Strengthening the body and the mind is the whole purpose of this body-karate course offered in Schiltigheim in the Bas-Rhin region to around a hundred women from all over France, as part of the International Day of Human Rights. women. A course organized by Laurence Belrhiti. This daughter of karate champions (his mother, Catherine Belrhiti, is a double world combat champion and Patrice Belrhiti, his father, five times European champion) is the national representative of this discipline which was born in the 2000s.
The practice of body-karate developed within the French Federation of Karate & Associated Disciplines (FFKDA) which has 250,000 members, including 13,000 body-karate practitioners, the majority of whom are women.
It was Laurence’s mother who created this discipline to feminize the martial arts, originally practiced mainly by men. “Today, explains Lawrence, I bring body-karate into the fight against violence against women. I can make it more than just a sport that makes you sweat”.
Six times French champion of the discipline (to date, it is the most important competition in this practice which only exists in France for the moment), Laurence Belrhiti, describes body-karate as “pure karate but modernized”, which makes it possible to workexplosiveness, cardio, speed, flexibility but also coordination”.
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Coming from a martial art where the mind plays an essential role, body-karate also allows you to find a form of sitting, of anchoring in yourself, which first passes through the body. Then, by regaining freedom of movement as well as a gesture that teaches them to parry and repel blows, the women also gradually reconnect with their self-esteem, even with a form of combativeness.
An essential element to deal with concrete situations of physical aggression. But not only. Because often, the violence is exercised first at the psychological level. “You don’t take a punch overnight without having had a kind of grip that is exercised before. It’s going to be daily humiliations, little remarks”, recalls Anaïs Fuchs, lawyer and president of the criminal commission of the Strasbourg bar association.
Remarks that end up morally destroying the person, his view of himself, making him think that “If she was hit, it’s her fault. By dint of being belittled daily, she thinks she triggered the violence in the other. For Léa Toledano, lawyer and president of CIDFF 67 (the Center for information on the rights of women and families in Bas-Rhin)“this is what allows attackers to maintain their spouse under the influence and to go further and further, sometimes even to death.”
The figures are there to confirm it: in 2021, 113 women died, killed by their spouse.