Potential attackers, muggers, and ne’er-do-wells, beware: the women of Georgetown are about to take matters into their own hands. Last week, Director of Public Safety Jeffrey Van Slyke announced that, beginning this semester, Georgetown will offer classes in Rape Aggression Defense Systems (RADS) to interested female students. RADS, the preeminent self-defense program in the country, has been taught to over 300,000 women since the organization was founded in 1989 and is offered at schools across the country, as well as at nearby universities such as Catholic University, George Mason, and Johns Hopkins. Female students at Georgetown should take advantage of RADS classes offered at Georgetown as a means of protecting themselves against potential threats and taking control of their personal safety.
This isn’t to say that RADS will eliminate the responsibilities of the Department of Public Safety. However, recent events, from the shocking sexual assault in LXR last spring to the incident just last week in which a man got into bed with a female student in Burleith, have demonstrated that, no matter how many DPS officers are patrolling campus, women at Georgetown need to be able to defend themselves.
RADS goes beyond methods of physical self-defense, though these are a major part of the curriculum. The program, which includes lectures and discussions in addition to live defense training, also instructs women in risk reduction, awareness, avoidance, and recognition so that physical engagement is a last resort only. RADS teaches tactics tailored to different situations, from what to do when a guy puts an unwelcome arm around you at a bar to how to protect yourself from attackers when you’re walking home alone at night. The all-female environment (excluding some male instructors) is critical to the program’s success, too, ensuring a comfortable and open atmosphere for all participants.
RADS isn’t a meager time commitment—the full program, including simulation training, takes 12 hours, a significant chunk of time for college students busy with classes, extracurriculars, internships, and jobs. But after the first session, said Don Challis, the Chief of Police at the College of William and Mary and a long-time RADS instructor, participants are hooked. “They’re amazed at the power they have,” he said.
DPS has yet to announce the times or dates when the RADS sessions will be offered at Georgetown. Hopefully, female students, from freshmen to seniors, will take full advantage of the program because, no matter what promising new initiatives DPS has up its sleeve, the world’s not getting any safer.
