Sign your daughters up for Pinkarate now!

This Way Up | Teaching young girls how to be powerful in pink
By Art Carey
Inquirer Columnist

When Liz Durning was a girl, she was skinny and shy, not at all physical and athletic. That made her a target for bullies and tough girls - and in Upper Darby in those days, the tough girls were really tough.

Then, at 8 years old, she saw a karate movie featuring female fighters that impressed her indelibly.

“They were beautiful and tough,” she says. “They showed me that you could fight and still be feminine.”

The same could be said of Durning today. At age 43, she is still slender but no longer shy. The once-retiring non-jock has blossomed into a confident martial artist with a third-degree black belt and a passion for teaching the self-defense skills of American Kenpo karate to girls.

She does so through Pinkarate, which she conducts three days a week at the Wayne Ballet & Center for Dance Arts.

Aimed at girls ages 4 to 12, Pinkarate is designed not to produce the Lara Croft of tomorrow, but to instill a sense of awareness and physical poise and to enable girls to protect themselves in a world that’s not always as safe and genteel as downtown Wayne.

“If my mother had let me take this kind of training, I would have stood up to the bullies,” Durning says. “I would have told them to stop, and if they didn’t, I would have been able to back it up.”

Bullies are unpleasant, but they’re not the real problem. According to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, one in five girls is sexually exploited before reaching adulthood. And the molesters usually are not strangers. More than 90 percent of sexual-abuse victims know the perpetrators, the U.S. Department of Justice reports.

So Durning launched Pinkarate in September 2004. “I wanted a way to get girls who think karate is intimidating to try it,” she says. “I wanted to teach it in a place that is female-friendly. And I wanted to make it fun.”

The fun begins with the uniforms. The typical karate robe, or gi, is white and bland. Durning, who lives in King of Prussia and has been practicing karate for 20 years, is shrewd. By dyeing the robes pink, she not only sent a message that karate is for girls, she also created a must-have fashion accessory.

On a recent weekday afternoon at Pinkarate, about a dozen little girls, pretty in pink, were practicing kicks, blocks and punches. They hopped, scampered and scrambled. They ran agility drills and mini-windsprints.

“1, 2, 3, 4! Four steps away!” they shouted as they retreated from an imaginary “tricky person.”

“What’s the first rule of self-defense?” Durning asked.

“You move. You get out of the way,” the girls replied.

A cardinal principle of Pinkarate is “stun and run.” To reinforce that message, the girls formed two lines and attacked kicking shields brandished by Durning and an assistant.

“Eyes, eyes, eyes,” they shouted, as they pretended to gouge the eyes of an assailant with their fingers, squeezed together to form a beaklike point.

“Palm, palm, palm,” they shouted, as they pretended to smash their palms into an assailant’s face.

“Kick, kick, kick,” they shouted, as they pretended to deliver a strike to the groin, walloping the shields with resounding pops.

Durning’s goal is to enable these girls to master the basics fast. The first task is to “break the freeze response,” the paralyzing panic that can overcome you when you’re threatened or attacked.

So in Pinkarate class, rather than learning katas, the stylized stances and move sequences that are the alphabet of grown-up karate, the girls learn what Durning calls “real self-defense moves” - practical, unadorned techniques for repelling or escaping a malefactor.

“You can teach strategy,” Durning says. “But you have to give them the physical skills to back it up. The girls have to know in their hearts that they can do it.”

The hope is that the girls will never have to resort to physical resistance. Being aware of potential danger and avoiding it is 90 percent of prevention, which is why skill drills are interspersed with coping lessons.

What do you do if you get lost in a store? Answer: You look for a mother with children and ask for help.

What lures do “tricky persons” often use? The “help me” lure, the “go with me” lure, the “gift” lure.

Watching this group of girls, many of them so cute they looked like they stepped out of the L.L Bean for Kids catalog, I wondered about their lost innocence, whether all this talk about “tricky persons” and “lures” might make them precociously suspicious and fearful.

If so, they certainly didn’t show it. There was plenty of giggling, laughing and frolicking.

“You learn how to defend yourself and you do a lot of fun stuff,” said Julia Saile, 8, of Berwyn, a second grader at Episcopal Academy in Devon.

Julia, who has been taking Pinkarate classes for three months, was proudly sporting her recently conferred yellow belt. She enjoys the karate class so much she recruited a classmate, Brittany Berrard.

“It makes me feel more brave,” Brittany said, “like I could do a lot more than I thought I could do.”

Julia’s mother, Darlene, calls herself “an ambassador” for Pinkarate.

“It’s given Julia more physical confidence,” Darlene Saile said. “It’s awakened an awareness of her inner strength.”

It also has enabled Julia, described by her mom as “demure and reserved,” to do something most little girls, especially well-bred little girls, are not socialized to do - unleash aggression, or as Darlene puts it, “unleash controlled aggression.”

“You should see their faces light up when they discover kicking and punching,” Durning says. Indeed, when it came time for the girls to clobber the miniature heavy bag with roundhouse kicks, they did so with as much verve and glee as a bunch of rowdy boys. They were spritely embodiments of Pinkarate’s motto: “Pretty powerful.”

The most valuable benefit of Pinkarate, Durning says, is that “these girls are able to stand up for themselves. They’re learning how to say no to adults.”

Contact columnist Art Carey at 215-854-4588 or acarey@phillynews.com. Join him on Wednesdays at 2 p.m. for an online chat at http://go.philly.com/phillytalk.

For information about Pinkarate, call 610-688-3904 or visit www.pinkarate.com.

http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/14049210.htm

Actually…those gis look kinda barfish. Not hot pink, nor a good shade of baby pink.

Also see this link with her and Billy Blanks!
http://www.pinkarate.com/lizandbilly2.html

Karate: Giving little girls false confidence nationwide!

I don’t think she would be really happy pulling her outta this martial arts school.

She took off cheerleading for this year, to do nothing but train, to the chagrin of her twin brother, who opted to stay in football.

I am waiting for the day she tells me she choked him out.

These girls should have signed-up with Gene Lebel.They would have trained very, learned a self-defense from the best and still be able to wear pink.

King of Prussia? That’s New York State, isn’t it?

In any case, why must being “feminine” conflate with crappy EPAK? Why must these people keep putting feminism back 20 years?

Feminine + tough = Erin Toughhill, not EPAK.

You should see their faces burn out when they realise that a groin strike works only about 60% of the time.

I mean i just got knee-ed there yesterday. It hurt but it wasn’t crippling. It hurt just as much as a knee to anywhere else would hurt…

It didn’t make me gag as much as I thought it would. The “stun and run” response, while cheesy, is better than any sort of fighting talk, as is ‘breaking the freeze response’.

It’s a bit contradictory though - it points out 90% of molestation occurs in the home, where to be honest no amount of MA is going to save a child already to terrified to tell, or - more commonly - mentally convinced such behaviour is normal, ordinary and part of a parent-child bond. By giving them the name ‘tricky people’, they are denoting a difference between Molestor on the Street and Molestor in the Home. Are they being taught that ‘tricky people’ (‘the mad axeman’ is my preferred term) reside in the home far more often?

I think this one is right outside of Philadelphia.

Hmm. Philly. I’ve only been there a few times. How are the crime rates there?

If I were a small girl, I’d carry around a hot philly cheese steak. The grease coming out of those things is absolutely lethal. If someone tried to molest me I’d shove the cheese steak into his groin. I guarantee he’ll pause to scream and clutch.

The whole “stranger danger” thing never worked. First, asking a child who has been indoctornated by “stranger danger” to describe a “stranger” will usually elicit descriptions that put movie monsters hollywood curns out to shame. Second, most parants send contradictory messages about these things. They say don’t talk to strangers and then allow strangers to assume positions of trust, authorit, an power over their children. Third, and most important, the vast majority of people you do not know are not raving psycopaths. When a “stranger” aproaches a child 999,999 times out of 1,000,000 it will be completely innocuous and the inability to recognize the difference between that 1 times and the 999,999 others is the biggest problem.

Teaching them to set limits is the most important thing. It isn’t enough that they can say “no” to some imaginary disfigured axe murder they must be able to say “no” to everyone with conviction and back it up with deadly violence if necessary. They must be able to say “no” to teachers. They must be able to say “no” to police. They must be able to say “no” to firefighters and to soldiers. They must be able to say “no” to social workers, to lawyers, and to judges. They must be able to say “no” lawmaking bodies and to heads of state. Most importantly, they must be able to say “no” to their families, their siblibings, and their parents and they must be able to back it up with deadly violence if necessary.

As for the “stun and run”, it sounds a bit gimmicky. Anything that relies on a single attack is. It also doesn’t prepare one for situations where running is impossible for one reason are another. There are many. Which is why I prefer to teach children to stun and stick something sharp between the ribs or in the neck untill the “tricky person” stops moving.

I do find the sexual segregation to be annoying and eventually counterproductive. The age segregation isn’t very useful either. It is good that more girls are interested in martial arts but they are missing out on some important lessons due to the segregation. Girls are more likely to experience violence from boyfriends as teenagers than they are from strangers. Therefore, full contact sparing with males of the species is important. Furthermore, girls 6 to 12 are not likely to be victims of sexual violence. A girl’s risk of sexual victimization peaks at 14 according to statistics from the US Department of Justice. On the other hand, boys are getting the short end of the stick here since their risk of being sexually victimized peaks at age 4. For self-defense against sexual molestion young boys and older girls would benefit the most

Gender segregation also creates an us verses them attitude that only fosters animosity, harrasment, violence, and oppression between genders which simply reinforces the trueism “feminism is anti-feminist”.

a girl can be a martial artist just get over it and accept the fact that women suck as fighters and thats what men are for so just teach ur daughter to make me a pie instead of trying to teach her ma

Shut up idiot. Until your balls drop, you shouldn’t talk.

… eyegouges on tricky people.

quietly weeps in the corner

So your saying you teach ‘deadly violence’ to children? Correct?

I guess that if someone tries to pull a Columbine it’s better if everyone has the ability to become extremely mean spirited and homicidal than if they all only know how to become victims.

It is better than teaching 4-year-old girls to gouge hypothetical sexual predators in eyes that they cannot even reach. If you are going to teach children how to defend themselves against people who mean to do them greivous and probably fatal bodily harm you might as well be pragmatic about it and do it right instead of giving them skills that will probably prove ineffectual in a real encounter.

While it is possible for a 4-year-old McBlackblet to beat up a determined adult attacker with nothing other than her bare hands, it is highly unlikely. The size differential puts the child at an extreme disadvantage that simply cannot be overcome with eyegouges and crotchpunches alone.

One must instead turn this disadvantage into an advantage. The strength differential can be bypassed using a force multiplier. Standard blunt instruments don’t work very well for this because a small child may not have the strength to wield one. However, with their small stature, superior agility, and quick reflexes children make excellent knife fighters.

If you really want to give small children the skills they need to defend themselves from predatory adults it would be a good idea to shelf the basic unarmed training untill they are large enough to use it effectivly and skip straight to hardcore knife training.

Is it safe to teach children to kill people with knifes? I don’t know. I’m not a child psycologist. What I do know is that if every child in the world were given a knife and taught how to use one the rate of child molestion would be reduced dramaticly.

Jesus fucking christ…

Yes?

:bowdown:

You gotta admit that even a mean-spirited toddler with a knife would at least be potentally dangerous.