Medicine Hat Judo Club hosting self defence classes

By JAMES TUBB on August 30, 2022.

jtubb@medicinehatnews.com@ReporterTubb

The Medicine Hat Judo club wants to help women find the ability to earn more confidence in setting and enforcing boundaries through a course of self defence classes.

Judo club president Donovan Hoggan said this is something he has wanted to do for years and started up in 2019 before it was shut down in 2020 due to COVID-19.

He said women have to worry about the dangers of their communities every day and he wants to help them gain confidence in setting boundaries.

“The reality is, 82 per cent of attacks come from people the victim knows,” Hoggan said. “So the danger isn’t the bad guy jumping out of the bushes, the danger is the person they know who keeps progressively over time, invading their boundaries. So their self defence begins that, ‘Hey, dude, you’re in my bubble, back up,’ and that’s what we want to help people do.”

Hoggan, who will be coaching the course alongside Alanna Young, said one of the reasons women have cited for not setting boundaries is being afraid of the man’s response, and this course can help teach them to defend themselves.

“It’s like teaching somebody to surf who doesn’t know how to swim, you have to take a risk, you have to stand up on that board. But if you don’t know how to swim, and it goes wrong, you’re going to drown,” Hoggan said. “With self defence, what we’re trying to do is give students tools, so that if it does go wrong, they know that, yeah, I can handle most situations.”

Hoggan added self defence is a stop-gap measure, and the real solution to the issue of sexual assault is to get perpetrators to stop committing sexual assault to begin with.

“We try to look way beyond just the physical techniques, to the psychological part and then the societal part,” Hoggan said.

The course is set to start up Sept. 20 and run until Dec. 6. It costs $125 with subsidies available. Any women interested can reach out via email at info@medhatjudo.com or over the phone, 403-580-6666.

A cool element of the course, Hoggan says, is the “bad guys” will be judo students who are trained at falling down so the course students won’t need to hold back while training.

“In a lot of programs, when you do anything, you have to hold back so you don’t hurt your training partner. In this one, on just about all techniques, you go full force,” Hoggan said.

He said it will also provide his judo students a learning experience of what women go through on a day-to-day basis for their own safety.

“There’s a great story about a university prof who says, ‘Guys only, I don’t want to hear from the women, what do you do day-to-day to keep from being sexually assaulted?’ The guys kind of look strangely at each other for a minute and say, I don’t know, don’t go to prison like, nothing, really. Then he says, ‘all right, all the women in the class, what do you do to keep from getting sexually assaulted? They start listing off all sorts of different strategies they use every day to protect themselves,” Hoggan said. “It’s that day-to-day fear that we’re hoping to address.”

15
-14