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Fight like a girl
Taught by women, exclusively for women, SASS Defense teaches students how to use their natural strengths against an attacker’s weaknesses. SASS director of education Brett Brown (right) takes her clients step by step through defensive techniques against common assault scenarios. To learn more, visit sassdefense.com or call (754) 900-7277.
Photo credit: Andrew Haworth
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Battle cry
In SASS class, “No!” is the roaring soundtrack to every evasive move and every physical strike.
“This is our battle cry,” SASS Defense CEO Shannon Henry explains. Not only does it alert bystanders, it also releases nitric oxide, helping the body prepare to fight.
Photo Credit: Mic Smith
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Words to live by
Student Terry Hutto, now known as Gammie Ninja to her proud grandsons, models a T-shirt with the organization’s slogan. SASS Defense offers training to women and girls of all ages, teaching them the awareness skills to avoid trouble, and the confidence and fighting skills to prevail if trouble comes.
Photo Credit: Andrew Haworth
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A force to be reckoned with
Brett Brown, director of education, Meghan Jacocks, operations director, and Sass Defense CEO Shannon Henry share a common goal to teach women to defend themselves with assertive confidence. SASS instructors must be “a mix of Wonder Woman and Mother Teresa,” says Henry. “Our goal is to give as many women as we can the tools and the power and the education to defend themselves. And it is a force to be reckoned with.”
Photo credit: Andrew Haworth
SASS Defense empowers my core
For the world awaits outside my door.
I’ve got what it takes to preserve outer peace
And I protect what I love with my inner beast.
—From SASS Defense
I feel Terry closing in from behind even before she grabs me. Barely a moment later, her right arm wraps around my neck, pinning me against her, her forearm pressing on my windpipe. It’s hard to breathe; all I can think about is how to break loose. But she has a solid grip on my left arm, daring me to try to move.
My mind scrambles for escape options. What are my strengths? Where are her weaknesses?
It plays out in seconds. I latch my hands around her forearm and swiftly spin my body to break her grip—and possibly, if I didn’t happen to like Terry, her arm as well.
But Terry is my training buddy, so I execute my escape with care, inflicting no damage. Had she been a real assailant—someone intent on harming me—there would be no such mercy.
This is SASS—Surviving Assault Standing Strong. SASS Defense is a training program born in Columbia 21 years ago, now spreading across the country, designed to empower any woman with the skills to protect herself and to escape or fight back against physical assaults.
“There are thousands upon thousands of self-defense programs, but there’s nothing like us,” SASS Defense CEO Shannon Henry says. “Our goal is to give as many women as we can the tools and the power and the education to defend themselves. And it is a force to be reckoned with.”
Girl fight club
Among the first things Henry does with each new class is ask the women to raise a hand if they or someone they know have been victims of assault. Nearly every woman does. It shocks many to see so many hands go up, she says, but comforts those who have felt alone in their fears. Guiding these women through training, instructors must be “a mix of Wonder Woman and Mother Teresa,” Henry says.
“We love them, and we take great care of them with a curriculum we know works for their bodies and minds,” says Henry, who smiles often and exudes the calm demeanor you’d want in your child’s preschool teacher.
At the heart of SASS training is a simple premise: Women’s bodies are different from men’s, with strengths in different areas—mainly, hips and legs. SASS teaches women how to use their strengths against an attacker’s weaknesses. They review common assault scenarios—for example, attacks from the front or behind, choke holds, multiple assailants—as well as tactics attackers use to win their victims’ trust and tips for avoiding dangerous situations.
Mother to three young girls, Melissa Genova of Columbia was inclined to worry about safety, both for her daughters and for herself.
“There are a lot of terrifying stories in the news,” Genova says, referring to media reports of abductions and assaults. “It occurred to me that, if I ever found myself in a situation like that, I wouldn’t know what to do.”
Genova discovered SASS online and has taken three training classes; one was a mother/daughter class with her oldest girl. As a working mom, she found she could fit SASS classes into her schedule and acquire skills to feel confident about protecting herself and her children.
“It’s scary stuff that we learn—hard-core material,” she says. “But it was fun, and it wasn’t intimidating.”
Cleverly named to help students remember how to execute them, many of the moves connect to visual clues about what they look like: the Seven O’Clock, Ghost, Starfish, Ballet/Soldier/Rock Star and Take Him to Church. One University of South Carolina student with SASS training quickly recalled the Seven O’Clock to free herself from a stranger who grabbed her ponytail from behind as she walked across campus. Her elbow striking his nose dropped him to the ground, and she ran to safety, Henry says.
The Fight is one technique with a straightforward name. Exactly as it suggests, The Fight is a series of moves that come into play when an attack is unavoidable, escape is not an option, and the woman will have to put her attacker out of commission to get away. The final strike can leave an attacker unconscious.
“It’s valuable information to have, and it gives you a sense of peace that there’s something tangible you can do,” Genova says.
And, it’s for women only. This is girl fight club; men aren’t allowed, and women are discouraged from sharing what they learn with the men in their lives. Keeping these skills under wraps gives women advantages over would-be assailants—the element of surprise and unexpected resistance.
‘If you train me, I’ll never stop’
So many women have been trained by SASS in the last two decades, its founders can only guess at the total, estimating it in the tens of thousands. No sooner do women finish their training than they are prodding friends, coworkers, daughters, mothers and grandmothers to sign up.
“It spreads by word of mouth, because everybody who gets it wants to share it,” says Henry.
But it started with just one 13-year-old’s assault. Kidnapped, held captive and raped over three days, the young girl managed to escape but was severely traumatized. No counseling seemed capable of drawing her out of the isolated shell she had retreated into. A Columbia pastor, who happened to be a second-degree black belt in judo and goju-ryu, was called in to help.
“And, the idea came to him, what if I could teach her something to show her how powerful she is, and that there are choices and options and ways, and that she’s worth that,” says Brett Brown, the director of education for SASS and the daughter of that pastor. “He said, ‘Can I show you one move that might have helped you get away from him if you’d known it at the time?’” The young girl agreed; one move turned into several, and over time, her confidence, joy and hope were reborn.
A protective father of daughters, the pastor developed a program to teach women to defend themselves and escape threatening situations, basing it largely on Krav Maga, a combat system with unarmed street-fighting techniques used by the Israeli military. His first workshops in 1997 were for young women at his church, including Brown, a high school student at the time. Later, Brown and her father brought the workshops to USC and Columbia College, where SASS training is now offered regularly as a physical education class.
Enter Shannon Henry in 2013. When she discovered that her pastor—Brown’s father—taught self-defense to women, she begged him to teach her. Henry herself is an assault survivor; as a teenager, she was raped by a trusted boyfriend who threatened her with a knife. Many years later, after all the counseling and recovery, she still had nightmares and feared being unable to protect her own daughters.
“I took a class with him, and I loved it!” she recalls. “I felt more powerful than I had ever felt in my life. I found my voice. No gym, no workout, no counseling—I had tried it all—could ever do what happened to me in that class. I wanted more, and I wanted everybody else to have it.
“After that class, I looked him in the eye and said, ‘If you train me to teach others, I’ll never stop.’ And I haven’t.”
Since Henry took the reins of SASS Defense in 2014, it has grown to include 15 instructors, classes that fill to capacity every semester at USC and Columbia College, workshops on campuses across the state, beginner-through-elite courses held at churches and YMCAs, and trainings for women working in Midlands-area law enforcement agencies, including the S.C. National Guard and U.S. Forestry Service. There are satellite programs in North Carolina; Georgia; Washington, D.C.; California and even Senegal, West Africa, where a trained instructor works for the Peace Corps. Starting this summer, SASS Defense is branching out as a pilot program at state colleges and agencies in Utah through the state’s Department of Public Safety.
Battle cry
In a sunny room at the Ballentine Family YMCA, SASS instructor Brett Brown is coaching women in a weekend training class how to execute a defensive maneuver with their hips, channeling the power in their lower bodies. “You know how when you get groceries and your hands are full, you have to shut the car door with your booty?” That’s what Brown wants from them. They get it.
“Good!” Brown praises. “But I want to hear your ‘NO!’ when you do it!”
On paper, “NO!” is silent, even when typed in capital letters with an exclamation point. In SASS class, it is the roaring soundtrack to every evasive move and every physical strike.
“This is our battle cry,” Henry explains. Not only does it alert bystanders, it also releases nitric oxide, helping the body prepare to fight, and the shouting helps prevent a woman from biting her tongue during the confrontation.
Over and over, we practice yelling “NO!” in training until its meaning thunders clear. This is not a polite denial or a mild objection; this is a gut-emptying, throat-shredding “NO!” that defies an assailant’s attack, that rejects self-doubt and fear, that spits in the face of anyone who would attempt to belittle, threaten or overpower us. After our first class, I am so hoarse I can barely speak the next day. But I also own my “NO!”
It’s not easy for everyone, especially survivors of assault.
“One of the biggest things I see in class is how childhood sexual abuse survivors struggle with being able to say their ‘no’s,’” Brown says. “Because they weren’t allowed to say ‘no’ for so long, they physically cannot bring themselves to say it. It can take weeks and weeks, but when they do, whoa! It’s so big! It changes everything about them.”
Two years ago, Elizabeth (this name is an alias to protect her privacy) took her first SASS class; she has taken several more since and plans to continue. At 4 feet, 10 inches, Elizabeth wanted to feel more confident during her frequent solo travels for her job.
“I was tired of being fearful,” the 52-year-old Irmo woman says. “I wondered if I could fight back if I had to.”
In that first class, though, her biggest hurdle was the word “no.” Abused by her father as a child, she says, “I learned early on to not say ‘no.’” In class, she found she “couldn’t say it, couldn’t yell it, couldn’t voice it.”
“I told Shannon I didn’t think I’d ever be able to say ‘no,’” Elizabeth recalls.
Finally, while practicing ground-fighting strategies—pinned to the ground with an “attacker” looming over her—her “no” burst through. She practiced yelling “NO!” while driving her car. Weeks later, she dreamed about repeatedly striking her father in the nose, and soon after, she dreamed of chains falling off her body.
“It was life-changing,” Elizabeth says. “Now, I know I can do that, and I can be heard. It gave me a sense of freedom.”
A former elite gymnast and All-American diver, Lauren Lamendola, too, had to learn to say “no,” because dedicated athletes learn not to question their coaches, she says. Though she was not abused by them, that submissiveness seeped into her personal life.
“I got into a lot of situations in college”—including being verbally and physically abused by a boyfriend—“because I was just doing what I was told,” says Lamendola, 23, a part-time SASS instructor now enrolled at the Medical University of South Carolina.
Lamendola took USC’s SASS class just for the PE credit but soon felt empowered by it. “I kind of got my voice back,” she says. “I saw a change in my confidence in school, in my personal relationships with friends and family, and in my athletic performance. It transformed my entire life, and I want every woman to experience that.”
She teaches SASS classes at USC to give other athletes that same confidence and “show them they can be strong in ways they didn’t know they could.”
Fight, fight, fight
I am supposed to be practicing defensive techniques against an armed assailant with my training partner, Terry Hutto of Lexington. But the plastic toy gun we are using as a prop is giving rise to bad jokes, and we are doing more laughing than fighting.
That’s typical of a SASS class. Until these women put their fight faces on, classes are filled with laughter and encouragement. Henry and her team are often the ones cracking jokes, although they are quite serious about what they teach.
“You will perform like you practice,” Brown cautions. “Your body remembers.” The moves are not pretty choreography; they are an interchangeable set of tools to use as escape options.
“You are never stuck,” Brown preaches. “You fight, you fight, you fight, you fight, you fight.”
Henry drives home the need to understand why and how the moves work. To escape an assailant, it may be necessary to inflict pain that can’t be ignored. “Have you hurt him yet?” she quizzes an eager student who has freed herself from a hold but hasn’t yet neutralized the threat.
Hutto, a 63-year-old grandmother, was concerned about being physically able to handle the class before she signed up. Henry assured her that SASS is for all ages and fitness levels.
“Your bad hip is not going to stop somebody from attacking you,” she says. “You still need to know how to target areas that will cause the most pain for an attacker, regardless of whether or not your hip hurts.”
Hutto’s grandsons now call her “Gammie Ninja,” and she feels more assured of her ability to protect them and herself.
“I’ve always been super aware of my surroundings, but I wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it if something happened,” she says. “But, now I can.”
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Get More
SASS Defense offers beginner, intermediate and elite courses, mother/daughter classes, private group sessions, and training for girls ages 6 to 14. SASS Defense also has a nonprofit component, SASS Go, to help fund training for at-risk and underserved populations who may not be able to afford classes. To learn more, visit sassdefense.com or call (754) 900-7277.
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Start with awareness
SASS Defense teaches participants that being alert to potential threats and aware of surroundings is the first step to safety. These tips offer ways women can protect themselves from harmful situations.
- Avoid going out alone. Traveling with others makes you harder to harm or abduct. You have witnesses and can look out for each other.
- Stay in lighted areas, near other people, and away from bushes or other areas where an assailant might be screened from view.
- Don’t feel compelled to talk to strangers who approach you. Predators use tactics that make them seem friendly to gain your trust. Question why a stranger is trying to be charming.
- Trust your instincts. If something doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t. Get away as quickly as you can while calling for help, making a scene and running to a lighted area where there are people.
- Even if someone threatens you with a weapon, don’t go with them to a second location. Statistically, the second location is more dangerous.
- If an armed assailant demands your wallet, throw it far away from you and run in the opposite direction.
- Don’t advertise on social media where you are going. Predators may use that information for their own agendas.
- Stay alert to your surroundings at all times. Don’t sit in your parked car to text, and don’t talk on your phone while walking. Scan a parking lot before you walk through it to see if anything looks suspicious.
Go to the settings on your smartphone to set up Emergency SOS on iPhones or the SOS feature on Android devices, which can notify emergency services and your chosen contacts if you are in trouble.