History

IMPACT Personal Safety has been training women, men, teens and children in self-defense and personal safety for over 25 years.

The full-force, full-contact form of self-defense taught by IMPACT has its origins in the 1970s, when a female black belt was assaulted and raped by two men. This prompted a group of martial artists to study the different ways in which women and men are assaulted and to seek out the most effective means of real-life defense.

Their research and consultations with survivors of assault, convicted assailants, law enforcement personnel, engineers, psychologists and trauma counselors established the fundamentals that form the basis for IMPACT’s training.

IMPACT initially developed its training for adult women, seeking to combat the frightening statistic that one-in-three women will be the victim of sexual assault during her lifetime. But at least half of the women who took our class had already survived some type of assault. So we developed workshops for teen girls. When we again encountered a much-too-high incidence of assault in that age group, we developed a kids program for boys and girls, ages 6-12.

Over the years, the husbands, boyfriends, brothers, and other males in the lives of our female graduates expressed a desire for training. This led to further research into the dynamics of assaults on males and the development of a men’s course.

Students had endless “what if…?” questions—What if I can’t see? What if he has a gun? What if I’m in a bed? What if my kids are with me?—which resulted in experimentation and the addition of more classes to our roster such as the Advanced Course, Partners, Weapons Defense and Multiple Assailants. But, we didn’t stop there…

In 1989, Millicent Collinsworth asked IMPACT to train her in self-defense. Millicent was legally blind, partially deaf in one ear, and had been the victim of several assaults. IMPACT accepted her challenge and eventually assisted Millicent in creating Project: Blind Ambition, a non-profit self-defense training program for the disabled. This cemented another fundamental of IMPACT’s philosophy—no matter what a person’s disability, we can teach them to improve their personal safety.

In 1993, Marlborough School in Los Angeles hired IMPACT to teach the nation’s first semester-long course in self-defense for PE credit. In fact, demand for the course at Marlborough has been so great that now three to four classes are offered each semester. A few years later, other local private schools have invited us to provide workshops and intensive programs for their students.