Comments

Thank you so much for everything that you have done with your involvment in 'Just yell fire'. I have a 13 year old daughter with a bunch of very close friends. As soon as we get our d.v.d. we will be having a pizza night with them all and watching "JUST YELL FIRE". The world needs more people like you.

We are always looking for good, interesting and helpful programs to offer our patrons. We are lucky that we live in a low crime area, but it is true that crime has no boundaries, and it's always best to be prepared.

I work for Healthy Communities/Healthy Youth of Marquette County, Wisconsin as the Montello Prevention Coordinator. One aspect of my job is running a junior high and high school group that focuses on educating about the dangers of drugs and alcohol and giving the kids better things to do than using substances. I am working on bringing a Date Rape Awareness week to the high school in the spring and when I heard about this dvd I had to have it!!! In college I was a victim of 2 separate rapes. The first rape was an aquaintance rape and the second was a stranger rape. My life has changed forever, both of the rapes happened when I was 21 within 5 weeks of each other (I am only 22 now so the memories are very vivid), but this job gives me an outlet that will allow my pain to possibly prevent future women from going through what I went through and am still going through. I thank you very much for making this dvd, more than you could ever know!

I am interested in becoming a certified trainer for Just Yell Fire. I gained my Master's degree in Library Science last May with an emphasis in children's and youth services, and hope to find a job soon as a public librarian. With the amount of contact I will have in that field with young and teenage girls, as well as contacts with schools and other libraries, I would like to find out how to become involved and help promote your program.

I have been training in aikido as a self-defense art since June, and will be testing for my first rank soon. The more I learned in aikido, the more it made me aware of how girls and women in America are socialized about violence. Movies, television, and popular media seem to promote the belief that girls and women cannot win or escape in a situation where we are under attack by a man. Recognizing this made me interested in finding out what programs were already available to promote girls' and women's self-defense. I discovered Just Yell Fire by Googling "women's self-defense". I was thrilled to find that someone has begun a movement to counter that socialization early in women's lives, beginning with teaching the girls who are most at risk that they CAN defend themselves and escape an attacker, even if their attacker is much larger. I myself am only 5'1", and the techniques that eliminate an attacker's advantage of greater height are also especially applicable to me.

I live in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, and I would like any information available on training for certification for Just Yell Fire, either locally or in neighboring states if necessary. Many thanks to you, Dallas, and everyone else involved with Just Yell Fire for your caring and hard work.

My daughter is about to go to college and I am interested in your DVD. I would like to give her some skills to avoid an unwanted encounter. I myself was the victim of an assault during my sleep; fortunately, I woke up and my instincts took over to fight back. My attack could have been much worse as many of his victims didn't make it and were permanently disfigured.
Best of luck with your cause, it is an awesome one.

I checked out the link for your daughter's film. Very cool! I was thinking about it this morning when I was on the treadmill and CNN had a piece on ladies that were potential military recruits being raped by their recruiters. They interviewed this one person, who was sixteen at the time of the rape, and her responses made me think that she just didn't have a clue how to fight back. I hope your daughter's movie empowers women to not only learn how to fight back, but to take action when they need to!

Just sort of off the cuff, Maggie, I got to thinking today about how doctors and inventors also do things to benefit the public, but they don't give their services or ideas away for free. For what you and your wonderful Dallas have done, you deserve to be multi-millionaires. JYF is a priceless gift for all of mankind! For it, I'm truly sorry that the proper gratitude it deserves can only be expressed in the old cliché that no words in the English language are sufficient enough; no word, no phrase. To me, this is one of less than maybe a handful of ideas since time immemorial that will prove to have such a thorough, beneficial impact on mankind.

Katherine and Dallas, I am very proud of the effort you have made to make all of this a reality.

The greatest defence a person has is knowledge. This project will be a great learning tool to empower our kids. We need more projects like this.

This is a comment sent in to our trainers Leila Rae Sommerfeld and Valerie Mainridge of Gresham, OR

Thank you again from our entire team! You and Valerie did such a fabulous job. Several of our volunteers commented at the end that your traiing was the best self-defense class they had ever taken - and several had attended classes in the past. you adapted your presentation to fit perfectly into our time constraints and skill level. You and Valerie brought such great energy and enthusiasm to our class. We especially appreciate you taking time on a Sunday. We feel empowered to continue to advocate for sexually exploited women in and around Portland.

We are so pleased to know you and your work. I hope this is only the beginning of our partnership.