Dale Boyer, assistant director of Campus Security, led a Rape Aggression Defense Systems (RAD) program at Elizabethtown College on Oct. 25 and 26. Founded in 1989 by Lawrence N. Nadeau and Sheri Iachetta, RAD established an accessible, constantly improving and nationally respected program to educate women, children, seniors and men about violence and assault.
RAD instructors work to help society eradicate violence as an accepted part of daily life and to develop self-defense education and options for those who experience violence and harassment. It is the largest women’s self-defense program in the world.
RAD’s main goal is to empower women. The program combines two schools of thought: learning martial arts and how to fight back and not fighting back so as not to make the assault worse, but reporting it later. “Neither one is realistic as an interpretation,” Boyer said. “Nadeau blended both.” In RAD, there is not time to teach students to master martial arts, but they should have more options that to comply with their attackers. “What we want is to give you the option to fight back should you choose to,” Boyer said.
RAD offers several different types of classes, ranging from RAD Basic, a physical defense program for women and RAD Advanced, which expands that physical defense, to RAD Men, which teaches defense to men at risk of assault. There are also RAD programs for children and seniors which focus on other types of risks. The children’s program teaches them how to recognize abductive behavior like forbidding them from leaving an area or luring them away from their parents or guardians. For seniors, the focus is on recognizing dangerous situations or situations in which someone is trying to take advantage of them.
Boyer has been certified and teaching RAD classes since 1995, and said that the primary groups involved in the program are those likely to be at risk of assault. This is why the RAD Basic class is open only to women. Boyer said that it is more realistic to teach women about assault in environments exclusive to women. There are several reasons for this. The chance of there being assault survivors in a class is quite high, so it avoids the risk of triggering someone’s trauma if the class is only open to women. The class is also more realistic and safer to pair women with other women when practicing self-defense techniques. In the worst case scenario, RAD instructors want to avoid the chance that potential attackers might sit in on a class to learn their techniques.
However, instructors understand that women are not the only group at risk of violence, which is why they have implemented other programs over the years.
The class taught at Etown this weekend was RAD Basic. The three class segments focused on three different parts of defense. Part one on Friday night took place in a classroom setting and covered reduction strategies: safety in the home, safety while traveling or dating, weapon defense, reporting sexual assault and what is involved in evidence collection.
For part two, physical defense was covered. Instructors focused on teaching students to effectively use their bodies against their attacker’s vulnerabilities. They teach easy-to-learn techniques so that students can become proficient easily and quickly.
In part three, the instructors reviewed what they had gone over in the previous two sessions and held a controlled situation in which students could practice the techniques they had learned against a simulated attacker. Boyer said that the opportunity to learn in a realistic but safe environment is extremely important. “Society portrays women as the weak victims, and the class shows you how to protect yourself,” Boyer said. “Empowerment is the key word there. It’s scary but it’s very, very empowering.”
Because of the nature of the class, instructors go through extensive training programs before they are certified. Instructor training consists of an intense 30 hour program involving all aspects of the RAD educational technique and is highly selective. “We take our accreditation very seriously,” Boyer said. RAD takes all of its educational policies just as seriously. The classes here at Etown are free, but all RAD classes are intended to be affordable for the average person and have a lifetime return policy. This means that once someone attends one class, as long as they keep their signed and authorized instructional manual, they can use that manual as a free pass to subsequent classes anywhere and at any time.
Boyer said he tries to make sure the classes work with student schedules, but life is worth just as much as classes are. “Your life is worth 12 hours to learn skills and information that could possibly save your life,” he said.
