Beyond Sexual Assault Prevention: Targeted Outcomes for Empowerment Self-Defense

Empowerment Self-Defense (ESD) has been shown to be effective in reducing risk of sexual assault victimization among women, but because research in this area is still in its infancy, less is known about additional intervention outcomes that may explain how and why the intervention is effective and about other ways that ESD affects students. The purpose of this study was to examine ESD instructor perspectives about intervention outcomes they perceive to be most important for their students. Using qualitative case-study methodology, interviews from 15 ESD instructors from the United States and Canada were conducted and analyzed using thematic analysis, which yielded six themes: Agency, boundaries, core beliefs, health and healing, somatic experiences, and gender and intersectionality, with each theme having two or more subthemes. Although some of these outcomes have been quantitatively evaluated in previous ESD studies, over half (n = 10) have not yet been empirically measured and are the focus of this article. These 10 outcomes include enactment, self-determination, nonverbal communication, relationship quality, self-worth, healing, physical strength and power, downregulation, support and solidarity, and societal-level changes. In addition to developing standardized tools to measure these outcomes, future research should quantitatively evaluate these outcomes across diverse student populations and explore their effect on producing the profound outcome associated with ESD, which is reduced risk for sexual assault victimization.