By: Jared Stranberg
Unfortunately, the prevalence of on-campus violence across the nation is high. The National Sexual Violence Resource Center (NSVRC) reports that roughly 20-25 percent of women and 15 percent of men attending college are victims of rape while at college.http:// https://www.nsvrc.org/statistics
In addition to campus security and violence prevention programs, University of Nebraska at Omaha offers another option to help students feel safer here on campus. On Friday, UNO hosted two instructors from the Four Horsemen Security to teach basic self-defense in the martial arts room at the Health and Kinesiology building on campus.
“We are teaching the classics of self-defense. We want to teach [the students] how to realize that they aren’t the victim. The assailant wants them to be the victim, but they have the power and strength to control the situation and get away without getting hurt,” said instructor Anthony Benes.
Throughout the class, Benes and his co-instructor Lacee Gerweck went through various techniques of disabling your attacker and getting away safely. Since Gerweck and Benes work in Douglas County Corrections, Gerweck highlighted a distinction between how they fight and what they teach the students.
“We use the same tactics, but we fight, stay and wait until backup arrives. Here you are fighting to get away,” Gerweck said.
Four Horsemen started with Gerweck and a few other women who wanted to market self-defense towards women, as they viewed it as paramount that women are taught self-defense so that they don’t have to be the victim. As they got busier, they decided to pick up some male instructors and expand their audience to everybody. The goal now is to give anybody the confidence to fight back against their would-be assaulter. This expansion does not devalue the original importance of teaching women self-defense.
Gerweck also wanted to encourage women to not be afraid of hurting their attackers.
“The thing is what [the assailant] is going to be doing to you will be a million times worse so who cares what it does or how bad it hurts them. These people are awful, I’m around them every day and they don’t feel bad for what they do,” Gerweck said.
Benes agrees about the importance of women learning self-defense, as he has a family member who was assaulted in college and he sees the type of people who commit these crimes at work.
“My point of view working in a jail, we see predators every day, and predators like to gloat about their successes. This class is to show [women] they aren’t the victims in these situations, and a lot of times we can turn the predator into the prey,” said Benes.
