I had a fabulous time with the students and hosts at UTPB!   I want to send a big thank you to Falconpalooza and Student Life for bringing me out to empower their students. Members of the UTPB Crisis Center and 2 uniformed UTPB Police Officers were in attendance as well which was great! I always love it when the campus community comes together to support a common cause and goal.

Instead of having just 2 volunteers I had 4 students ready to step in and help me demonstrate our awesome skills! We got it narrowed down to 2 who did an amazing job pretending to be creepers. We covered the importance of trusting your intuition and being an active ally and we covered why an elbow isn’t a first choice if you’re looking for a vulnerable spot to disable an attacker.   An elbow is a great weapon for us to use against an attacker though!

I fielded a lot of great questions during Q&A including several students who were interested in taking Full Contact Self-Defense classes. One student even commented that since their area is primarily oil infrastructure, a male dominated industry, that there unfortunately are many reports of sexual assaults happening. She emphasized the importance of self-defense training and I chimed in that in addition to self-defense we all need to look out for each other and challenge the rape culture so that we can chip away at the very core of why sexual assaults happen in the first place.

I hope to come back to UTPB soon and teach even more students how they can be their own best protector and live their lives fearlessly with no apologies!

Cheers,

GFB Nicole

Our friend Rachael fought back this weekend and is sharing her story to instill some serious badassery in all of us. Rachael’s experience is one that no one should ever have to go through, but when she did suddenly find herself in a potentially life-threatening situation, she acted on her instincts and fought back with everything she had because Rachael knows that she is worth fighting for.

We are so happy to hear that your warrior spirit kept you safe, Rachael! Thank you for sharing your story (full story below).

“Last night at around 10pm I was assaulted in Logan Square, on a cute little side street off Milwaukee. I am telling Facebook about it because I think there are things to be learned from my experience, and I don’t know how else to tell a large number of people I care about. I don’t think this says anything bad about my neighborhood, I think this could have happened anywhere.

I was walking alone to a friend’s house, with headphones on. Someone grabbed me from behind, showed me his gun, and started walking me to his car, saying if I knew what was good for me that I would get in. Once I processed that I wasn’t just being mugged, I started to fight back. I screamed HELP I’M BEING ASSAULTED as loud as I possibly could. He started hitting me on the head with his gun and I fell to the ground. People started to yell back and ask if I was OK- the guy yelled “This is my girlfriend”- and I screamed “No I am not” (as if being his girlfriend would change this scenario?) The whole time I was thinking about what my friend Morgan had taught me just a few weeks earlier through a program she works for called Girls Fight Back—that these are crimes of opportunity and they aren’t expecting a fight. I screamed and struggled as he stood over me and continued to hit me and tried to silence me until I got a solid shot and kicked him in the balls with my 2″ stacked heel boots– which gave me a chance to get up and run across the street as he fell back. By that time enough neighbors had come out of their homes that he sped away with my purse.

Ladies- be alert and be fierce, you are stronger than you think you are. The police were adamant that you should never let someone relocate you, that it’s worth the fight.
Everyone else- if you hear something or see something that’s not right, don’t shy away. I am so grateful for those neighbors who came out of their homes and let me in.

Special shout out to Alanis Morissette—I truly believe that listening to “You Oughta Know” moments before this happened unleashed a special kind of femme rage in me that helped me fight back (despite the fact that headphones on probably made me a target—duly noted).” – Rachael

-GFB Morgan