David Singleton

Perhaps not all centers would share this analysis, but encouraging women to talk about the pain and trauma of violence is in itself a revolutionary project. Fighting to change blame-the-victim attitudes and helping women battle the medical and legal-justice systems were radical ideas when rape crisis centers came into being, and these continue to be the day-to-day, invaluable services the centers provide. However, as an individual counselor struggling through the daily pain of helping survivors to heal, I felt we had a parallel mission: to generate social change, to limit or stop sexual violence altogether. And we fought for this change, as I said, by educating, by exposing the reality of injustice and inequality.

But we were stuck within the confines of the very system we were seeking to change. We accepted, perhaps too uncritically, the notion of women as power-less victims. For to say that we could fight back, that we could take power and not let ourselves be victims, seemed to suggest that we were also responsible when we did not fight back, or could not get away. I stumbled over that one, and there was an uncomfortable silence around these questions at the rape crisis centre.

I wanted to teach self-defense almost from the beginning of my work at the rape crisis centre, though I never really thought about why. I had not yet come to believe that counseling and prevention services should operate in tandem. I had not yet noticed that one of the best ways to dispel the ever-present bum-out of crisis counselors is to have them work alongside those who teach assault prevention, and I had not yet seen that an assault prevention course can be an important part of the healing process. I now envision an anti-violence movement in which these services are inseparable, where counselors and self-defense instructors work in shared facilities, taking coffee breaks together, learning from each other.