Beyond Sexual Assault Prevention: Targeted Outcomes for Empowerment Self-Defense.

This article examines Empowerment Self-Defense (ESD) instructor perspectives on the most important outcomes associated with ESD courses, which are designed to reduce sexual assault risk among women. Using qualitative case-study methodology with 15 instructors from the United States and Canada, six key outcome themes were identified: agency, boundaries, core beliefs, health and healing, somatic experiences, and gender and intersectionality. While some outcomes like self-efficacy and risk detection have been quantitatively studied, instructors highlighted additional outcomes—such as enactment, self-determination, nonverbal communication, relationship quality, self-worth, healing, physical strength and power, downregulation, support and solidarity, and societal-level changes—that remain underexplored in research. The study underscores the importance of intersectional feminist and social cognitive frameworks in ESD and calls for further research to develop standardized measures and evaluate these outcomes across diverse populations to better understand how ESD contributes to sexual assault prevention and broader social change.