As we know all too well, women and girls get tons of useless advice about how to “protect” ourselves. And then whether we follow the advice or not, we’re blamed for our own assaults.

Thankfully, more people are pushing back against these victim-blaming messages and standing up to those who believe we caused our own attacks because of something we did or failed to do.

Increasingly, society is rightfully putting the responsibility for the crime on the person who committed it and not on the person targeted. There is nothing any survivor could do or not do that could “cause” a sexual assault, harassment, intimate partner violence, or stalking to happen.

At the same time, we all have the right to assert our boundaries and defend ourselves. We have the right to unlearn the messages telling us to “stay quiet” and “not rock the boat,” especially in the face of someone hurting us.

But for many people, saying that we can defend ourselves sounds like victim-blaming. It can feel like someone’s saying, “If you just had fought back harder, you would have escaped” or “You should have taken a self-defense class and then you wouldn’t have been raped.”

So how do we reconcile those two messages?

One way is through feminist, empowerment-based self-defense.