit vulnerable spots so she won't be victimized."
A researcher at Tufts University, Reichert has earned a red belt and serves as an assistant instructor while she continues to train.
After four years of practice, she can break boards in half with a "palm-heel" hand strike.
"I'm not sure a one-day course is all that useful. People forget things. Information has to be reinforced," she said. "To be effective, you have to practice repeatedly."
Walter Mattson, the dean of MetroWest karate teachers, has his doubts.
An eighth degree back belt who helped bring Okinawan Uechi-ryu karate to the United States, he worries short-term courses provide a "false sense of security" because students simply can't master their emotions without rigorous training.
Mattson said, "Someone's success in self-defense also depends on their ability to control their fear, anger and anxieties as their physical capabilities. The world is full of examples of talented people who choke, or seize up, at vital times. My concern about quick programs is they're very misleading. They tend to create a false sense of security. They train in the relative comfort of a studio. But, when you take the fight to the street - bang."
Mattson added, "If this was quick or easy, I still wouldn't have a teacher after 40 years."
When eighth degree black belt Mark Grupposo shows Nancy Mandile how to defend herself, everything goes out the window - but survival."Go for the vital areas," said the tall, sturdy Grupposo, president of Vilari's Self-Defense Center in Natick. "Inflict the most pain in the shortest amount of time."
He is also president of Threat Deterrent Associates, which offers a series of half-day workshops designed to help a company's employees react to threats or defuse potentially violent situation.
Like many other martial artists who teach self-defense, he emphasized a boiled down curriculum of maximum mayhem - but only if "avoidance" and "flight" don't work.
"Avoidance is always the first and best line of defense. But if you must respond, there should be no halfway measures. Err on the side of being overly aggressive."
He tells Mandile that "fighting to stop fighting" is her "third option" only if evasion and "less-than-lethal" means, like pepper spray, fail to deter an aggressor.
Grupposo explained that typically a woman will have just seconds, or less, to decide "Do I run or do I engage."
"You have to establish your personal boundaries," Grupposo explained. "But if there's no choice, deal appropriately with the level of intrusion."
Citing the case of a couple shot to death by strangers who hijacked their car and drove them to a golf course, he said, "We do not advocate compliance."
And with 30 years martial arts training, Grupposo advocates basic, brutally-effective techniques that will incapacitate a mugger - or stun him enough to permit flight - that aren't for the faint of heart.
At the North Main Street studio, Grupposo coaches Mandile as she responds to a series of "attacks" by black-belt instructor Jeff Silvetti, a muscular 180-pounder.
If assaulted face-to-face, Grupposo advised Mandile to employ "the claw," in which she stiffens her fingers and gouges her attacker's eyes to "blind and distract" him.
If an attacker approaches from the rear and wraps an arm around her neck, Grupposo instructed Mandile to elbow him in the stomach and then grab his testicles, and "squeeze and twist until he lets go."
"The attacker isn't counting on resistance," he tells her. "Be good (enough to stun him) or be gone."
Asked if she could react so violently to an attack, Mandile replied, "Absolutely."
"But I don't think I could've before learning self-defense," she said.
Grupposo cautions her not to strike with a closed hand because she's likely to break her knuckles on his head. Instead he advises her to use her forearms or elbows to crush the soft cartilage of his nose.
Grupposo acknowledges due to years of social conditioning that emphasize women's softer "feminine nature," many women are initially reluctant to deliver painful blows or crippling kicks
Grasping a key ring in his fist with an inch-long metal key protruding from between his fingers, Grupposo demonstrates how to jab it into an attacker's eye, ear or throat.
"Everything and anything is a possible self-defense weapon. A key, a shoe, a rock," he said. "The only dirty fight is the one you lose."
