She is 12 years old and she was counting down the minutes Friday in her seventh-grade class until the time she could take her best shot at a cop.

She was ready to put the moves learned in class to the test against police officers all padded up as volunteer predators. She has never known the ugly, brutal experience of assault. But when she heard her mother was going to take the RAD course, she asked to come along. She is not too young.

In a brightly lit second-floor room at the Barrington Police Department, there is some nervous laughter among the women who have completed nine hours of training and are preparing for the final night “simulation.” They will be asked to “walk down the street” or “wait for the bus,” the kind of everyday actions that too often become the prelude to rape.

“Can you tell us what to expect when we go in there?” asks a woman as she waits to take part in the simulation.

“No,” says an instructor.

It is very serious stuff. It is about dealing with the creepy, vicious underside of life that can ooze to the surface in the least expected places.

The 12-year-old and her mother live in Bristol. The mean streets of Bristol are not something we hear much about.

“I felt like Bristol was safe when we moved here 12 years ago,” says the mother. “But there’s a difference now.”

“There are more strangers around the neighborhood,” says her daughter.

“And you hear stories,” says the mother.

So they signed up for RAD — Rape Aggressive Defense. It has been around for 19 years. It is a network of self-defense instructors who stress easily learned, easily retained and easily applied methods of self-defense.

“It’s very empowering,” says JoAnne Waite, who learned RAD while working at a residential facility for sex offenders in Massachusetts. “It’s very tactic based. There are certain maneuvers that come from the center and the core of the body.”

She is a marriage and family therapist who also works with the sex offender treatment program at the Adult Correctional Institutions. She is the state director of RAD, which is provided at no charge by eight Rhode Island police departments and at Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design.

Women who take the course, says Waite, are more aware of the dangers. They also know they have a way of dealing with them. The realtor who makes calls to strangers’ houses can move more easily on the job.

There are 20 women in the class. One is a rape victim. Before the simulation, Waite takes the women through the moves they have learned — straight kick, sweep kick, block and parry, hammer fist, snap kick, knee strike. Then the women take their turn, reacting quickly, loudly and with all those moves and a few of their own to the crude advances of the padded volunteers.

One woman joined the class at the request of her grandfather, a cop who wanted her to have the training before she heads for college in the fall. She said she found the knee strike the most effective move.

Waite says one of the very good things about RAD is that it gets people talking about something they should talk about but seldom do. It gets young girls talking about how they sometimes feel what happens to them is their fault when it isn’t at all.

And it gets women talking about the things they can do and not do to avoid becoming a victim. For example, the woman walking through the mall parking lot with cell phone to her ear and shopping bags in hand is doing something very dumb and very dangerous.

bkerr@projo.com