Around 3 p.m. on Saturday, the wrestling room in Fetzer Hall hosted a group of 30 women who were eager to learn about self-defense through a free seminar led by the UNC Police and a local martial arts school, Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Durham.
The energy was fun and friendly as attendees jokingly roughhoused on the Carolina Blue wrestling mats, and strangers introduced themselves to one another. However, underlying this lightheartedness was an acknowledgement of why the seminar needed to be held in the first place.
“I am a runner and people like to yell at me from cars, and that’s kind of freaky,” Maddie Sparrow, a sophomore environmental science major, said. Sparrow said that she attended the seminar at the suggestion of her dad, who feels nervous because she often runs alone.
This feeling is not only limited to Sparrow. According to a 2023 Gallup poll, 50 percent of women are afraid of walking alone at night, compared to just 26 percent of men. In addition, as of April 18 of this year, women were the victims in 90 percent of the 24 recorded domestic violence-related homicide cases in North Carolina.
Although not all attendees were there for the same reason, they gained new, useful skills in this class. Sophomore Ella Hawn, Sparrow's friend and women's and gender studies major, said that she primarily attended so that Sparrow didn’t have to go alone, but it also sounded like a cool class to come to and learn new things.
Once the instructors checked everyone in, the participants gathered in a circle for an introduction.
Nancy Thomas, an instructor at Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Durham, laid out the structure of the seminar, which was centered around the typical four phases of an attack: identify an unsuspecting target, subdue and isolate the target, control and exhaust the target and carry out the assault.
Each jiu-jitsu move taught in the seminar was presented in the context of a hypothetical situation that women may find themselves in, based on the attack strategy.
First, participants learned how to safely stand up when a potential attacker is approaching, by positioning themselves perpendicular to the perpetrator in a wide stance to create a strong base.
