Episode 29: The Cost of Fear – with author Meg Stone

The Discussion

Amy Allebest: When I was a teenager, I remember reading a magazine article that told young women how to avoid being attacked by men. The strategies that I remember are: don’t ever be alone after dark, and that one was obvious because my dad always told me that; whenever you encounter a man you don’t know, look right in his face so he knows that you would be able to identify him; keep your car keys in your hand with the key out so you can use it as a weapon if you need to; hold your head up high, walk fast, and look confident. Predators prey on girls who look like they have low self-esteem. Don’t listen to music in public with headphones on, don’t wear tight or revealing clothes because that can give men the wrong idea, but also don’t wear overalls or other loose, baggy clothing because then attackers can grab onto it. The other one, and this is the one that shocked and scared me the most, was don’t put your hair in a ponytail because attackers can grab onto your ponytail and pull you with them. That one scared me and seemed so weird, and I also remember feeling like, “Oh my gosh, then there’s nothing I can do that will not make me a target.” I mean, I am a ponytail girl. I had put my hair in a ponytail all the time and I thought, “If I did get attacked, maybe while wearing a baggy sweatshirt or a ponytail, then maybe that would be my fault for being careless and not protecting myself.” I’m guessing that a lot of women can relate to that experience and maybe to hearing advice like that. I’m very excited to introduce today’s topic. It’s a book called The Cost of Fear: Why Most Safety Advice Is Sexist and How We Can Stop Gender-Based Violence by Meg Stone, and here to talk about the book today is the author. Welcome, Meg Stone! Thanks for being here. 

Meg Stone: Thank you so much for having me. 

AA: Meg Stone is the executive director of Impact Boston, an abuse prevention and empowerment self-defense organization. Her writing has been published in Huffington Post, Newsweek, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Dame, and Ms. She has received numerous awards for her work over the past 30 years. Meg, I’m so excited to have you here for this conversation. I’m wondering if you can tell us a little bit about yourself first, where you grew up and some of the things that brought you to do the work that you do today, and what brought you to write this book.

MS: One of the reasons that I wrote this book is because the safety advice that you described at the top of the show is the same as what I heard. One of my colleagues was doing historical research and found vintage videos from the 1970s, which had identical baseless safety advice. And if you go on TikTok, really the only difference is the production value and the fashion choices. A lot of what is being circulated and being targeted at teenagers and young women today is no different from what either of us and women of any other generation grew up with. I started my journey working in the court systems. I was in my twenties and I worked for a domestic violence program. I thought I was going to go to law school, and my whole job, for that part of my life, was helping domestic violence survivors get restraining orders or orders of protection. And if I had been more thoughtful, if I had been more reflective at that time, I would’ve realized that what I was really looking for is for systems that were led by men to validate women’s experience and to decisively punish abusers. And I both felt this sense of accomplishment from getting a court order – they tried me out in a support group, it was a terrible idea, I just got very overwhelmed and was not effective – but there was this illusion when you went to court that you have accomplished something and you have changed the world. But if we look more carefully at what that system looked like, all of the men were holding the rules. They were judges, they were court officers, they yelled at people to leave the waiting room, they told us where to go and what to say. And all of the women in those systems were secretaries, social workers, and domestic violence advocates like me, and our job was not decision or action. We basically cleaned up after the law. Whatever a judge ordered, we had to figure out. 

So, I felt this really important pull toward something that felt like justice. And to be fair, and to be clear, legal advocacy is crucially important. One of the most effective bulwarks we are seeing right now in terms of preserving the best of what the US has is lawyers doing amazing work. But when it came to those systems, I saw a lot of the relationship dynamics that we were working to change play out in our relationships with male-dominated systems. I wish I could say that I had this great epiphany and I had this profound revelation and I changed my life, but really I just got so burned out and so tired that I quit and, you know, temped for a little while. And what I realized when I took my first self-defense class is that everything I believed was something that I could embody, and that all of the change that I was working for was something that I was more capable of doing, and more powerful given that I had the skills to take care of my own safety and have agency in the face of somebody trying to hurt me.

AA: Wow, that is really, really interesting. The first thing I want to ask you is a very basic question, but I think it bears defining, and that is what is gender-based violence? You have “gender-based violence” in the title of your book, so let’s define it. 

MS: As I was constructing the book, and as I was creating a focus, I deliberately chose “gender-based violence” and not “violence against women”. The terms overlap a lot, and women are the primary targets of gender-based violence, but the UNICEF definition of gender-based violence is one that really resonated, and what they uplift is physical, sexual, mental, or economic harm inflicted on a person because of socially ascribed power imbalances among people of different genders. And especially in the world that we’re living in right now, every definition of gender-based violence has to be inclusive of trans people, non-binary people, and men are often subjected to gender-based violence when they are somehow stepping out of the prescribed masculinity box. We do a lot of work with high school students, and one of the biggest forms of harassment that high school boys get is being equated with women or girls or gay people if they’re not doing “being a man” right. 

So it has that characteristic of perpetuating gender inequities, also race-based violence, disability-based violence, and other hate-based violence are related. But another defining characteristic is that the majority of it is enacted in private. The types of social change strategies that work to prevent fracking or to change environmental racism are very different from the types of change strategies that prevent or stop an act that is usually unwitnessed and is usually caused by someone that we are supposed to be able to trust, or at the very least, we are supposed to not be afraid for our bodily safety. And if you look at the actual data and evidence, big shocker, it says nothing about ponytails. There is a 70-something-page incident report from the National Crime Victimization Survey, which is the largest national survey of people’s experiences of violence, and there is nothing about ponytails. There is nothing about headphones, and yet the popular safety advice persists. 

AA: So interesting. I have to say, you did write a lot, I noticed, about women in STEM. And because I am not in STEM myself, and actually none of my daughters have really gravitated toward those fields, it’s kind of a new thing for me. But I will share that one of my daughter’s very close friends in high school is a computer science and math and all kinds of sciences genius, basically, and she experienced the most horrific sexist, just constant harassment. I don’t want to identify her at all, but I will say that it was at some of the clubs that she was in at her really excellent school. And she didn’t say anything about it, and it was horrifying to me that in 2023, 2024, she was still experiencing just constant, totally gender-based harassment. And I think she was one of few, if not the only girl in the entire club. And those boys would say the most sexist things and then pass it off as a joke. If she did say something like, “Oh my gosh, stop,” they’re like, “Whoa, what’s the problem?” Just constant harassment. 

And if she brought it up to the teacher, who is a really good guy, I knew this man, I think maybe he was just so used to it and he is from a different generation, he was blind to it and did absolutely nothing to help her. And I was really stunned. I think that if I hadn’t had that experience recently of hearing my daughter say like, “Mom, it is so bad.” I’ll say one thing, high school boys, and this is not just to this one girl, it was endemic. High school boys would do things in science classes when they would be working out equations on their whiteboards, they would toss the whiteboard to a girl and be like, “Clean that.” And then they would pretend that they were joking if the girl made a big deal about it. “Clean that,” and walk away. It just makes me sick. Boy, is it still a big problem in STEM.

MS: And it’s a way of creating a psychic load and it’s creating fear, stress, uncertainty, anxiety, and that’s why I called the book The Cost of Fear, because it is not just the actual trauma of experiencing a sexual assault or intimate partner violence that has a cost. But it is the extra energy that your daughter’s friend has to put into her participation in that STEM club. And if she is on guard at all times, trying to decide whether it’s worth it to set a boundary when a boy talks to her like that, less of her attention is available to solve that equation. And then if she doesn’t solve the equation, it’s because “women aren’t as good at science as men.” 

AA: Yes, exactly. Or she drops out if she’s just like, “I’m sick of this, it’s not worth it. I’m good at other things.” Partly why women drop out is, like, “I’m tired of this. I’m not gonna do this.”

MS: And the example of the teacher is a really unfortunately common one. This is a good person, a decent person, not somebody who is a bad teacher or an abusive teacher, but just somebody who doesn’t have the courage or the commitment or the skills to be able to intervene and be able to create a space where that’s not tolerated. I’m sure there are a million behaviors that are not tolerated in STEM club, and I’m sure that teacher is perfectly skilled at enforcing them. And yet when it comes to sexism, harassment, everything that your daughter’s friend is experiencing, that doesn’t register in the same way. The commitment is just not there.

AA: Yeah, and I’ll just throw this in because we’re talking about it, to listeners, when we talk about something that you can do, one thing that occurred to me is to talk to my son. Because my son is in STEM, and I just said, “Every class that you are in, look around for the girls in your class, because they’re probably going to be in the minority. And you might not know that they have had all of those microaggressions, if not macroaggressions against them. Make sure they know you are an ally. Look out for it. Speak up against it. Ask them if they’re okay. Just be aware. So not only don’t be a perpetrator of that kind of crap, but also be aware that those girls and women may appreciate you speaking out against it or asking them if they’re okay. And just be aware, because a lot of boys and men just aren’t aware.” 

MS: Right, right. And I think the influence you have as a parent, and the influence other parents have, is a lot greater than the influence I have when a school comes in and says, “Can you talk for two hours?” 

AA: Well, both are needed, I guess. 

MS: I want 400 hours, not two hours, but two hours if I can get it. 

AA: Yes. Let’s talk more about what you mentioned just a minute ago. You said that most violence– and when we’re talking about real gender-based violence, physical violence, it’s enacted in one of two contexts, close relationships or economic relationships. Can you tell us a little bit more about each of those contexts and what that looks like? 

MS: Really what it looks like is existing relationships that are not supposed to be places where we have our guard up. People who connect with us in those places usually start with coercive control, and that can be a mixture of flattery and insult, that can be trying to talk us out of our experience of reality. When we talk to teenagers, it can be simple things like a girl telling her boyfriend, “I hate scary movies,” and then he turns on a scary movie without asking her and makes fun of her when she doesn’t want to watch it. And those instances in isolation of everything else, you know, we all have bad or questionable judgment sometimes, it’s not like we’re all terrible people, but the ways in which one person tries to take agency away from another person and then that person tries to strip the other person of their bodily autonomy and their integrity of their body, their ability to choose what happens to their body, is a usually a long-term process of months, weeks, sometimes years. So when we are told to be vigilant about the wrong things, our intuition, if we call it that, gets miscalibrated. 

I cannot tell you how many women I have taught who show up in my class because they’re afraid of walking to the parking garage when it gets dark in the winter. And of course we are. If you’re told that something is dangerous over and over again by adults who love you when you’re a kid, and social media when you’re a teenager, and regular media when you’re an adult, and the police when a crime happens in your community, then what happens is that the people we start to fear are people that we see as outsiders. And for some of us with privilege, particularly white women or middle class women, that can become men of color or people of color, or people that face other stigmas like people who are homeless, people who are using drugs in public. So what we perceive as dangerous not only perpetuates stigma, but it doesn’t prepare us to recognize those line crossings that are designed to be subtle, that are designed to be normalized. If I am afraid of some guy grabbing my ponytail, then when my classmate snaps my bra, I don’t recognize that as a problem because he’s not a creepy guy grabbing my ponytail. 

The men that I have met, the men that I interviewed for my book who give that safety advice, have incredible sincerity. They really care, some of them have experienced or witnessed violence in their own lives, and they want women to be safe. But when safety advice is a series of directives, like, “You must not wear a ponytail, you must not wear headphones”– your example about clothing is a perfect one because some of the safety advice actually contradicts itself. “Don’t be on your phone because you look distracted, but get on your phone and pretend you’re calling your boyfriend.” It’s impossible to follow, but if you think about it, it’s somebody telling you what to do. And somebody giving you rigid rules to follow is a warning sign for abuse. So what we need to do is we need to be very discerning about who is telling us how to be safe and what actually happens to that advice when we square it with reality. 

And to be fair, there is not enough evidence about what makes us safer. Most of the questions that folks ask me, my answer is that there is no evidence to answer that question. But the evidence that we do have is that self-defense programs that are explicitly feminist and that focus on familiar sexual assault reduce sexual assault by 50% or more. And when we look at the National Crime Victimization Survey, people who use forceful resistance, either verbal or physical, are more likely to interrupt sexual assaults than other folks. And again, I want to be clear, it’s not because some people did it right and some people did it wrong. It’s because everybody reacts to a hard situation in the moment, and we’re all doing the best we can in the face of bad information. So, being bold, resisting, speaking up, connecting our personal safety to political inequity actually makes us safer. Wearing a ponytail, literally all it does is save hairstyling time. I estimate that I have saved four months of my life over the course of my lifetime. I’m terrible at styling my hair. Anytime my hair has had to look good, I’ve had to emergency call a friend because I cannot style my hair well. But I hope I’ve read some really good books in the four months I have saved. 

AA: Fantastic. Well, it’s good to know that it didn’t jeopardize your safety, as that is a complete myth. I’m a big ponytail fan myself. 

MS: If we want to do a real deep dive into this myth, I actually went into newspapers.com to look up ponytail attacks just to see what the news reports showed. 

AA: Oh my gosh. How interesting. 

MS: It was an adventure. All of the women who were grabbed and dragged by their ponytails, who made the news, the person who did that to them was either an intimate partner who was abusive or an ex-partner who was abusive. 

AA: Oh my gosh. 

MS: And the newspaper is not a controlled study, but women who had ponytail incidents with strangers, it was something like a guy coming up to a woman in a shopping mall, she was putting her kid in her car, he cut off her ponytail, she yelled at him, he ran away. She called the police, the police couldn’t catch him, and what she said to the reporter is, “I guess I’m going to the hair salon now.” 

AA: Someone cut off her ponytail? In a random act of weirdness? So odd.

MS: An act of weirdness. But what stopped it was her loud voice. And it’s a very complicated balance, because women and other gender-marginalized folks, women and non-binary people, women and trans people, face so much blame if we experience sexual assault. What were we wearing? Why did we go to that party or have that drink or do that thing? In that context, feminists and other social justice oriented self-defense groups are just as vigilant about challenging victim-blame as it is about teaching skills. 

It is very important that resistance be seen as an option, as a possibility, but not as any type of requirement. And at the same time, it is important to acknowledge just how often we save our own lives and how often we save and support each other. One of the organizations that I interviewed for my book is a theater organization that was founded by a man who was a serial sexual abuser. And before the organization had leadership that took the issue seriously, women who were older or who were stage managers or stage crew folks would make sure that the ingenue actors were never alone with this man. The stage manager that I interviewed would come up with a hundred excuses to walk in the room, and she would basically follow this guy when he was trying to get into dressing rooms before the show started. So it’s not just about protecting ourselves and feeling like we are an island, but it’s about the ways in which those acts of resistance add up to social change. Ways in which the acts of abuse, the acts of violence often catch us off guard, and our first reaction is disbelief. 

I’ve read countless news stories about sexual abuse crisis in organizations, and there’s usually an interview with somebody whose first reaction when hearing about it was disbelief. And we have that disbelief because we’re waiting for the guy in the black hoodie hiding in the Walmart parking lot. But we also have this disbelief because we’re protecting people in power, particularly men in power. Part of feminist or empowerment self-defense training is learning the skills to move through that disbelief in a split second so that we are available for the active resistance that will interrupt the harm. And for more of us to do that. Imagine your daughter’s friend’s STEM club if one boy told a joke and two other girls and six other boys and the teacher all had the presence of mind and the commitment to interrupt that. What it takes is the capacity to access a boundary or a response of resistance in the moment of intimidation when our bodies and our brains are under stress. 

AA: Which takes practice, right? And we’re going to talk about that. Because if you’ve never done it before, there are all the different things that people do when they’re not prepared.

Let’s talk about that in a little bit. First, I want to ask you, because I thought this was such a helpful framing for me, that you talk about two opposing philosophies of how to make people safer: safety through compliance and safety through resistance. And you’ve been talking about that already, but I loved how clear that was. Safety through compliance and safety through resistance. Can you tell us about each one a little bit more? 

MS: Right, so safety through compliance is a belief system that comes largely from male-dominated institutions and individual men, and it tries to convince us that the way to be safe is by following rules that restrict our lives. Compliance-based safety advice usually uses words like “always” or “never”, it gives us directives that are only relevant to the minority of violence, which is from total strangers in mundane public places like parking lots. There was a slight uptick in car thefts according to the FBI in the early 2020s, but parking lot crime at this point is very rare among strangers. But all of our safety advice is based on telling us to be vigilant in places that are not statistically common sites of violence, and it tells us to restrict our lives and that if we don’t restrict our lives it is our fault. What I find really notable is that a lot of these individuals or organizations give the advice that we need to be smart. But when I think of smart, I think of critical thinking, asking hard questions, analyzing, looking at multiple sources. But you aren’t smart by analyzing, you’re smart by following. So this compliance-based safety advice becomes its own form of coercive control. 

And it would be one problem if it were a bunch of individual entrepreneurs or individual authors who gave this advice, but a lot of this advice is found on taxpayer-funded websites of police departments, and it’s found on tuition- or state-funded websites of colleges and universities. So if your county health department were to tell you, “Don’t eat vegetables outside because you absorb less vitamins,” first of all, somebody would stop that because it’s irresponsible and baseless. And if they didn’t, any number of vegetable-eating hikers would complain. The level of separation from fact that I have found on any number of law enforcement, sheriff’s department, local police, campus police websites, is about the same as the ridiculous example I just gave about the county health department. And it does not get challenged. The county sheriff in Ripley County in Indiana who put the safety tip on their website that talks about what rapists are looking for, basically you shouldn’t wear a ponytail or have long hair, you shouldn’t wear clothes that can be cut, but you should wield an umbrella because a rapist will see the umbrella from far away and be afraid of you, I asked this sheriff, “Why is this advice up there?” And there was not a good answer, nor was there any sort of acknowledgement that not having a good answer was a problem. 

And I heard this from several of the men I interviewed, both in institutions and individuals, “It’s just something to think about. Just helping people, just wanting to give people something to think about.” I want to think about something that is factual, I don’t know about you. I felt like this 2-year-old kid that kept asking “Why?” to a parent that kept rolling their eyes. It was this very authoritative tone expressing compassion toward women, probably genuinely and sincerely feeling that compassion toward women, and that was all that was required. Having actual facts and actual evidence and actual rationale was not required. That safety through compliance. 

Safety through resistance is a philosophy that is most prevalent in feminist and Black liberation movements currently and throughout history, but has also spun around in many other social justice movements. Safety through resistance is an approach to personal safety or self-defense that defines the problem as societal and systemic, but wants to equip individuals to be able to resist it as a way of building individual and collective power. Self-defense has a long tradition in the feminist movement, and a lot of what safety through resistance does is it takes the types of harm that are most prevalent, and that are most connected to societal power inequities, and it gives people a range of strategies. My job as a teacher is to find something that works for you, not to browbeat you into doing what I say or what I do. My job as a teacher is to say, “It is not okay that you are a teenager and somebody wants to sexually assault you. It is not your fault, and you have options. And one thing you can do is use your body to protect yourself. One thing you can do is use your voice to protect yourself, and then there’s a hundred, million, thousand other things you can do.” 

What safety through resistance does is it takes the most common and most prevalent types of harm and it walks them back to their beginnings. Maybe you don’t begin in a dorm room alone with someone who’s trying to sexually assault you, but what happens when you’re on that date and what you want and what you don’t want, and how much alcohol you want to drink, and whether you want to be in a public place or private place, is not respected by the person you’re on the date with? What you can do is advocate for yourself and then pay attention to whether this person is committed to you being comfortable and having a good time, or whether this person wants what they want, regardless of how it affects you. And frankly, even if you don’t prevent a sexual assault that night, you prevent a really irritating date and you have a saner life because of it. 

So it’s about advocating for ourselves, advocating for others, and thinking critically about how political inequities show up in our personal lives. And it’s evidence-based in two ways. First of all, it is relevant to the most common types of abuse and violence, and second of all, despite a complete lack of resources, and that was before the current US federal government research cuts, much evaluation research has been done over the last 30 or 40 years to determine that these programs are actually reducing sexual violence. And they’re reducing sexual violence by helping young women identify sexism in their intimate relationships and be loud and brave and assertive in whatever way works for them, not by telling them to hide in their room and not go anywhere. One of the reasons why I spent so much time using those labels is because I came from a domestic violence crisis center. In my twenties I worked the night shift at an emergency shelter. And when I moved into doing self-defense work, a lot of people that I knew and loved and collaborated with were like, “I don’t understand why you’re doing that. Self-defense is horrible, it blames the victim.” And what I realized is that the self-defense that they don’t like, I also don’t like. A man telling a bunch of women that your body is a crime scene.

I spent many years having many dialogues, and it’s been amazing to see the shift in understanding over the years and that these two approaches to personal safety are not well-defined or well understood. And I will say that there’s almost no research on any compliance-based self-defense program that has been published in any academic journal I could find, and believe me, I spend my life searching academic journals. I’m super fun at parties. I’m so fun. But it would be one thing if these compliance-based programs actually reduced stranger violence, but they really don’t. So it is something that people with positions of authority and people who can adopt a very authoritative bearing and tone get treated like they know something important, and the evidence tells a very different story.

A man telling a bunch of women that your body is a crime scene.

AA: Mm-hmm. Well, it’s just the momentum of patriarchal cultural norms of literally millennia, right? That’s our automatic reflex. I remember when there were huge demonstrations in London a few years ago about gender-based violence, and there was this whole thing like, “Women, stay home because it’s dangerous out there.” And women finally spoke back and were like, “Actually, how about the men stay home? Why is it the women who have to,” like you’re saying, have these compliance-based attitudes like, “I guess I have to stay home in my house and not go anywhere.” I’m so grateful that this is changing. I think in the public conversation it’s changing a little bit, and I think #MeToo helped that also. I’m wondering now if we can dig in, as long as we’re talking about the resistance-based approach, tell us what those steps are and tell us some more about self-defense training. What are the things that people can actually do? What do you teach in your classes that are skills that we can practice so that no matter what the violence is, no matter what we’re confronted with, we know or our bodies know what to do?

MS: Right, right. One of the things that I learned from the neuroscience field, and I want to shout out the fabulous Dr. Amy Arnsten at Yale, who took time out of her busy life to let me interview her. If you freeze or get overwhelmed by something scary, all that means is that you are a human being with a brain and a body. When it comes to what neuroscientists have learned over the years, it is that the part of our brain that is the most compromised by stress is the cerebral cortex, or the part of the brain that’s responsible for thinking, reasoning, and decision making. When we are overwhelmed with stress, humans default to our habits, and that is great for when someone cuts you off in traffic and you slam the brakes and you don’t even think about it. But when it comes to somebody who I thought I could trust, who’s being really nice to me, who’s a senior, is suddenly trying to take my clothes off when I did not say I wanted to have sex, that’s a moment of overwhelm. Any reasonable person would be overwhelmed in that moment. 

So, what we are trying to do, particularly in the impact methodology, but in other forms of empowerment self-defense as well, is to give people experiential practice of resisting and finding their voices in the moment of threat and intimidation. We are shifting our habits so that when somebody touches me without my permission, I say, “Hey, what are you doing?” and I move my body away and I put my hand up in a way that says, “Stop.” So that I have rehearsed that reaction in the relative safety of a classroom, and if it happens to me in real life, it’s not the first time I’ve done it. That’s why sports teams have practice, theatre kids have rehearsal, if you’re training to be a firefighter you don’t watch videos of putting out fires, you go and do fire simulation. Because we know that under stress, we need to just have a habit ready to go. 

The habits that we try to build are the use of awareness and voice as a first strategy. Because if somebody doesn’t touch me and I don’t touch them, the only way I can get injured is if I trip and fall later. So, I don’t want to use a physical skill if I have any other option. That said, the process of learning physical skills has been shown by research to be both very healing to abuse survivors and also confidence-building to anyone who gets studied. Using your body powerfully has a psychological effect that is oftentimes very positive. But the first thing I’m doing as a self-defense strategy, and when students ask if I’ve ever used the skills, they’re picturing me elbowing some dude in the face, and I’m like, “Yep, I use the skills every day.” And they’re like, “Oh!” And I’m like, “Well, what I do is I say what I want and what I need, and I pay attention to how the other person reacts.” 

And one way to get information about how trustworthy someone is is to voice our likes, our dislikes, our wants, our boundaries as individuals, but also if we work in a daycare or a school or we work in another organization, we have boundaries on behalf of the organization. So we say, “You know what? I am not a fan of horror movies.” And the first date person that says, “Okay, cool. Let’s watch a movie we both like,” is different from the person who is going to argue the case of horror movies, berate me for not liking horror movies, and roll their eyes at the non-horror movie we decided to watch because they really want a horror movie. And again, we’re all works in progress and these kinds of reactions are things that especially young people have a learning curve over. So if somebody does one of those things, it doesn’t mean that they’re dangerous, it just means that this is not a person who is equally concerned about my wellbeing as theirs right now. 

And then if the situation escalates, if the situation gets more dangerous or more concerning, the next strategy is really very straightforward, which is just narrating what happened. Folks who harm people close to them, and folks who harm people in intimate ways get a lot from our silences, our embarrassment, and our wish to pretend that it’s not happening. So saying something like, “I just said I wasn’t comfortable with your arm around me, and you just put your arm around me again. What’s going on?” Or, “I’m moving away and you keep moving closer to me.” Or, “You just touched my hair and that’s not okay.” Just saying out loud what is happening is a great skill. And we’ve worked with a lot of women in very different male-dominated professions, STEM, finance, construction, and depending on the social cost and the benefit, those statements might be very indirect and they might be very direct. It may be, “I have to do a lot of emails, so I’m going to go upstairs” when you’re at a convention and your male colleagues are trying to get you to go out to a bar. “Nah, you want me to do a good job tomorrow, so I need to sleep.” Finding a way to name the behavior can be very powerful. And then if you are experiencing threats, intimidation, harassment, somebody yelling at you, the things that are unsafe or somebody too close to you, and somebody trying to overpower your ability to resist either verbally or physically. 

A lot of what we teach is a hand position where both of my hands are in front of me, my thumbs are close together, my fingers are pointed toward the ceiling. And if you read this body language in one word, the word is “Stop”. I’m not looking like the ultimate fighting champion. I am a perpetual last-kid-picked-in-gym-class, so any self-defense skill that I can learn well enough to teach is not going to make it to an action movie. You want to use phrases like “Stop”, “leave me alone”, and “don’t come any closer to me.” So you’re not ordering or commanding the person, you’re not swearing at the person, but you are making it very clear that it is not okay to get closer to you or keep interacting with you. 

Another really important skill, more broadly for safety or community safety than straight self-defense, is understanding the difference between a person who is agitated and possibly struggling around a trauma response versus a person that’s a threat to us. A lot of the folks that we train work in shelters, work in employment centers, work in food banks, so the folks that they support are in a lot of crises. And when you’re in a lot of crisis and one little thing goes wrong, it can be the straw that broke the camel’s back. In those situations, using empathy and problem solving, along with making sure that you have physical distance and you’re setting boundaries about how the other person is treating you, things like, “I really want to help you, but I can’t help you if you’re yelling at me. I can’t help you if you’re pounding on the table, but what I really want to do is try and help you get some food for today.” And being able to hold that boundary in a way that acknowledges that that person is living in an unfair system and needs some sort of support. Whereas with somebody who is a threat to me, somebody who is trying to get me to go with them, verbally berating me, verbally harassing me, this is not the time for your beautiful, Shakespearean sonnet about gender equity. It is “Stop, leave me alone. No, don’t come any closer.” And if you say, “leave me alone” a hundred times, then your brain doesn’t have to think about, like, “Oh no, what am I going to say?” 

And then if none of that works out, and if this person still chooses to be a threat to you, use a strong part of your body against a weak part of their body. Head, eyes, groin, something that doesn’t require a lot of fine motor coordination because you’re under stress. If you have less muscle mass, if you’re five feet tall and they’re six feet tall, you can equalize those disadvantages by striking a part of the body that is an inherent vulnerability. And going back to our little dialogue about ponytails, if somebody grabs my ponytail, what they are doing is putting their face in the perfect range for my elbow. The thing about being grabbed, and this is something that we don’t think about when all the safety advice we get is about diminishing ourselves and being afraid of the world, anyone who is grabbing us does not have that hand available to do anything else. So if the person is grabbing my ponytail, the most they have is one free hand and they have two vulnerable targets that are at different ends of their bodies. If I’m asking what’s free on me and what’s vulnerable on them, then, you know, thanks for that ponytail grab, I would’ve had a worse rear elbow if you hadn’t done it. I don’t mean to be glib.

AA: No, no, it’s important. That’s exactly right. I love that question. And before I read your book, this was completely new to me, honestly. I mean, I knew to go for the eyes, I guess, and the groin, but I didn’t have a lot of these skills that you talk about. But in terms of what’s free on me and what’s vulnerable on them, and just watching for those things. Yeah, super, super helpful. 

MS: Even statistically common forms of violence are not predictable, so having a principle is going to help you more than having perfect choreography. There’s a reason why self-defense is not an Olympic sport, because you can’t get a 10 on your ground kick. It’s more like what could you do in that moment? 

AA: Yeah. Well, I love this. I love how you line up your first line of defense, and if that doesn’t work, then this, if that doesn’t work, then this. One thing that came to my mind too, as you were talking about men who are themselves so stressed and they’re actually not trying to threaten you, that’s just so important. I thought of neurodivergent boys and the tenderness of new dating experiences and some boys maybe not picking up social cues that the girl is giving him. So I’m really grateful for what you said, and I’m assuming a heterosexual couple that’s going out here, like a girl training herself to– even what you said, the first thing to do is just state what’s happening, right? “I said I didn’t want to hold hands,” and if he does it again, “Nope, I really don’t want to hold hands.” Everybody wins from that strategy, right? She’s practicing speaking for herself, and the boy gets a clear message. And then if it progresses past that, then you do the next thing, and then if it progresses to be physical, then she knows to use the hands, “Back up, don’t come any closer.” But that girls don’t automatically go to the very physical and very aggressive, and assume the worst intention from a boy or man who’s like, “Oh gosh, I just didn’t know.” I love that you’re covering all the bases there.

MS: Yeah, because so much of baseless safety advice is rooted in stigma. Stigma against neurodivergent people, stigma against poor people.

AA: Or race, as you said earlier, too. That’s a huge one for boys and men of color, also. 

MS: Yeah, and folks who get perceived to be dangerous when they’re just living their lives, it’s a huge problem. The disservice it does to neurodivergent men, men of color, homeless men, men who are using drugs in public, is obvious, but it also does a disservice to the relatively privileged woman who learns to see stigmatized life circumstances as threat cues. If I’m afraid of the person who’s sitting on the sidewalk outside my office, then I’m missing the male colleague who lingered with his hands over my hands when he took a box away from me that I told him I could carry. And I am missing coercive control from somebody who has power in my life, from my kid’s coach or whoever.

AA: Or your husband at home!

MS: If we were expected to eat healthy when 60% of the information we got was that processed foods are the best, nobody would eat healthy because we wouldn’t know how. And that’s what the universe of personal safety advice is like. 

AA: Yeah. Well, unfortunately we’re getting to the end of our conversation, so I’ll only have time for a couple more questions. We’ve talked a little bit about racism, and there were a few things that you talked about in your book that I thought were so, so powerful and important. In fact, you have a whole chapter titled “Resisting Racism”. Can you tell us about that chapter and some examples of problems and the way people are fighting and solving those problems? 

MS: Sure. The reality of the way that the criminal legal system works in regard to self-defense is that a lot of the people who get charged with crimes for defending themselves are people who are otherwise socially devalued: women of color, LGBTQ+ people of color, working class women of color. And it is a real problem, and it is a real inequity when self-defense law is not made accessible to the folks that have the least access to the kinds of support services that would help somebody get out of an unsafe situation safely. 

There’s a wonderful organization called Survived and Punished, and it’s an activist organization that works to support and defend folks who are survivors of abuse and violence, who then get criminalized, sometimes incarcerated for defending themselves. The organization was founded in the 2010s around the case of Marissa Alexander, who is a Florida woman who was being threatened by her abusive ex when her baby was two months old. She shot a gun into a wall, injuring no one, and then she was charged with crimes like attempted murder. And this is Florida. This is a stand-your-ground state where, not that long before this happened, neighborhood watchperson George Zimmerman shot and killed Black teenager Trayvon Martin, and was not criminalized. He was tried and acquitted. So what Survived and Punished recognizes is that the criminal legal system is yet another thing that marginalized survivors have to defend themselves against, not just the individuals who harmed them. Their model is to collaborate with and educate and support defense lawyers who are working on the court case in the system, but also do political organizing to draw attention to the situation. 

This issue and the use of defense campaigns goes back to the 1970s. The historian Emily Thuma wrote a really good history of this, noting that in 1974, Joan Little, who was a woman of color who was sexually assaulted, was the first person to use self-defense in a rape case. Self-defense laws are designed for white dudes on the frontier, for lack of a better word. So as we advocate for self-defense, it is really important to advocate for anti-racist activism and anti-racism within the criminal legal system. There’s an amazing report called “Defending Self-Defense: A Call to Action by Survived and Punished”, which is led by survivors who have been criminalized, so the research team and the research subjects were the same people. It wasn’t a bunch of outside academics coming in to research people. And the report really identifies this problem where the most targeted survivors have the least access to victim services, police are not helpful, other institutions that help more privileged survivors do not help them. And as a result, the abuse gets so bad that the only option is a very high level of self-defense for which folks are then charged with crimes. It is so important as we think about resistance to think about the ways in which self-defense gets criminalized and what we need to do to change that. 

AA: Thank you so much for talking about it. One thing that I really want to make sure that we cover also that’s kind of on this topic of race issues, was the incredibly inspiring story about the janitorial workers. Can you talk about that? 

And after many years of addressing wage theft, they started hearing more and more stories of janitorial workers being sexually assaulted or raped on the job, either by their manager or by somebody who worked in the building. So, this is a person who works after all the office workers leave, overnight, and is perceived as vulnerable because it is perceived that that person would be too afraid to report the incident. MCTF did incredible work around advocating for policy change while empowering individual survivors. And it was amazing to watch more and more janitorial workers speaking up about sexual assault, but also the way in which the organization recognized that helping people develop the belief that they were worth protecting and confidence in themselves and getting the space to heal from sometimes incredible amounts of trauma went hand in hand with showing up at the State House, protesting bad policies, fighting for sexual harassment, protections for janitorial workers, and they implemented a self-defense program called Ya Basta, which translates as “Enough”. It’s designed specifically for janitorial workers to learn physical and verbal skills to resist abuse and violence and harm. And it is taught in Spanish, it’s taught in a way that’s accessible to janitorial workers, and for me it really demonstrated how resistance is both individual and collective. I just have so much admiration for all of the folks who have worked at MCTF over the years, and the real political gains, the real requirements that they have changed, the millions of dollars in stolen wages they have recovered, and the fact that they have done just as much to prevent and address sexual assault and to hold companies accountable for not creating safe workplaces.

AA: It’s incredibly inspiring. I’m so happy that you included that. Well, Meg, this has been such a wonderful conversation, and I’d love to wrap up our conversation with the chapter that’s titled, “So, what should I do? What should I tell my daughter?” I want to end with this chapter because this season’s theme is taking action, so I would love for you to tell us what can we do? What are some things that are actionable that we can do to stop gender-based violence? 

MS: Right. We can do a lot. We have power, we have agency, and often we have support that we can access. One thing is to communicate your boundaries and pay attention to how people react. That is a way to know if somebody is invested in you being safe or comfortable, or you feeling good in this relationship, whatever relationship it is. And sometimes you will prevent harm, and other times you will prevent really boring situations you don’t want to be in. Describe the behavior that alarms you, and be specific. Something like, “I said I didn’t want to talk and you’re still talking to me. I asked you to leave me alone and you’re moving closer to me.” Really prevent the secrecy and prevent the person from being able to operate out of sight, because maybe we feel too embarrassed to name it. Get loud. “Stop. Leave me alone.” Either call attention to the situation or create a startle response in the person that’s harming. 

Also, keep it simple. Self-defense does not require any fancy language. Things like, “Stop,” “leave me alone,” “don’t come any closer to me” are best because they’re about myself. The last thing I want to do is get in an insult match to the point where I can’t tell if I’m still defending myself. And by repeating “stop” or “leave me alone,” I don’t have to spend too much energy thinking about what I’m going to say. Figure out if you can leave. If you don’t like a situation, don’t let social politeness get in the way of your wellbeing. If you are at drinks after work and the conversation is getting inappropriate and people are touching you in ways you don’t like, and when you name it, nobody is paying attention. “All right guys, I’m outta here.” Can you leave? And if something is more imminent, is there an exit? Getting distance and using obstacles. Somebody who is trying to hurt me has to get close to me. So if we can use furniture, garbage cans, whatever, as a way to put a barrier between ourselves and them, that can be incredibly helpful. 

Pay attention to whether you want a particular type of attention. Do I want this attention? Do I want this conversation? And if the answer is no, you can leave. If you can’t leave, many of the strategies we discussed earlier can work. Recognize and resist what my fabulous colleagues Lauren Taylor and Nadia Telvy call ‘parting shots’. You’ve set a boundary, you’ve yelled “Leave me alone,” you’ve yelled “Stop,” and as the person is walking away from you, they call you a bitch or they tell you you’re crazy. The safest attacker is the one who is walking away from me. So later, I am either going to share my sarcastic comeback with my best friend, or I’m going to get support for how that insult made me feel. And I deserve that care and support, but I’m not going to get it from the person who just yelled the parting shot at me. I’m going to let it go if it’s going to help that person leave. 

Use a strong part of you against a weak part of them. What’s free on me? What’s vulnerable on them? This one is really important. If you’re a parent, teach your kids that they can choose who they touch. And if someone in your life, maybe a relative that you have a super complicated relationship with, is hugging your kid without their permission, insisting on kissing them, you are the adult and they are the kid. And nobody has all the power in the world, but usually adults have more power than kids. So, “Hey, I need to talk to you. When my daughter says she doesn’t want kisses, I’ve taught her that she doesn’t have to get kisses.” Because that shows kids that their boundaries matter and that the adults in their life have the skill to help reinforce their boundaries. 

If you’re part of a highly targeted community, leaders in your community probably know best. Black trans women, indigenous folks, people with some types of disabilities are chronically excluded from large-scale surveys. Particularly in this day and age, probably the response rate among immigrant communities for some of the large-scale surveys is going to go way down. If your community has wisdom, it is probably more relevant to your life than a survey that doesn’t reach your community. And then the most important one: if someone gives you safety advice, ask why. The question “What is the evidence that supports what you just told me to do?” should not be a gotcha question. It should be an easy question to answer. And if somebody doesn’t have an answer or gets defensive when you ask that question, that is a sign that it’s probably a baseless, compliance-based directive.

AA: Those are all so helpful, Meg, such important and relevant wisdom. I’m so grateful. And I’m thankful for your book! I can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s such an important topic that really transcends everything, unfortunately. The need for this conversation transcends place and culture and age and socioeconomic barriers. It’s just such an important topic, so thank you for writing it. Thank you for being here. And last, I’ll quickly ask you where people can find your work. 

MS: Sure. impactboston.org and megstone.org. Buy The Cost of Fear anywhere you can find books. And at the library. 

AA: And at the library, that’s true. Again, thank you so much Meg Stone. Thanks for being here today. 

MS: Thank you so much for having me. I have really learned a lot from your podcast, and I love how the two meanings of breaking down are so prevalent, both the explaining and the dismantling, having that double meaning in your podcast.

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