One of the throat strikes almost knocks Karin Walen off stage. The sparring pad she held up had blocked the impact, as it had with all the previous girls, but there’s a little too much gusto this time around and she creep-creep-creeps to the edge of the platform. But it’s just three hits and soon enough Walen laughs it off and she’s back in position for the next girl.

The instructors had asked for 10 volunteers but two dozen, maybe three dozen, had piled on stage. The last demonstration — groin strikes — had simply looked too fun. They could hit pads as hard as possible, they could swear and everyone would laugh it off — students, teachers and, yes, even their parents.

Hundreds of teenaged girls from Issaquah, Skyline and Liberty high schools gathered in the Issaquah High theater Nov. 13 for a sexual assault and self defense seminar organized by teachers Walen and Meggan Atkins. The seminar was part of the Fight The Fear campaign begun by singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile, who was present for the event.

“You can’t count the statistics of the things that didn’t happen because you’re here,” Carlile said, speaking briefly to students.

Carlile said that too often, women and girls don’t stand up for themselves in the face of dangerous situations because they have been raised to be demure and accommodating.

“The time to be quiet and cute is over,” she said. “That belongs in your parents’ and grandparents’ generation.”

The seminar, conducted with Fight the Fear Executive Director Melinda Johnson, included demonstrations of several defensive strikes and body language techniques to project a shield of confidence against would-be attackers. Jenna Hopper, the survivor of the high-profile 2009 South Park rape-slaying, shared her story of finding hope again after an attack.

Information on the prevalence of sexual assault was also presented, including the video “The Undetected Rapist.”

“The Undetected Rapist” — a recreation of an interview between Dr. David Lisak of the University of Massachusetts-Boston and a male college student — is an educational product borne out of a study by the Men’s Sexual Trauma Research Center. Researchers in the study collected survey responses from 1,882 college-aged men about their life and sexual experiences. Embedded in the surveys were behavioral questions that effectively asked the participants if they had ever had sexual experiences that matched the conservative legal definitions of rape, attempted rape or other sexual assaults, without referencing those crimes by name — such as “Have you ever had sexual intercourse with an adult when they didn’t want to because you used physical force if they didn’t want to cooperate?” Respondents who answered yes were interviewed further.

The results of that study found 120 men had committed 483 rapes against women they knew. None of those rapes were reported.

“Really, only one out of a hundred men are these perpetrators,” Atkins said. “But when you look at a school of a few thousand people … it adds up.”

The instructors expounded the importance of paying heed to fear as a protective instinct.

“The fear we carry around all the time, the anxiety that gets in the way of everyday life, that’s not the fear you should listen to,” Johnson said. “Mammalian fear … that’s the fear we want to listen to. When somebody is thinking about assaulting you, your body will tell you something’s wrong.”

Walen said she hoped the seminar would encourage girls to sign up for the after-school defense workshops taught by herself and Atkins.

Atkins and Walen became involved with Fight the Fear after attending the campaign’s launch in Seattle’s Capitol Hill in 2010. They trained in self defense under Johnson and applied for a grant to purchase training pads, allowing them to run four workshops a year.

In May, the teachers and Johnson ran a training seminar for teachers interested in running similar workshops.

Student response to last Thursday’s seminar was positive but at least one teen thought there was a group conspicuously absent from the night’s lessons.

“We have all these girls here learning to protect themselves, but what about the boys?” Liberty High School sophomore Soraya Marashi asked. “Shouldn’t we also teach the boys not to do these horrible things?”