by Jackson Katz
Men’s violence against women is a major contemporary social problem that is deeply rooted in our cultural traditions. This does not in any way absolve individuals of responsibility for their actions. But just as it is unfair to punish low-level soldiers and not hold their superiors accountable for the abuse debacle at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, it is disingenuous to attribute the widespread problem of gender violence to an isolated collection of social deviants and let the rest of us off the hook.
The historical dimensions of the problem of men’s violence become clear when you consider their awesome scope:
• JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association published one study in 2001 which found that 20 percent of adolescent girls were physically or sexually abused by a date.
• Nearly one-third of American women report being physically or sexually abused by a husband or boyfriend at some point in their lives.
• An estimated 17.7 million women in the United States, nearly 18 percent, have been raped or have been the victim of attempted rape.
• Studies show that 15 to 38 percent of women and 5 to 16 percent of men experienced some form of sexual abuse as children.
• The average age at which a child is first abused sexually is ten years old.
• As many as 324,000 women each year experience intimate-partner violence during their pregnancy.
• Women are much more likely than men to be killed by an intimate partner. In 2000, intimate-partner homicides accounted for 33.5 percent of murders of women and less than 4 percent of murders of men.
• One national survey found that 83 percent of girls reported being sexually harassed at school.
• Between one in four and one in five college women experience completed or attempted rape during their college years.
• Ten thousand porn videos are released each year in the U.S. alone.
• The average age of entry into prostitution is thirteen or fourteen.
• Forty percent of girls aged fourteen to seventeen report knowing someone their age who has been hit or beaten by a boyfriend.
• There are twenty-five hundred strip clubs in the U.S.
• One study found that 70 percent of women with developmental disabilities had been sexually assaulted, and that nearly 50 percent of women with mental retardation had been sexually assaulted ten or more times.
• One study showed that 37.5 percent of American Indian and Alaska Native women were victimized by their male partners, with 15.9 percent raped, 30.7 physically assaulted, and 10.2 percent stalked.
• Eight percent of women and 2 percent of men in the U.S. have been stalked at some time in their life; an estimated 1,006,970 women and 370,990 men are stalked annually. Eighty-seven percent of stalking perpetrators are male.
• In one study, lifetime risk for violent victimization was so high for homeless women with severe mental illness (97 percent) as to amount to normative experiences for this population.
• A study of prisons in four Midwestern states found that approximately one in five male inmates reported a pressured or forced sex incident while incarcerated. About one in ten male inmates reported that they had been raped. Sexual abuse rates for women in prison vary widely among institutions. In one facility, 27 percent of women had been sexually abused. (Women in prison are most often abused by male staff members.)
• The estimated annual health-related costs, lost productivity costs, and lost earnings due to intimate partner violence in the U.S. is $5.9 billion.
• Studies suggest that between 3.3 and 10 million children witness some form of domestic violence annually.
• Between 50–70 percent of men who abuse their female partners also abuse their children.
These numbers tell a dramatic tale, but you do not need statistical proof to see glaring evidence of the problem. Just look around. Stories about men stalking, attacking, and murdering women and children make the local, regional, and national news virtually every day; especially when they have a good news hook like a famous perpetrator or a young, attractive victim. A random scan of the headlines in the metro section of the newspaper on most days in moderately populated U.S. cities will turn up stories about husbands murdering their wives, members of the clergy arrested for sex offenses, male coaches fired for sexually abusing their young athletes, corporations sued by female employees for pervasive patterns of sexual harassment by male employees, and college athletes charged with gang rape. Sometimes the metro news pages read like a morbid catalogue of violent masculinity run amok.
Regrettably, few people see the problem in these terms. For one thing, news stories and the conversations they spark are more likely to focus on the unfortunate (female) victims than on the (male) perpetrators. It is no longer taboo in many circles in the U.S. to discuss violence against women. But when was the last time you heard someone in public (or private) talk about the problem of men’s violence? Also, men’s violence against women has been so pervasive for so long that when they hear about it, typical Americans just shrug their shoulders in resignation, if they can muster the psychic energy to watch or read the grim news in the first place. Not that following the news would lend them greater understanding of the problem. With few exceptions, news coverage of intimate-partner and sexual violence merely contributes to the public’s misperception that these crimes occur randomly and are not part of a larger cultural pattern.
I remember watching the six o’clock news on a local network affiliate in Los Angeles a few years ago. The first story was about a minor development in the ongoing drama about then-congressman Gary Condit and Chaundra Levy, the missing Washington intern whose body was later found in a wooded area. The second story turned locally to Long Beach, where a successful realtor was missing and presumed dead; her husband had just refused a lie detector test. The next story was about an incident, also in Long Beach, where a man had abducted his ex-girlfriend at gunpoint in the middle of the day at her place of business. She later turned up safe; he was arrested.
This was just the first few minutes of one random day’s newscasts. You would think it was worth mentioning that each of these three stories involved abductions and possible murders of women—perhaps by men close to them. You would think it was relevant to provide some background statistics about how many women are abducted by men each year, and how many are murdered. But the anchorwoman simply reported the stories as if they were completely unrelated.
This happens all the time. Newscasts regularly report on incidents of men’s violence against women without mentioning any larger social context. One effect of the ongoing backlash against feminism is that in mainstream media, knowledgeable women and men are rarely interviewed for their insight into the broader social factors that contribute to crimes against women. It is much easier—and less risky for ratings—to offer apolitical analyses of “the criminal mind” by FBI profilers and other law enforcement types. Consider, by comparison, how the news media would cover a series of attacks by white people on people of color. Would they regard them as “unrelated” and not bother to consult experts on racism?
As if out-of-context media coverage were not bad enough, let’s not forget that the vast majority of gender violence is never reported. Most of it happens behind closed doors and beneath the public radar screen. Murders usually make the news—although the violent deaths of poor women of color are likely to be buried on page twenty-seven. But the vast majority of battering is never reported, much less covered in the media. According to the FBI, 80 to 90 percent of rape is never reported. To be sure, dramatic events involving groups of men tend to get our attention, like the sexual assaults at the Tailhook naval aviators convention in the early 1990s, the group sexual assaults in New York’s Central Park during the Puerto Rican Day festival, the rapes at Woodstock ’99, or rape scandals in college athletics and the U.S. military in recent years. For at least a brief period, these assaults can spark outrage—among men as well as women—and in some cases stimulate dialogue about men’s violence.
But low-level harassment and abuse from men is much less a newsworthy event than it is a routine part of life for millions of women. After the attacks on 9/11, millions of Americans suddenly paid attention to the plight of women in Afghanistan, a situation feminists had been alarmed about for years. Men’s violence is a serious problem for women all over the world. In fact, a major international study released in 2002 found that one in three women worldwide has been physically or sexually abused. But for Americans it is easier to see and speak out about problems thousands of miles away than it is to look in our own backyard.
Feeling guilty?
It is long past time that men from all walks of life owned up to their part in all of this. The status quo is simply unacceptable. And while it is crucial that women and men work together to address the problem, the primary responsibility resides with men. Men, after all, are the primary perpetrators of rape, battering, sexual abuse, and sexual harassment, at least according to those radical feminists over at the FBI. So we can dispense with the idea that it is anti-male to say what everyone already knows to be true. There is an awful lot of violence against women in our society, and men commit the vast majority of it.
Is saying that unfair to men? Better yet, is telling the truth unfair to men? For those who think it is, please know that I am not going to spend a lot of time in this book catering to some men’s defensiveness around this subject. Or to women who feel obliged to rush to the defense of their sons and husbands. But let me be clear. I am also not going to guilt-trip twenty-first-century American men by blaming them for thousands of years of sexism and patriarchal oppression. Men shouldn’t feel guilty simply for being born male. That’s silly. If there is a reason to feel guilty, it should be about what they do or fail to do, not about their chance placement in one gender category.
Nonetheless, when it comes to discussions about men and sexism, the concepts of guilt and responsibility are often confused. They are not the same thing. For conscientious men, especially those who are just beginning to grapple with the enormity of the problem of men’s violence against women, feelings of guilt can be paralyzing, whereas feelings of responsibility at least have the potential to be energizing. Clearly we need to figure out new ways to energize men and not give them more reasons to feel paralyzed. After all, if more men felt guilty, how would women benefit? This point was driven home by Victor Lewis, one of the co-founders of the pioneering Oakland Men’s Project. During a presentation, he asked the women to raise their hands if men’s guilt has been helpful in keeping them safer, getting an equal wage, or making their lives less limited in any way. No woman raised her hand.
I believe that men who are silent in the face of other men’s violence—whether the silence is intentional or not—are complicit in the perpetration of that violence. We’re not guilty because we’re men. We’re responsible—because we’re men—either for speaking out or for not speaking out about other men’s violence. This is hardly a new concept. Some of the proudest moments in the history of this country are grounded in the principle that members of dominant groups have a critical role to play in the struggle for equality. For example, whether motivated by secular or religious beliefs, many white abolitionists in the nineteenth century understood that they were complicit in the “peculiar institution” of slavery unless they worked actively to end it. A similar sensibility informed the many courageous white radical college students and mainstream white liberals who played an important role in the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Not coincidentally, a lot of those white people were accused by racist whites of succumbing to “white guilt.”
When I work with men, I try to address the concepts of guilt and responsibility up front because I know from long experience—and a lot of trial and error—that if the goal is to inspire more men to engage in transformative action, we need to do more than simply tell them to stop behaving badly. That is sure to provoke a defensive reaction. Defensiveness, in fact, is one of the greatest obstacles to men’s involvement in meaningful discussions about gender violence. Simply stated, a surprising number of non-violent men cannot hear about the bad things some men do to women without feeling blamed themselves.
In anticipation of defensive hostility, many women (and some anti-sexist men) censor themselves in discussions with men about sensitive issues like rape, sexual harassment, and abuse in relationships. They decide that it is not worth such confrontations with men in their professional or personal lives. The cost is too high in terms of ill feelings and interpersonal tensions. So a lot goes unsaid. Moreover, because defensiveness is the enemy of critical thinking, an awful lot of men who stand to greatly benefit from reading and reflecting on decades of brilliant academic and popular work on gender, power, and violence instead avoid it like the plague. So a lot goes unread.
But not all men who react defensively are irrational. Some men actually have a troubled conscience, based on past (or present) perpetrations. No point in soft-pedaling this: there are millions of men in our society who (accurately) hear calls for men to speak out about gender violence as direct criticism of their own behavior. Many men get defensive and hostile at the mere mention of gender violence because they have reason to be defensive. The only way these men would not get defensive is if no one ever brought up the subject.
People who do gender violence prevention work with college or high school students are frequently told that we need to work with even younger kids, because we need to get to them before their sexist attitudes and beliefs have fully formed. Everyone I know in the field agrees, and wishes that schools and school boards would allow this sort of education as early as possible. The urgency of this need is especially apparent when you consider that 29 percent of rape victims are assaulted before they reach the age of eleven.
Young minds are easier to influence with pro-social, anti-violence messages. This is true for both girls and boys. But, for boys especially, it is not simply because their minds are more impressionable at younger ages. There is a more cynical explanation. Since younger people have literally been around for a shorter time, they are correspondingly less likely to have engaged in behaviors for which they have reason to feel guilty. Older guys, who have had more opportunities to mistreat girls, or to participate in particularly sexist aspects of male culture, as a result have more incentive to defend themselves, and more motives for denial. These motives make it increasingly more difficult to reach men as they get older and accumulate experiences they might be called to account for.
Self-interested denial is clearly on display in batterer-intervention groups across the country virtually every night of the week. The U.S. batterer-intervention movement has been around for a quarter century. There is a large and evergrowing database of experiences and insights provided by counselors and therapists who have run batterers’ groups and thus interacted with hundreds of thousands of abusive men. There is much for us to learn from studying batterers’ mindsets, because batterers are a lot more like the “average guy” than many people think.
As the batterer-intervention counselor Lundy Bancroft observes in his deeply insightful book Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men, many men who batter have internalized cultural beliefs about “manhood” that legitimize—in their own minds—their controlling and abusive behaviors. These beliefs did not appear out of thin air. These men are not from some other planet. Batterers often seek to minimize and deny their abusive behavior. Men who are ordered to seek counseling for assaulting their girlfriends or wives are commonly defiant—at least initially. In the face of compelling evidence to the contrary, they often flat-out deny they have done anything wrong. They also frequently invert the truth and argue that they are the true victims. She’s the problem. She’s a manipulative bitch. She should be here, not me. None of this is surprising. Men who batter are products of a society that is in deep denial about men’s violence, and when forced to face reality seeks to blame victims instead.
Victim-blaming is e
specially virulent in incidents of sexual violence. The level of anger directed at the alleged victim in the recent Kobe Bryant rape trial, for example, provided a shocking wake-up call to activists and advocates in the rape crisis movement. In the year after she reported that she had been raped by the basketball superstar, the young woman received numerous death threats. She constantly had to move from state to state to ensure her safety and privacy. Her motives were questioned and her character impugned in the ugliest of terms on talk-radio programs, cable TV shows, and in countless locker room and water cooler conversations across the country. By the time the criminal trial began, Bryant’s lawyers had successfully steered public conversation in the direction of critiquing her sexual practices, thus shifting attention off of Bryant’s alleged pattern of sexually aggressive conduct toward women.
What explains the virulence of victim-blaming in sexual-assault cases? Perhaps one clue can be found in an often-cited study of male college students. This study found that one in twelve men admitted to having committed acts that met the legal definition of rape. However, 88 percent of men whose actions came under the legal definition of rape were adamant that their behavior did not constitute rape. This could be a result of confusion about what constitutes rape. This confusion is real in an era when the majority of boys and men are “educated” about sex through pornography, where it is normal in “non-violent” videos to see men treating women with incredible brutality and callousness. But the fact that so many men had committed rape also speaks to the reality of how pervasive the problem is—and how many “average” guys have motivation to ignore it.
