More than just self-defense
Bob Moore used to teach girls how to “beat guys up.”
Now the retired Norman police officer shows them other ways to prevent being the victim of rape and other sexual assaults.
Bring a crowd with you. Be responsible for yourself and your friends. Get your own drink. If you put it down, leave it. And never leave your friends behind.
“There’s a psychology behind it,” said Bob Moore, who travels the country teaching self-defense techniques.
On Wednesday, Moore, daughter Megan and her service dog Koda were on hand at Emerson North High School to teach the seventh of eight classes designed to empower female students through awareness, education, violence prevention, risk reduction and appropriate self-defense techniques.
Four years ago, Megan Moore was beaten and raped while in a relationship and subsequently developed seizures. The dog alerts Moore when she’s going to have one, “so I don’t fall and hit my head.”
The focus of Wednesday’s lesson was alcohol and drugs and how they can impair the decisionmaking process.
“I’m not trying to tell you how to live; I’m trying to teach you how to protect yourselves,” Bob Moore told about 20 female students.
One by one, the students took turns slapping the sides of a training dummy’s head, each wearing goggles to simulate intoxication.
“It was like a whole new world; I couldn’t see anything clearly, I couldn’t walk in a straight line,” said senior Kanijah Manuel, 18.
Two years ago, Manuel and her mother were the victims of domestic violence and left their home in Atlanta to escape their attacker.
“I feel as if I need to learn to protect myself and protect the people I love,” she said. “I can stop a bad situation from happening just by knowing some selfdefense skills and ways to keep myself safe.”
Emerson teachers TingLan Lu and Rivers McKenzie came up with the idea for starting the “My Life, My Body” empowerment program at Emerson North, a downtown alternative
school for teenage mothers and other at-risk students.
“Our students ... for whatever reason don’t fare well in a traditional setting,” McKenzie said. “I think it’s really important to have an outlet for physical energy.
“A lot of our students have been traumatized in the past or live in situations that have ongoing traumas. There’s a lot of energy, sometimes, that manifests itself as aggression, anger. So I think this is a really useful outlet to express some of that in a way that is not going to get them kicked out of school.”
The Foundation for Oklahoma City Public Schools and DonorsChoose provided about $2,700 in funding, about $1,000 of which will pay for Moore to train Lu and McKenzie to teach the empowerment program going forward.