2002 Jennifer Allshouse Offers Rape Aggression Defense (RAD) Course for Women

Jennifer Allshouse, police services officer, taught the first Rape Aggression Defense (RAD) courses for women in the Penn State Harrisburg community. In 2002, she taught the 12-hour course twice to small groups of participants, and continued to teach it for several years afterwards. To instruct a RAD course, Allshouse had to go through a 30-hour instructor training course.

In 2004, she also started to offer a 2-hour S.A.F.E. (Self-Defense Awareness Familiarization) course, which was less intensive but still provided participants with information that may reduce their risk of exposure to violence and familiarize them with basic skills to avoid and escape attack. She also taught these courses off-campus for other members of the local community.

Prior to joining the police services at Penn State Harrisburg in 1999, Allshouse worked for eight years at the Penn College of Technology Police Department in Williamsport where she earned the rank of sergeant. She was the department’s first female police officer. Before that, she had earned her associate’s degree in business administration from Penn State Dubois, a bachelor’s degree in criminology from IUP, and then graduated from the IUP PA Police Academy Training Course in 1990. While working at Penn State Harrisburg, she started working on her master’s degree in health education.

Allshouse was an active member of many committees related to law enforcement and sexual assault including memberships with the Penn State Harrisburg Liaison Committee to the University Commission for Women and the Sexual Harassment Resource Team, PA Association of Campus Crime Prevention Practitioners, Dauphin County Domestic Violence Task Force, Mid-Atlantic Association for Women in Law Enforcement, and the American Women’s Self-Defense Association.

In 2006, she won the Kathryn Towns Award and then in 2007 the Achieving Women Award, both presented by Penn State’s Commission for Women. In 2008, she became chair of the awarding organization.

She told a student reporter that in the future she hoped to teach criminology and law enforcement at the college level.