Liberia: Self-Defense

By Lilian L. Best

The 16 Days of Activism are now well underway! Kicking off Tuesday, November 25th, the campaign runs until December 10. Late last month, I googled this year’s theme, and appreciated its tech-forward tenor — “UNiTE to End Digital Violence Against all Women and Girls.” I found it fresh and culturally relevant on a global scale. Yet, I expected the campaign’s format to remain the same. More marching, speaking, tweeting, and chanting, but little change. This time next year, when a new theme is announced, I’ll determine if I was wrong.

I found the digital bullying focus ironic. This segment of Gender Based Violence (GBV) arguably matters the least in a country like Liberia, where the network is still shaky and narrow in national reach. Yes, the theme is important. Yes, policy and legislation around cyber misogyny are long overdue. But they will mean nothing if we don’t deal decisively with the physical abuse of male power. The kind that kills, maims, and spreads diseases. The kind you can’t press a button or change settings to turn off. The kind no coding skills can scrub from human memory.

Men respect and respond to physical power

In our microscopic Liberian society, where cyberbullies can’t hide for long, it is easier to root out that digital scourge with present justice — swift, ruthless, and consistent. But, to my knowledge, the cyberbullies caught in this country still have their jobs and have paid not the smallest fine — let alone one large enough to teach them a lesson.

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As a result, the risk of future online violence persists and slowly grows. But those risks are remote and no match for the brute force too many women face in their own homes.

Women, too, demand violence.

Being a woman is a dangerous enterprise. Throughout our lives, we face perils from nearly every aspect of our environment, including and especially from our male counterparts. But we live in the same environment as men. But boys learn to fight early and are expected to. Meanwhile, our mothers say it is unladylike for a woman to defend herself physically. Instead, we learn to rely on intuition and intelligence, femininity and sexuality to manufacture safety. Sometimes it works; but, statistically, not for long.

And yet, the male propensity to fight, in and of itself, has never been a problem for women. In fact, it is our love language. We respect a man who is willing and able to defend us and himself. We disrespect and distrust those who cannot or will not. And we are socialized to rely on men, not ourselves, to insure our physical liability.

Feeding this dependence is the widespread belief that men are insurmountable anyway. Except perhaps in bed. And in the kitchen, where the frying pan hangs ready to be swung with hot oil or blunt force to the head. In every other setting, we feel ourselves tactically inferior to them and think it futile to learn to beat men at their own violent game. Instead, we have left ourselves at the mercy of male friends and enemies alike.

Such dependency is inefficient, at best. At worst, it is a death sentence.

Size doesn’t matter.

If women and men respect physical power equally, then women’s pervasive physical weakness and failure to mitigate it possibly creates our inferior standing in society. If we cannot stand toe to toe with men, we cannot respect ourselves as their equals. Nor can they respect us as such. I may be wrong, but we must at least test that theory. Women have leveled nearly every other playing field; perhaps this is the last frontier, although it should have been the first.

Of course, no woman, however strong, could ever beat every man in a fight. But that is also true for men. The strongest among them have heaved over the ropes, once and again. But still, they know it rarely matters who wins or loses a fight. That the ‘loser’ fought back skillfully is often deterrent enough to a rematch. In fact, it raises his profile as a worthy opponent to the winner.

And then there is the power of the underdog in asymmetric warfare. Being the bigger fighter is rarely an advantage. Or, how do men put it, when they feel somehow unfortunate? “Size doesn’t matter.” What counts is how you use what you’ve got.

What women have is a sharp multitasking weapon between our ears, lethal intuition, a superior risk analysis capacity that keeps our mortality lower than any man’s, lower body strength, and a pain tolerance that men can hardly fathom. Add to that a stone fist, and we would be scared of ourselves.

Learning war is already national policy.

Perhaps we women have robbed ourselves of the outsized agency, confidence, and self respect that come with physical strength and martial competency. In the process, we have missed that dimension of men’s respect shown in the healthy fear they have for one another. But we can catch up if we do the work.

‘Martial’ means ‘of or relating to war.’ And, by now, you must think I’ve gone bonkers and am trying to foment one. I am not. There is no need; we are already in one.

Besides, if you know me, you know I very much prefer bubbles, butterflies, and pink. But you tell me the theft of a little girl’s innocence through rape is not an act of war. She and her mother must be able to defend themselves using every resource at their disposal. It is their right — and the responsibility of the adult, in that scenario, to ensure their safety. And, as with any other right — women’s suffrage and land ownership — the mere legality of a thing is futile if we fail to learn about and exercise it.

So, let’s start now. Self-defense is permissible during an attack, and the aim should be to stop the threat. Mob justice or personal revenge after the fact is illegal, as justice is then in the hands of law enforcement. Teaching men, women, and children the difference is a critical part of public safety education — a missing piece in our national security framework.

Government does not have to undertake this alone. It would boost the economy if private martial arts programs had partnerships with local schools, with some public, private, and donor funding. Mandating self-defense education for all would help promote public safety and end GBV. A skilled and informed public is a protected one, after all.

But let’s set Government aside. We know it will be a while before they act. In the meantime, who are women waiting for to teach us to move in our own interest? Women must learn war by our own initiative. And our girls must learn alongside the boys the art and honor in combat.

Imagine if we pushed the schools we pay for to teach self-defense and martial arts, every year, for everyone. Would bullying persist? Would some surly child test yours, after seeing her flip an opponent over on a judo mat? I think the heavens not!

Losing our religion.

The beauty in a mandatory martial arts education is its impact on the psyche. The philosophy behind each of these arts demands mastery of oneself first, body and soul. Martial arts emphasize the personal responsibility to keep inner and outer peace, and to defend that peace sustainably, when obstructed. That is true personal power, and it is earned through discipline.

But, come Sunday, the preachers in town will teach the truth to rebut my points. “We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities.” “Those who live by the sword will die by the sword.” But how many of them have developed the spiritual competency and credibility to deliver an abusive person from a narcissistic and violent spirit? Meanwhile, male and female pastors alike are telling Gertrude to “just bear it” and respect her abusive husband, then frowning on her choice to divorce that monster. Which one of them would ever tell a President not to retaliate, in the event of an attack on our soil? But, in church, the men are the money. So, let’s leave that one.

The preachers are right about another thing, though. The Bible says to “turn the other cheek.” But it also says to defend others when they are in harm’s way? Would God be pleased if we stood by and watched the defenseless harmed? Is that the message the church wants to continue sending, both by their sermons and silence? Women and children need to be able to defend one another, not just themselves.

We must stand together or alone.

Then, again, we don’t talk enough about women’s complicity in GBV. How many women take their daughters to be cut with another woman’s knife, sit silent as they are beaten, and shush them when they cry rape and accuse a family member? How many mothers have their underage daughters winning the household’s bread on their backs? It’s a hard pill to swallow, that some of our mothers wouldn’t fight for us, even if they could. But it’s the truth. On many a street, in many a home, it is every woman for herself.

Yet, even for the skillful, it is often insufficient, on its own, to fight and futile to do so alone. Around the world, women serve in their military and law enforcement agencies, and they can scrap and shoot with the best of them. But they still experience abuse from partners, peers, and superiors, with impunity. That is a matter of organizational culture and politics, which physical strength alone cannot contest. That scourge requires collective effort to speak up for justice and change to laws, policies, and systems. That is the value of political action, over 16 days or 6,000.

What will change after these 16 Days? Will the Liberian Government finally respond with concrete policies, laws, enforcement, and investment? Will its private and bilateral partners champion that change for us and for the women within their own ranks? I wonder which ones will lead the charge to support self-defense education programs in Liberia. Perhaps the businesses sponsoring this year’s campaign. Perhaps the partners who hold martial arts as their core cultural practices. Or those who promote women’s security and freedom as a policy priority. They all must seize this tangible, impactful opportunity to make their money meet their mouths. It would help if they’d say so before the 10th.

The Other 349 Days.

How refreshing it would be if every woman were sure of her own safety and that of her children. We would all stand a bit taller, breathe easier, trust ourselves a bit more, and feel more at peace walking the streets at any hour. That goal comes with a learning curve, the slope of which is measured by each woman’s commitment to her own independence.

Well, every goal needs a visual, an aspirational scenario to get us started and keep us going. Here’s mine: when even a few more women can break the balls-brains continuum effectively, it will teach some man, somewhere, some cotton-pickin’ sense.

Lilian Best is a political economist and journalist writing at the intersection of foreign policy, gender, and finance. She has held senior roles at the center of Liberia’s economic development architecture and holds a B.A.and M.A. from UC Berkeley and Princeton University, respectively.

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