Violence against women a men’s issue
Society needs to redefine manhood in a more egalitarian way, says educator
Violence against women is a men’s issue, says Jackson Katz, an internationally recognized educator on gender violence prevention among men and boys.
And, obviously, it’s also a women’s issue.
“But calling gender violence a women’s issue is part of the problem,” Katz said in a recent telephone interview from Los Angeles.
That’s because it gives men an excuse not to pay attention, he explained.
“A lot of men hear the term ‘women’s issues’ and they tend to tune it out.”
Katz argues that “these are men’s issues, first and foremost. Men commit the vast majority of it, so by definition it’s a men’s issue.”
Even the term ‘violence against women’ is problematic, he said, because it focuses on what is happening to women, what they experience, but doesn’t target who’s doing it to them.
As co-founder of the mixed-gender, multi-racial Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP) program at Northeastern University’s Centre for the Study of Sport in Society, Katz has worked to help educate people in colleges, high schools, sports culture and the military in North America and beyond.
“A big part of my work is to shift the paradigm,” said Katz, who will be speaking in Regina on June 23 at the annual general meeting of Regina Transition House, which has been sheltering and supporting abused women for 40 years.
“The traditional paradigm is thinking about it as a women’s issue that some good men help out with. The new paradigm is it’s a men’s issue.
“My point is that we want to prevent it from happening, not just respond to victims and survivors and take care of them, or hold perpetrators accountable after the fact. All that’s important, but if we want to prevent violence from happening in the first place, we have to ask why it’s happening, and we have to ask why are men assaulting their wives and girlfriends, and other women and girls at significant rates all over the world. Is it genetic? Is it biological? Is it predetermined? I don’t think so. I think it has to do with how we’re defining manhood, how we’re socializing boys, how we’re normalizing certain kinds of entitlements.”
We can do better than we’re doing, Katz insists. Society needs to redefine manhood in a more egalitarian way, he said.
“We need to define what it is to be a man not as being in control over others, including women ... that men’s needs are important, but they don’t come first; they’re equally as important as women’s needs.”
Equality, justice and fairness should be the rule of thumb in everyday relationships, as well as in the larger political context, he said.
“We need to define manhood in ways that don’t reinforce that men have more rights or that men’s needs come first, or that men are entitled to control women or be dominant over women in relationships.”
Men need to start challenging and interrupting other men when they act out in sexist or abusive ways towards girls and women, Katz said.
Men who are not OK with other men abusing women need to speak up and make it clear to those men — their friends, their peers, their colleagues, their coworkers, their teammates, their classmates — that they do not accept their abusive behaviour.
“A lot of men remain silent in the face of other men’s abusive behaviour towards women. And as a result of their silence, they communicate the message that it’s OK, or that the sexist attitudes that underlie the behaviours are somehow socially acceptable,” he said.
In his work as an internationally recognized educator on gender violence prevention among men and boys, Katz said he strives to help empower men, as well as women, to speak up and challenge and interrupt abuse.
Getting young men on board is a critical step, he said. “It’s about changing norms in male culture.”
Tickets for lunch and to hear Katz speak at the Wascana Golf and Country Club are $40, available online at https:picatic.com/transitionhousagm or by calling (306) 757-2069 extension 2. Regina Transition House’s annual general meeting, which follows, is optional.