A Fight Against Sexual Assault
June 2016
Ryan Kelly gets down on the ground; lying on his side, he grasps his teacher assistant’s ankles as she stands over him. He pushes off her legs; swinging his body outwards into a “V” shaped position. This is a technique he calls “shrimping.”
He stands out as the only male in the room as he teaches this escape technique to a group of 20 young women at the University of Oregon. This is just one of the moves Kelly teaches his students in the hopes of saving their lives.
Ryan Kelly is a father of three, a husband, and a martial arts instructor of 22 years. He began practicing martial arts at 10 years old after being a victim of childhood bullying and a sexual assault. Kelly now owns his own mixed martial arts studio, Northwest Martial Arts Academy in Eugene, Oregon, which he has run for the past twenty years with his wife Jenna Kelly. He has also expanded the women’s self defense program at the University of Oregon. Within his studio and the ten classes he teaches at the university, he hopes to instill confidence and a sense of personal empowerment with his students.
A simple man with a lean build and a humble smile, he’s no Incredible Hulk in appearance, but Kelly could take you down in a swift sequence of moves. We sit in his office; to the right is a wall of his framed certificates featuring the variety of martial arts he has been trained to teach in, Jeet Kune Do, Filipino Marital Arts, and Sambo among them. Behind him, to the left, sits a large window opening up to his studio where a group of regulars spar after the day’s classes have finished. He’s hesitant with his words at first, but as we continue to speak his voice rises with pride and passion as he leads me through his journey with martial arts.
Kelly started martial arts at ten after a long string of childhood bullying incidents. The teasing started when he was young, but as he grew, the words turned into fists.
Kelly’s parents began to worry, as he would spend most of his free time indoors too afraid to play outside or walk to the park. The first martial arts class they signed him up for was karate because his dad it practiced as well.
At twelve Kelly made the career decision we typically don’t make until halfway through college. “I’m going to help other people get to this place that I have got to, because of the difference it [self-defense] made in my life. From being scared all the time and feeling like a victim to being empowered and feeling like I can stand up for myself. I don’t want to fight, but I can.”
Through these years he fell in love with the sport. Not only did he gain the confidence to defend himself, but he also now had enough confidence to stand up for others. He recalls the social experiments we often see floating around YouTube where someone will pretend to bully someone else in an attempt to provoke a reaction from bystanders. Often the strangers will walk past, unwilling to help, claiming that they don’t want to get beat up themselves. Kelly differs from the average stranger in that he’s not afraid of getting his ass kicked or being called the “buzz kill,” because of the confidence he’s gained through self-defense.
Kelly never imagined his future any other way. “Martial arts gave me superpowers,” he stated.
In addition to teaching at his academy, he has been teaching at universities for the past 20 years. He started at Umpqua Community College, in Roseburg, Oregon, and three years later moved on to the University of Oregon. He now teaches ten different martial arts classes, including women’s self defense. He started teaching women’s self defense about eight years ago, out of what Kelly says was necessity.
He was often asked by businesses and women’s groups to teach women’s self defense workshops, and he thought it couldn’t be that much different than general self defense. He began researching for programs that he could model his curriculum after. He couldn’t find one.
During his research he learned that an act of sexual assault would most likely be done by someone you know or an acquaintance. While doing his research he recalled a repressed memory from deep in his past.
When Kelly was ten he befriended an older neighbor who asked him to help him with yard work. As their relationship grew, the neighbor would invite him in for a glass of lemonade. He then began to tell dirty jokes, and eventually offered him a cigarette and some Playboy magazines. Kelly recognized the slightly strange behavior, but as a young 10 year-old, he thought it was kind of cool to hang out with a guy that threw around cuss words. What Kelly didn’t know was that this man would eventually sexually assault him. Even though Kelly had some martial arts experience he was “a deer in headlights.”
Fortunately, the situation was interrupted by a random knock at the man’s front door, and Kelly used that time to flee. It took some time for him to process the situation because this man was supposedly his friend. Why would his friend do something like that?
Something struck him after recalling this repressed memory from years ago; not only do you need to know how to defend yourself, but you also need to know the signs of an impending assault. Kelly realized that when your assailant is someone you know, you are not thinking about tearing his or her eye out.
He states that “this is when I started becoming a good women’s self defense teacher.” In his class he began teaching verbal defense and how to detect the signs of a potential assault. Kelly felt he was now teaching more verbal instructions rather than physical defense techniques.
He approached Jocelyn Hollander, the head of the UO’s sociology department, and the researcher behind most of the articles and statistics he was reading about sexual assault. He learned that the sexual assault rates on college campuses are currently one in five for women and one in 16 for men and are highest within the first two months of school.
Hollander has been involved in sexual assault awareness for about 30 years after taking a women’s self defense course at her university. She states, “When I became a sociologist, I discovered that there had been almost no research on women’s self-defense training, so I started a research project to see whether learning self-defense makes women safer.”
Together Kelly and Hollander developed a two-part class that has been in place for a year now. This allows Kelly to focus on physical defense with the class twice a week, and Hollander or another instructor will meet with the students once a week to discuss verbal strategies and techniques to diffuse threatening situations.
Catie Parker, a second-year student at the University of Oregon, stated that her favorite part of the women’s self defense course was the physical aspect. The class showed her the power and strength she never knew she had. At the end of the term she felt the class had proved itself when she was able to fight her instructor and effectively hold off his weight.
Parker learned many techniques from Kelly that included, how to create space between her and the attacker and how to use simple moves to cause a minor injury to distract the assailant.
Kelly realizes that when the attacker is someone you know you may be apprehensive to use violence. He therefore focuses on teaching how to keep yourself safe but also how to cause harm if necessary.
All of the techniques he teaches fall under the umbrella of Jeet Kune Do. Kelly uses techniques from over 50 forms of martial arts in his teaching. He most commonly uses types of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and Filipino martial arts in his women’s self defense class, among others.
Over the past eight years Kelly has become very familiar with the statistics surrounding sexual assault. He has done research, been to rallies, and attended lectures all to learn how to improve his teaching. He states that a common question that comes up at each event is “What are we going to do about this problem? What is the answer? Where is the solution?” Kelly states that he is constantly trying to show that the solution is right here in empowerment self-defense.
He believes, “It’s a fantasy land to think that we’re just going to be able to tell predators to stop being predators.” He emphasizes that although it would be ideal, the answer isn’t in a PSA telling people not to commit sexual assault. Universities and institutions don’t like to admit that teaching fighting skills is the answer.
Kelly would love to find a more holistic approach, and he doesn’t believe we should shut the door on any of the strategies we are currently being taught. In the meantime, self-defense is the most realistic solution, as it is the one thing that is improving the statistics on sexual assault, by reducing the risk by more than 80 percent.
Kelly wants to start solving the problem by getting his self-defense curriculum out to every student at the UO. He hopes to then expand his curriculum to every university, and then to high schools and middle schools thereafter. His goals may be ambitious but he clarifies, “The problem is big enough that the response needs to be big enough, and right now it’s a half-ass response to a big ass problem.”