Screaming Eagle and Hawk Learn How to Break a Few Bones

Rape. The most hated word in a woman’s vocabulary, the awful crime of sexual dominance that unites us as sisters in fear, victims or potential victims of those inevitably more powerful males who seek to physically dominate us.

Fear no more, says Tevis Verrette, who advocates a bone-breaking, eye-gouging, take-no-prisoners solution. Women are powerful, it’s just that most don’t know it because no one bothered to tell them. Women need not be victims, Verrette says, regardless of how big or intimidating the attacker.

Verrette isn’t just talking. A third-degree jujitsu black belt, Verrette has over the past six years trained nearly 2,000 women to defend themselves. His First Strike Rape Prevention classes--so-named, Verrette says, because the first strike against an attacker is the most important--are held each Saturday at the Sepulveda Recreation Center.

For $395 for a seven-week-course, women learn to break legs, smash faces and crack skulls. No fancy-schmancy martial arts stuff here. This is street fighting at its dirtiest. Go ahead and scratch a man’s eyes out, Verrette says--it works. He tells women to get down on the ground where they can use their hips and legs, because that’s where most of their strength comes from. Kick an assailant’s groin, but do it right, he says. Don’t just make him wince, pulverize his pelvis.

Verrette doesn’t just show women how to rip a man’s ear off. Though he does that too. In fact, he says, about two-thirds of class time is given to putting women in the right psychological frame of mind to destroy an attacker.

He calls it “personal power.”

Someone else might call it programming women to be killers as men have been programmed by warrior trainers since the dawn of the club.

Verrette even refers to his students as “warriors.” They adopt noms de combat like “Tigress,” “Spike,” and “Screaming Eagle,” that reflect their new warrior personas.

Has it come to this? Is a woman’s only alternative to being a helpless victim becoming an eyeball-plucking Amazon?

Well, maybe so. Sure, we all want a less violent world. Social workers and psychologists stress the need to address the root causes of heinous crimes like rape and abuse--and they’re right.

But until a better world comes along, 173,000 women were raped in this country in 1991, up 33% from 1990, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Some private organizations put the figures much higher. The National Victim Center in Alexandria, Va. and the Crime Research and Treatment Center of the Medical University of South Carolina estimate that 683,000 adult women are forcibly raped each year in the United States. That translates to 1.3 rapes per minute.

The Los Angeles Police Department, fearing lawsuits, advocates neither resisting attackers or acquiescing. Sgt. Christopher West, who heads the LAPD’s crime prevention section, says that research is inconclusive as to whether fighting back improves a victim’s chances of survival.

But Verrette scorns counsels that women should submit rather than risk angering their attackers as “akin to sheep awaiting their own slaughter.”

A disarmingly polite, 30-year-old black man with soap-opera star looks, Verrette says he formed First Strike six years ago after learning that a former fiance had been date-raped and that another friend had been abducted and raped. He began investigating and found that while there were rape-therapy groups aplenty, precious few programs actually taught women how to fight back.

Some might find Verrette’s courses a tad theatrical. At the “graduation” of First Strike’s 69th warrior class recently, nine women linked arms in a circle and let loose their “warrior scream.” Before an enthusiastic audience of about 100 friends and relatives, the women took turns demonstrating their new skills. The “attackers” were Verrette and another male instructor, protected by padding and helmets that made them look like crosses between Darth Vadar and “Jason” from the “Friday the 13th” movies.

The women were approached both standing up and lying down, feigning sleep. A few even stripped their “assailants” of a knife or an unloaded pistol. While the men were busy trying to unzip a fly or pull down a woman’s pants--what First Strike teaches is a “window”--the women gouged eyes, kicked groins and snapped kneecaps, then used their legs to land repeated body blows. Once down, the man received multiple kicks to the head--strong enough, Verrette later explained, to crush an unprotected skull.

Women say First Strike has changed their lives.

Lisa “Rock” Lee, a 24-year-old CSUN student who says she attended First Strike after being stalked by a former boyfriend, says the program “gave me back what he had taken from me. It gave me a sense of security. It gave me hope.”

Says Caroline “Hawk” Hoadley, a 28-year-old marketing researcher, “I’m no longer the same person. I’m no longer afraid of the dark.”

First Strike “is not just about self-defense,” Verrette insists. “It’s about self-confidence, self-worth, self-esteem.”

But the bottom line is, he teaches women to be ready, in their minds, “to kill, if necessary.”

Has it come to this?

The answer, sadly, is yes.