Giving Thanks
November 24, 2005 | Leave a CommentPosted by admin | Filed Under Erin Weed's Blog
Just wanted to wish you all a very happy thanksgiving. I, for one, have so much to be thankful for. Alright, now time to go back to gorging myself with turkey…
Most Dangerous City Announced
November 21, 2005 | Leave a CommentPosted by admin | Filed Under Erin Weed's Blog
PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - Camden, New Jersey, was the most dangerous city in the United States for the second consecutive year, according to an annual survey released on Monday. The survey ranked the rates of serious crimes including murders, rapes and robberies in 369 U.S. cities, based on 2004 statistics reported by the FBI last month.
Camden, a city of 80,000 people near Philadelphia, was listed as the most dangerous, followed by Detroit, Michigan; St. Louis, Missouri; and Flint, Michigan, according to the Safest (and Most Dangerous) Cities survey by Morgan Quitno Press, a research and publishing company based in Kansas. Camden’s murder rate was more than 10 times the national average and its robbery rate was seven times the national average, the study said.
“It was a very bad year for Camden,” said Scott Morgan, president of Morgan Quitno, adding that the city’s rating was the worst in the survey’s 12-year history.
The safest city, also for the second year in a row, was the Boston suburb of Newton, Massachusetts, which had no murders and the lowest overall crime and motor-vehicle theft rates in the nation. Newton was followed by Clarkstown, New York; Amherst, New York; and Mission Viejo, California.
Meet Kelly and Becca
November 18, 2005 | Leave a CommentPosted by admin | Filed Under Erin Weed's Blog
I would like to introduce my loyal blog readers to my friends and fellow women’s activists, Kelly Addington and Becca Teider. They travel the nation speaking to college students about date rape drugs, acquaintance rape and supporting friends who have endured an act as horrific as sexual assault.
During Kelly’s senior year at college, she was slipped a date rape drug and sexually assaulted. She didn’t realize it until days later, which is pretty common with this sort of crime. Her best friend, Becca, was there for Kelly like a sister. Together, they put together the pieces that remained in the aftermath of a woman’s worst nightmare. Today they make a killer team educating students about this devastating issue facing today’s college campuses.
Recently Becca and Kelly were speaking at Wichita State in Kansas, and the local TV station did a story on the awesome work they are doing. Click here to watch the video. You go girls! Keep fighting the good fight.
Watch Primetime Tonight
November 17, 2005 | Leave a CommentPosted by admin | Filed Under Erin Weed's Blog
The ABC News program “Primetime” is scheduled to air an extensive investigation into stories of crime on college campuses this evening. The campus crime segment is expected to be broadcast during the first hour of the program. Please consult your local listings for the exact time and channel in your area.
This feature is part of a special two hour broadcast tonight at 9 PM Eastern/8 PM Central. The story includes segments on the murders of two University of North Carolina Wilmington students, Christen Marie Naujoks and Jessica Lee Faulkner. Their killers were fellow students with criminal records. The story will also feature a brutal robbery that left a University of Tennessee student with permanent brain damage. In addition, the investigation will spotlight the problem of “tailgating” on campus. No, not the drinking in the parking lot kind of tailgating. It is a term used when unauthorized people walk into residence halls behind students who live there while the door slowly closes.
This kind of attention on campus crime is long overdue. I hope you can check it out.
Happy Angela Shelton Day
November 6, 2005 | Leave a CommentPosted by admin | Filed Under Erin Weed's Blog
Well you may not know it, but today is Angela Shelton Day. Angela Shelton is an activist for women and children, an incest survivor, a filmmaker and one of the bravest people I know. (See pic above of us horsing around in Asheville, NC) She made a movie called “Searching for Angela Shelton.” In it, Angela journeys across the United States in a Winnebago to meet other women with the name Angela Shelton as a way to survey women in America. What she wasn’t prepared for was to learn that like herself, 24 out of the 40 Angela Sheltons she spoke to had been raped, beaten or molested. The first Angela Shelton the filmmaker meets rents out space to a foster care company and it brings up the filmmaker’s memories of being in a foster home as a child. Then there is an Angela Shelton who tracks sexual predators and just happens to live in the same town as the filmmaker’s father who molested her and her stepsiblings for years.
“Searching for Angela Shelton” forces the filmmaker to not only confront her past but it leads her to her father’s doorstep on Father’s Day. The interaction between Angela Shelton and her father is riveting and brings you face to face with the depths of denial that a perpetrator can go.
As you can see, Angela is an absolute powerhouse when it comes to making change and forcing people to think about violence in our society. The mayor of Asheville, NC named Nov. 6 Angela Shelton day in honor of all her work. I know I’ll be celebrating!
Visit Angela’s website
Heather Gordon
November 3, 2005 | Leave a CommentPosted by admin | Filed Under Erin Weed's Blog
The message below is from one of my greatest mentors in self-defense named Mark Gordon. Since he was a career Marine, my nickname for him is Marine Mark. This guy is one of the people who inspired me to start Girls Fight Back, and goes down in my book of one of the most amazing people on the planet. Anyways, he has taught extensive women’s self-defense, and last night it got personal. Here is his story.
***
This morning at 0700 my daughter Heather walked in from work. Last night was her first experience of working a late shift at the hotel she works at. At 0300 this morning a guy walked in with sunglasses and a what Heather described as a hair net the lunch ladies wear while serving food. She instinctively knew it was not going to be good.
He had his hand in his coat pocket and pointed it at Heather and demanded money. Heather (thinking he had a gun) gave him all the money $160.00. She was then able to hit the panic button…it didn’t work. The second employee was in his office doing an audit. The perp demanded Heather to go in the back room. He then fled the scene.
Heather was upset at herself because on the video you could see that he just put his hand in the pocket. She couldn’t tell. She said she didn’t get scared until after the incident. She said that when she was walking back toward the back room she was saying…fight HIM not his gun, take his eyes first. She told me that she remembered everything all at once. And that she was waiting for HIM.
Now, as I sit here and right this I am shaken up bit. No one wants their daughter to have to deal with that….ever! But, if I never teach another person anything about self defense, everything that I have taught was validated in a most personal way. She is 19, innocent, not a mean bone in her body but she was faced with a man who she thought had a gun, looked that bastard in the eye, did what she was instructed to do and was formulating a plan to take him out.
***
I love this story because it illustrates how having self-defense training keeps you calm and cool when others freak out. Heather had taken self-defense with her dad, and had experience fighting while under adrenal stress. She was able to calmly acknowledge that it was a bad scene, but not dwell on it. She had already moved on to her action plan.
As I told Marine Mark this morning, it reminded me of a recent interaction I had with a college professor. She was saying how amazing it must be to have my job, and to save people’s lives. But I told her, I don’t save lives. I teach people to save their own lives.
Remember that your personal safety begins and ends with you!