When I was a young newspaper reporter/feature writer circa 1978-9, I did a story about the new interest in learning self-defense seen amongst young women in the US sparked in part by Ted Bundy's rape and killing spree. Several instructors and experts I interviewed said that whilst the young women they taught had no problems at all mastering the self-defense skills, strategies and techniques to keep themselves safe(r) from malevolent men, they'd noticed a worrying pattern: when in a RL situation where they were faced with a man or teenage boy who discomfited, creeped them out, preyed on them, crossed their boundaries, and even began/tried to assault them, a large number of young women couldn't put the self-defense skills and methods they'd learned into action because they were afraid and ashamed of "being mean" and "hurting him." Please note: none of the instructors and experts I spoke to back then thought girls and women were at fault for this, nor did I or my editors: it was becoming apparent and widely accepted back then that girls' and women's difficulty in standing up for ourselves was the result of a lifetime of conditioning that began when we were babies/toddlers - aka "female socialization."