The Benefits of Self Defense Training for Pakistani Woman

In 2018, Pakistan was ranked the 6th most dangerous country for woman, and incidences of violence against woman are reportedly on the rise. In this climate of violence, what can women do to help protect themselves?

In a recent preprint, “Perception about Self Defense and Woman Training for Self Protection” posted on Advance: A SAGE preprints community, authors Faiza Parveen, Adeela Rehman, Naimatullah Hashmi and Uzma Arshad Mughal discuss how teaching Pakistani woman self-defense may have a positive impact on their ability to defend themselves against assault. They found that the benefits of self-defense training extend beyond just teaching women how to physically fight off an attack. Self-defense training also helps to mentally prepare a woman against an attack by helping to empower her and increase her confidence and self-efficacy. It also helps teach women how to avoid potentially dangerous situations.

For those who are not familiar, preprints are early versions of research posted to an open access repository ahead of peer review. Though preprints are not peer reviewed, we encourage you to share your thoughts and comments directly on the paper on Advance.

The authors conducted a study of 120 women, looking at the difference in self-defense strategies, and the perception of effective defense strategies, between women who received self-defense training and those who did not. The study’s main objective was to compare “strategies which self-defense trained and untrained girls used…for their self-protection in order to reduce the risk of violence.”

Image by klimkin from Pixabay

I talked with lead author Faiza Parveen and she reflected on her recent preprint and what motivated her to undertake this study.

The paper was the result of research Ms. Parveen did during her Master’s thesis when she observed how women were “facing domestic violence, honor killing, sexual harassment in public places and in work” as a result of a heavily patriarchal society. This led her to discover self-defense training as a strategy to teach women to protect themselves, both mentally and physically, from an assault.

As she interviewed women for the study, she heard over and over again how self-defense training helped teach women to identify potentially dangerous situations and made them feel better able to protect themselves should they be assaulted. Some also noted that the training even gave them the confidence to move through society more freely, rather than forever relying on the protection of a brother or male partner.

While this is an early study, Ms. Parveen hopes that in future there may be mixed method studies done with larger sample sizes in order to get more in depth data. She also further hopes that NGOs, governmental organizations and even educational institutions might work to raise the awareness of the benefits of self-defense training and help make training more accessible for all women.