April 2010
San Francisco State University Personal Defense Class Campus Safety Video produced by Damon Fong, SFSU student for Dr. Judith Fein’s Personal Defense Class

January 2010

PRESS DEMOCRAT
Published: Sunday, January 31, 2010 at 4:05 p.m.

By CHRIS SMITH

Sebastopol pair collaborate on “Breaking The Intimidation Game–The Art of Self-Defense”‘

Usually when Sebastopol’s Judith Fein and Nancy Worthington are at work, each does her own thing.  Fein teaches. An innovator in the field of self-defense, the former Army captain leads classes and workshops that train people — most often, women — to unleash their rage at any would-be assailant and, if the attack persists, to fiercely fight back.Worthington is an internationally known artist whose works include kinetic
sculptures that are whimsical but sometimes sufficiently political to get them banished from museums and exhibits. The partners always have critiqued and encouraged each other’s professional endeavors. Now they’ve created something together. “This is a total collaboration,” Fein said of their shared project.

It’s a book.  Fein wrote it as a culmination of her 35 years of research into rape avoidance and resistance, and Worthington illustrated it with images of compatible and complementary drawings, collages, mixed-media reliefs and sculptures that draw from her nearly 40-year career.  The pair view their book, “Breaking the Intimidation Game: The Art of Self-Defense,” as their collective magnum opus. If it succeeds, the art-enhanced treatise will inspire women to train to be always vigilant about their safety and prepared to drive off or, if necessary, immobilize any attacker who mistakenly identifies them as likely to be intimidated.

“This is my fourth book, and I feel it’s the best,” said Fein, who teaches self-defense  workshops Santa Rosa’s Finley Community Center and classes at  San Francisco City College and San Francisco State University. She was instructor for 10 years at Sonoma State University.   www.torrancepublishingcompany.com

The central premise of the book www.torrancepublishingcompany.com is that if a potential rapist or attacker targets a woman, the outcome will depend on who intimidates whom.
“An assailant generally doesn’t randomly approach anyone and decide to attack him or her,” Fein wrote. “He will approach someone he thinks will make a good victim — someone he considers vulnerable and not likely to fight back.”
She teaches that the best defense to a possible attack by a stranger is to be constantly aware of your surroundings and prepared to act if you sense that someone poses a threat.
“You walk with confidence and self-assurance,” she wrote. “If you notice someone attempting to target you, or if your gut feeling tells you the situation is dangerous, you need to magnify your level of awareness. You send out don’t-mess-with-me signals.”
Fein urges women to practice using their voices and rage to project a “force-field of fury” capable of dispelling any notion that they are easy prey. Should the attack continue, she tells women to strike — hard — at the most vulnerable parts of the assailant’s body: The eyes, nose, Adam’s apple, groin and knees.
Fein believes it’s essential for women to practice how they will respond should they be attacked or come to sense that a stranger is preparing to try something.

At the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office, Capt. Matt McCaffrey agreed. “If you haven’t trained to do it,” he said, “when you get into a stressful situation you’re not able to do it, or you don’t do it well or you’re going to freeze up.” “Under stress, training kicks in,” the veteran lawman said. Like Fein, McCaffrey believes a woman’s best defense against a stranger attack is to carry herself with confidence, look people in the eye and honor a sense that someone may mean her harm. “If the hairs are going up on the back of your neck, they’re going up on the back of your neck for a reason” he said. He believes everyone should think about how they would respond should someone select them as a potential victim. Would it be worth the risk to fight someone who wants to steal your car or wallet? And McCaffrey agrees with Fein’s premise that in the event of an attack by someone whose intent is to rape or otherwise harm a woman, it’s a distinct advantage for her to have been trained to strike back and immobilize the assailant long enough for her to get away.

Worthington brought to the book project the color plates of 10 pieces of her art that she and Fein chose to illustrate each chapter.
Worthington, who was pursuing her masters in fine arts at Pennsylvania State University when she met post-doctoral student Fein there in 1973, said she has always aspired to the make the world a better place with her art.
“I’m not quite as idealistic as I used to be,” she said. “But I still think art can make a positive difference.”

With this new corroboration, she’s hoping her art will help prompt women to become prepared to summons their rage and power at the moment they need it most.

January 2010

TORRANCE PUBLISHING PROUDLY ANNOUNCES THE PUBLICATION OF OUR NEW BOOK,

“Breaking The Intimidation Game–The Art of Self-Defense”
by Judith Fein, Ph.D.

Link to Breaking The Intimidation Game

January 2010

YouTube Video, “Breaking The Intimidation Game”, CCSF and SFSU self-defense classes

PRESS DEMOCRAT ARTICLE

By JUDITH FEIN
Published: Friday, May 15, 2009

CLOSE TO HOME: Has the last rapist been arrested?
Don’t count on it!

Now that police have arrested a suspect in connection with the string of roadside attacks, women in Sonoma County can surely take a collective sigh of relief. Not!

The “last” rapist has been arrested. You are now safe to walk the streets after dark, to jog in the park, and to drive to your book club on a rural road. Not!

The only way you will ever be safe is when you learn to take care of yourself. No one else can protect you but you.

Mary drove home from the JC. The hour was late and she was tired. She pulled up in front of her home, walked to the back of her car, opened the trunk and started to remove some equipment. Suddenly, she was pushed from behind and started to fall head-first into the trunk.

Under similar circumstances, you may have seen the next day’s Press Democrat: “Woman shoved into trunk, kidnapped and raped!”

Mary, however, was trained in self-defense. Although she could have prevented the incident by being aware, she needed to respond to the attack. Mary stayed calm, grabbed her tear gas canister from her belt, and reached over her shoulder, yelled and fired the canister. Two men ran off screaming!

Self-defense training is survival training. You learn how to effectively respond to a crisis situation. You learn what works, what doesn’t and why. All attackers follow the same pattern — target, test, attack.

First they find a vulnerable victim — usually someone who is unaware. Second. they approach the potential victim to see if she can be intimidated. This is called the intimidation test. The psychology of self-defense is the psychology of intimidation. Whoever wins the battle for intimidation wins!

If the victim becomes intimidated, the assailant wins and can do anything he likes to his victim. If the potential victim refuses to be intimidated and in turn intimidates the attacker, she wins. She has either scared him off or has physically incapacitated him.

Either way, she has successfully resisted and fought back. These rape-resistance strategies have been confirmed by research conducted over the past 30 years. We learn what strategies are most effective and which strategies are ineffective.

I teach people how to fight back and win. In my classes and workshops, participants learn assault prevention, learn hands-on effective physical skills, which are essential for resisting assault, and learn the psychological skills of intimidation by participating in active drills and role-playing.

You can learn these skills though the powerful low-cost three-hour “Streetwise and Bodysafe” workshops which I conduct through Santa Rosa Recreation and Parks at the Finley Community Center.

(For information, go to www.worthingtonfeinselfprotection.com).

Learn to protect yourself. Fight back and win.

Judith Fein is director of EVOLVE Institute for Violence Prevention. She is a nationally respected self-defense expert, black belt in Korean karate and author of three books on self-defense.

Instructor uses power to empower
By LORI A. CARTER
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT
Article published – Nov 6, 2006

Judith Fein instructs a self-defense class last month in Santa Rosa. JEFF KAN LEE / The Press Democrat

At barely 5 feet tall, Judith Fein doesn’t look like she could intimidate anyone. But, boy, can she.The petite, curly-haired Fein, 64, is a former Army sharpshooter. She holds a black belt in tae kwon do and has taught self-defense techniques for the past 32 years.With three books to her credit, Fein teaches her students that 85 percent of self-defense is psychological.

“Whoever wins the battle for intimidation wins,” she said. “I teach how to get the assailant to leave, or if not, how to leave him in a crumpled heap on the ground.”In her self-defense classes at Santa Rosa Junior College and the Finley Community Center, Fein weaves hands-on self-protection skills with assault prevention techniques gleaned through years of research.

Students tend to be women, but men and families come, too.
Fein began teaching self-defense in the mid-1970s after she realized that of all the classes available, none was geared toward women.

A college instructor in San Francisco, she has a black belt in the Korean form of karate – a distinction she earned by fighting a male tae kwon do expert in Korea.Despite her martial arts skills, Fein said she was one of the first to begin teaching the “psychology of fighting back.”

“I love it. I get chills when I hear the success stories,” she said. “I have the knowledge, the credentials and the power to empower people – especially women – to protect themselves.”
In addition to leading community self-defense classes, Fein also teaches tennis at San Francisco State University and San Francisco City College.After growing up in New York, Fein moved to San Francisco to teach.She spent summers along the Russian River and eventually decided to make Sonoma County her full-time home, buying a house about 15 years ago.

“I always wanted to live in the country,” she said. With her martial arts background, teaching self-defense came naturally to Fein, but she never set out to write books.
A San Francisco Examiner article on one of her classes in the 1980s sparked a publisher’s interest, she said.Fein has a fourth self-defense book in the works, and is trying her hand at writing a novel for the first time.

She also is the director of EVOLVE Institute for Violence Prevention in Sebastopol, a nonprofit violence-prevention program.She teaches prevention first in her self-defense classes.  Because most in-home attackers come in through an unlocked door or window, Fein advises planting thorny blackberry bushes underneath accessible windows.
On the street, sidewalk, jogging path or at the mall, she says, pay attention your surroundings.

“Assailants are looking for a victim or prey,” she said. “They don’t generally randomly pick people; they target people who are not aware.”Get off the cell phone, she said. Turn down the iPod. Don’t be distracted.Once assailants target a victim, Fein said, they do an “intimidation test” to check if a potential victim can be bullied.

At least half the success stories she hears from former students are won at this crucial psychological point, she said.”Most women have been socialized to freeze when threatened,” she said. “A victim feels they have no other options. You’re powerful when you know you have options.”If a confrontation does becomes physical, Fein said, it’s not a lost cause. A small, physically weaker woman can still fight off a larger, more powerful male attacker.

Take Fein’s example: She once fended off six male attackers at an art show in San Francisco.
While she was taking pictures in what she thought was a safe environment, she said six thugs surrounded her and tried to steal her photo equipment.”I immediately got into this rage response,” she said. “I was furious, I yelled, I kicked at them. I sent out a force field of fury.”

In her classes, students practice simple, effective moves to stun or incapacitate an assailant. She recommends punching a male attacker in his Adam’s apple, kicking a kneecap or spraying teargas.

Fein said many of the psychological and preventative techniques she teaches can help avoid sexual harassment and bullying in work or school.”If I can do it, anyone can,” she said. “It’s not about age. It’s not about size. It’s not about weight. It’s all attitude.“