Lara Logan Assault: Why Female Foreign Correspondents Need Self-Defense Skills

If you're Melissa Soalt, aka "Dr. Ruthless," you preach the gospel of low-down, dirty, eye-gouging, groin-crushing, go-for-the-throat self-defense tactics for women. You also take your 26 years of martial arts training -- Soalt is in the Black Belt Hall of Fame -- and combine it with your insights as a former psychotherapist. You come up with a potent message to women that constant fear is a crippler, and that you can learn how to fight like a warrior -- or a mad dog -- always keeping in mind that fleeing, if possible, is your best defense.

Recently, Soalt joined an online discussion at Politics Daily about the attack on CBS reporter Lara Logan in Egypt. Soalt questions why female foreign correspondents don't routinely get self-defense training. She sent us her thoughts, and we followed up later with a call to her home in Massachusetts.

Why did Lara Logan's attack touch such a nerve?

Journalists tell stories the world might otherwise never hear. They also speak for people who sometimes cannot speak for themselves, usually out of fear. And sometimes the journalist, the storyteller, becomes the story. That was the case with Lara Logan.

Her assault and beating in Cairo's Tahrir Square sent shock waves through the journalistic community. Not only because it was a rapacious attack by a mob of men, but upon returning home she was re-attacked by loutish commentators and keyboard cretins who took some twisted pleasure in castigating her as the ballsy blonde, the warmongering reporter with a "hotness factor." In other words: she had it coming. Wanted it.

They should choke on a chicken bone.

What still haunts me is the picture of Ms. Logan's face, taken shortly before the attack. . . . It captures something uniquely female, a vulnerability -- and it speaks to every woman's unspoken fears of becoming prey. It's a sickening reality: That in our 21^st century, the taking and violating of the female body remains pandemic. You see it in the devastated face of a rape victim in the Congo. Or the face of the NYC woman who was beaten to a pulp in a restroom stall; or the numbed-out face of a Cambodian girl forced into sexual slavery.

These are all haunting images that we typically watch from the comfort of our sofas; they are the stories that journalists and women reporters go after -- then find themselves in places where lawlessness and armed men are plentiful -- and nice toilets, not so much.

We need to protect journalists so they can tell the stories the world might otherwise never read or hear.

And those who say Lara Logan's experience just proves why women journalists should not be on the front lines?

That would not only be a backward step for women, but it's not an effective solution. The better remedy, along with tightened security, is not to block women from assignments but to prep them to be battle-ready. Female journalists must learn to become self-defending dames! Prepping women with self-protection strategies would seem a no-brainer, yet this is nowhere to be found in "hostile environment" training. (The exception being the BBC, which offers safety training to women by women.)

Judith Matloff, a veteran correspondent of war zones, addressed the huge issue of sex assaults on female journalists in a Columbia Journalism Review article, "Unspoken: Foreign Correspondents and Sexual Assault."

Here's a quote: "Women have risen to the top of war and foreign reportage. They run bureaus in dodgy places and do jobs that are just as dangerous as those that men do. But there is one area where they differ from the boys -- sexual harassment and rape. Female reporters are targets in places where guns are common and punishment rare. . . . War zones in particular seem to invite unwanted advances, and sometimes the creeps can be the drivers, guards, and even the sources that one depends on to do the job. "

The risk of sex assault is corroborated in a survey in the International News Safety Institute (INSI). It's a slim survey, albeit, but a whopping half of its respondents "reported sexual harassment and a significant number said they experienced sexual abuse."

The other part of this is the "don't ask, don't tell" element. Matloff describes how female journalists don't talk about the assaults they endure for fear of losing assignments or being seen as wimps. Women have to get past that.

So your solution is a crash course in self-defense for women journalists?

Call it civil duty, but I feel called to the task. I'm going on record to let media and journalism outfits know that I want to help. Seriously -- call me!

Let me back up. I'm not a journalist. I'm a women's self-defense expert and advocate of 26 years. [By the way, I'm five feet tall on a good hair day.] I talk about fight-back self-defense -- but as a last resort on the continuum of strategies. I unabashedly advocate that ALL women uncover and train their capacities for aggressive self-protection. Not only is it imperative to female safety and well-being, but it also counters the ills and indignities imposed by fear.

Returning to Logan's experience -- you've said you have no details of what happened to her that day in Tahrir Square -- but can you talk in general about recovering from a sexual assault?

The truth is some women never recover. I'm hoping and assuming that Ms. Logan will get therapeutic treatment, but it takes time, and the residue from the trauma lingers. In fact, it embeds itself in your body tissue, in your neural network. . . .

Rape boasts a high incidence of PTSD, but as it turns out, having fight-back skills can make a huge difference in the aftermath -- regardless of outcome. Judith Herman, M.D., writes in "Trauma & Recovery" that women who fight back are not only more likely to be successful in thwarting the rape attempt, but less likely to suffer severe distress symptoms. On the other hand, women who submitted without a struggle were more likely to be highly self-critical and depressed in the aftermath.

This alone is plenty good reason to learn how to fight like a junkyard bitch.

That is not to suggest that Lara Logan could have done something to remedy her overwhelming situation -- of course not. But simply that women need to be armed with practical skills to handle a variety of what if scenarios specific to the sexual assault, harassment and hostilities that women journalists are most likely to face.

You were attacked in Boulder, Colo., in the 1980s.

Yes, I know what it's like to be scared to death, to be awakened in the night by a knife-wielding intruder and to hear these words scream in your head: "Now I am going to die . . . Now I am going to be raped to death." I heard his footsteps creaking on the floorboards -- not the footsteps of my then-fiance -- and saw him, maybe 10 feet away with knife in hand, approaching my bed. I sat up and unleashed blood-curdling yells and screams. My "war cries" sent him fleeing out the door, rather than closing the distance on me.

In my youth, I also did quite a bit of traveling as a "hippie voyager." I've been assaulted and have successfully bashed back, freeing myself from would-be rapists and a couple of street thugs in Israel, India, Pakistan and Italy. Places steeped in patriarchal rule where ownership and "taking" have historically been the privileges of men, where women routinely suck up indignities -- gropes and grabs, some fleeting like skaters on ice, other more stinging like hit-and-run thieves in the night.

But that pales by comparison to the panic of being trapped in a mob. It happened to me one day in Peshawar (1975) while walking a fellow traveler's St. Bernard. When we came to rest at a street corner, which was unremarkable at first, a group of maybe 30 or so men swooped in around us with the velocity of a thunderclap. The dog and I were stoned with rocks. When that first crush of terror hit and took my breath away, I instinctively crushed back. Somehow I managed to crash and bang my way out through the weak link in the chain -- a tactic I would later come to know as "entering," as "charging" an enemy when the only way out is through. We ran like the dickens, bruised but not broken.

What would you teach woman journalists?

Well, I could show you how to kill a man with a pen -- preferably a good, solid, titanium ballpoint pen -- how to drive it into the soft tissue of the throat, or the groin, or even the eye. The key is remembering your hips are your center of power.

Here is what journalists under my tutelage would be packing, along with notebooks and very good shoes: The mindset of a Marine, the heart of a lioness, and the essential knowledge of a security director.

And here is a sampling of the curriculum: