Self-Defense Is More Than a Kick and a Punch

“I’ve taught self-defense for nearly 17 years, across Queens and the world. I teach from a curriculum I’ve created over the years, grounded in my background in shotokan karate, taekwondo and muay Thai. I’ve turned public school classrooms, church basements, community centers and small businesses into dojos where people of different ages, faiths and socioeconomic statuses come together. In those spaces, often through whispered conversations after class, I learn what brings people through the door, as well as why I teach.

 

When people walk into my self-defense classes, they often think it will be only about throwing a kick or a punch. And sometimes it is. Sometimes students walk into the room because their life depends on it, because later that day they may get on a bus or a train and face harassment and they’ll need to use their bodies and their words to de-escalate. Sometimes they come because the violence is already happening at home.

 

But self-defense offers more. My students leave with an emotional understanding: that safety isn’t only about physical strength. It’s about knowing that you can set boundaries and that you don’t owe anyone politeness at the expense of your safety. It’s about recognizing danger early and knowing you are allowed to take up space. It’s about the confidence to say “no” and the physical tools to back that “no” up if it is ignored.

 

Self-defense is economic and political. It’s knowing you have a safe place to go if you’re experiencing gender violence. It’s knowing that if your boss is a harasser, you can organize or leave and still pay rent, still eat, still survive. It’s knowing that safety doesn’t end at your body and that it extends to your paycheck, your housing and your immigration status and knowing whether the systems around you will believe you when you speak.

 

I started teaching self-defense at 16, after surviving an attack as a visibly Muslim teenager in Queens in the years after Sept. 11. I didn’t wake up one day feeling brave. I was scared. And mostly I was angry. But I loved my community, and I knew I didn’t want other girls to feel as alone as I had. So with a black belt in karate, no budget and a borrowed community room, I taught the tools I wished I’d had.

 

The violence that was there when I was just getting started still exists. We continue to see high-profile cases of violence, trafficking and abuse. From Harvey Weinstein to Jeffrey Epstein, it seems that powerful men accused by women and girls of terrible crimes can still rise, still get promoted, still get protected. We’re not angry enough.

 

And we are watching survivors doubted, discredited or ignored at every level of power. We need self-defense because every institution that claims to protect us — courts, government, hospitals, the police — seems to be failing and those failures often land hardest on immigrant, poor, queer, Black, Indigenous and brown women.

 

I sometimes wish for a world where being a martial artist was just about the sport and not about saving our own lives. A society in which the burden does not fall on those who feel the impact of violence to have to learn how to protect themselves.

 

In my classes, people exchange phone numbers. They walk one another home. They check in and march together. They show up. Self-defense becomes a shared language, a way of caring for one another in a world that too often tells us to endure quietly. We look out for one another on trains, in stairwells, at rallies and on sidewalks where harm often hides in plain sight. The threshold of what is tolerated lowers. Silence breaks faster, and isolation weakens.

 

And let me be clear: Self-defense does not replace justice. It does not excuse institutional failure.

 

Every day, I know we must organize to change the systems that create harm to begin with, starting with patriarchy. But self-defense is often the only thing available when systems move slowly or not at all.

 

Rana Abdelhamid is the founder and executive director of the organization Malikah, a nonprofit working against gender and hate-based violence.” [1]

 

1. Self-Defense Is More Than a Kick and a Punch: Guest Essay. Rana Abdelhamid.  New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Feb 12, 2026.