After herself becoming a statistic in the country’s crime scourge, Miss South Africa is showing women how to defend themselves, and last Saturday she was at the Observatory community centre doing just that.
Demi-Leigh Nel-Peters said she had decided to launch Unbreakable, a campaign teaching women self-defence skills, after experiencing an attempted hijacking earlier this year.
She now works closely with karate expert Mark Grobbelaar, who created Woman INPowered (WIP), to teach women how to react in life-threatening situations.
“It was an awful experience, but I knew how to handle the situation in the best possible way, because I had done WIP and MasterDrive workshops for women that focused on everything from hijacking and robberies and how to handle these situations, to how to get out of toxic and abusive relationships,” said Ms Nel-Peters.
“I am a firm believer that knowledge is power and the information I learnt on these courses certainly helped me. So now, together with Mark, we will set up similar workshops.”
During the free workshop, women were shown how to defend themselves during a hijacking or assault. We aim to change the way women view self-defence by seeing the power in being able to take control and, by doing so, changing the outcome of a situation. It is easy to learn and yet devastatingly effective,” said Mr Grobbelaar.
