UW-Madison’s Taekwondo Club hosted its third “Fight Like a Girl: Women’s Self Defense Seminar” Sunday at the Southeast Recreational Facility.
More than 90 women attended one of two free 45-minute sessions led by the organization as part of their initiative to make campus a safer place.
For the most part, the women in attendance had no experience in self-defense or Taekwondo, making learning self-defense skills that much more important here on Madison’s 936-acre campus, the members of the organization said.
“Living in a campus this big, having that confidence [is important],” said Sangeetha Shreedaran, a UW-Madison junior who attended the seminar. “If you’re walking home late from the library you never know what could happen.”
The seminar included demonstrations of various Taekwondo self-defense techniques and an opportunity for the women attending to practice the skills they were taught. These included basic strikes, defense from various grabs and some ways of equalizing height and strength advantages, which were taught by James Irwin, the coach and head instructor of the Taekwondo Club.
“When I’m talking about self-defense, I like to emphasize the two ‘S's: smarts and sprinting. So smarts?avoid situations in which you’d need to use self-defense, and sprinting?run away,” Irwin said.
While the goal of the event was to spread self-defense skills, the seminar is mutually beneficial, according to Irwin.
“It’s a really nice thing that a club can do to give back to the community,” Irwin said. “It’s a lot of fun, and it’s a nice way to get the word out about what we do.”
Emma Watson, a first-year graduate student at UW-Madison and president of the Taekwondo Club, has a more personal reason for why teaching self-defense is important.
“As a woman on campus, [violence] is obviously something that I get emails about,” Watson said. “These are my colleagues I go to school with, and terrible things are happening to them. If there’s anything we can do to help even a few people get out of that situation, then we did our job.”
After another successfully run seminar, Watson says that the club will host another one, either in the spring semester or next fall.
