Send us a text Violence prevention expert and author Meg Stone joins hosts Katie Shipp, Chessy Prout, and Gabriel Viscogliosi for an unforgettable conversation about reclaiming safety, autonomy, and resistance. Drawing from her new book The Cost of Fear, Meg exposes how traditional “safety” advice, rooted in fear, control, and sexism, has changed little since the 1970s, and why it continues to harm more than it helps. Meg challenges outdated, compliance-based models of personal safety that burden women and marginalized people with preventing violence against themselves. Instead, she offers an evidence-based vision of safety through resistance and trauma-informed empowerment self-defense, built on research and lived experience. The conversation explores how agency differs from responsibility, why freeze responses never imply failure, and how movement-based, feminist self-defense can foster both healing and social change. The IMPACT Violence Prevention website lists all IMPACT organizations: https://impactboston.org/impact-organizations/ National Women’s Martial Arts Federation, for definitions and descriptions of empowerment self-defense: https://nwmaf.org/resources/empowerment/ Instructor directory: https://nwmaf.org/resources/empowerment/nwmaf-certified-instructors/ Empowerment Self-Defense Alliance: https://www.empowermentsd.org/find-a-practitioner What to look for while assessing a self-defense class: https://defendyourself.org/whats-a-class-like/picking-a-self-defense-class/
