The Girl’s Center at Clemson University has brought in the young filmmaker who launched what CNN calls a Million Girl Revolution against violence and abuse, to keynote the 2013 Empowering Girls Symposium kicking off Domestic Violence Awareness Month at the Columbia Convention Center on Friday beginning at 8AM.
Dallas Jessup, who founded the nonprofit Just Yell Fire and has traveled 200,000 miles speaking out against violence against girls, has a very different take on empowering girls. Just 21 she believes the key to stopping violence and abuse is to empower girls to know their rights, give them some stay safe strategies, and for when trouble finds them, give them some street fighting get-away tools, e.g. eye gouging, whipslapping an ear, to buy a few seconds to escape an attacker.
In a country where 1 in 4 girls will be victims of sexual assault, 1 in 3 victims of abuse or random violence, Jessup’s message has resonated so widely that her nonprofit has connected with 1.8 million girls across 66 countries, MIT and many other universities are using her program to keep their girls safe, and even the FBI has used it to empower their own daughters.
Jessup just graduated from Vanderbilt University, is an expert in multiple martial arts, the author of the book Young Revolutionaries Who Rock, and the producer of two stay-safe films for girls (free for online download), one of which was 1 of 10 most-downloaded production length films worldwide in the year of its release.
There’s much more to the story that you can see at the www.justyellfire.com; Jessup’s tips, tools, and strategies for keeping girls safe make a great story. She’s an articulate and entertaining voice for the subject who girls respond to because she is one of them.
This is an important and informative talk that no woman can afford to miss.