by Jackson Katz
What can the average man do about this? Many say that if they are not themselves violent, it is not really their problem. But if they care deeply about women, and this is a major concern to women, then shouldn’t they do something? Are they in fact obligated to act—especially if their actions can help?
By way of analogy, imagine that you were a white, middle-class South African during the apartheid era. In spite of pervasive residential and social segregation, you managed to make some black friends and acquaintances. You did not vote for the ruling party or support its apartheid policies. You did not directly exploit black labor in your home or workplace. You did not consider yourself racist.
Nonetheless, did you have a moral obligation to work against apartheid? If you did not actively behave in a racist manner, but as a privileged white person simply went about your life in the midst of this system, weren’t you manifestly part of the problem? Isn’t it fair to hold you accountable—morally if not legally—for failing to act more decisively to bring about racial equality? Were you being a responsible friend to black people if you chose not to get involved?
Likewise, is a man a responsible father/son/partner/friend to women if he chooses not to get involved in speaking out about men’s violence? Can a man who does not personally abuse women persuasively maintain that rape, battering, sexual abuse, and sexual harassment are “not his problem”?
How about men who have been disrespectful toward women in the past, even emotionally, physically, or sexually abusive? Perhaps it was in their teens or early twenties. Or maybe in a first marriage. What if they are better men now, having since matured, or been in therapy, or had an epiphany of one kind or another? Do their earlier transgressions confer on them any added responsibility to the women in their lives—and women in general?
One of the many reasons why some men do not feel comfortable holding other men accountable for sexist behaviors is their feeling that—considering their personal histories—they are in no position to lecture other men about how to treat women. It is a valid concern. There are a lot of compromised men out there. This was one of the striking aspects of the 1992 Senate Judiciary Committee hearings into Anita Hill’s sexual-harassment allegations against Clarence Thomas. Many of the Democrats on the committee were noticeably silent or gentle with Thomas, who was alleged to have had a history of sexist and boorish behavior, but was being considered for placement on the highest court in the land. At the time, numerous commentators speculated that several Democratic senators were passive precisely because to go after Thomas would mean risking their exposure as self-righteous hypocrites. Feminists argued that if there were more (any!) women on the committee, these sorts of conflicts would be avoided—and men like Clarence Thomas would have little chance of confirmation.
Men’s concern about the boys in their lives
In 2000, the Family Violence Prevention Fund commissioned a study to determine what sorts of messages would be most likely to attract men to anti-domestic-violence efforts. The study found that men were much more comfortable talking with children about the problem than they were with any of the other approaches—including confronting peers or participating in a collective action.
When adult men take a stand against violence against women, they not only model positive behavior for the next generation, they help children today—including boys. Practically speaking, men who care about boys—and feel both a personal and a political responsibility for their physical well-being and emotional health—need to think about gender-violence prevention as a primary need of theirs. In the domestic-violence and sexual-assault fields over the past decade, there has been an increased emphasis on the effects of these crimes on children. National and statewide conferences are frequently devoted to the subject of “children who witness,” not to mention dozens of books and countless articles. It is worth noting that the category of “children” includes both girls and boys. Hundreds of thousands of boys are routinely terrorized in their own homes as they stand by, helplessly watching as a father or stepfather abuses their mother.
This is not taking place in some abstract universe. Thousands of five-, six, and seven-year-old boys in the United States tonight will cower in the closet and scream as their mother is beaten—and this is not just a problem in poor or low-income communities.
One repercussion for boys who grow up in abusive homes is the damage this does to their relationships with their fathers. This is one of the many complexities of father-son relationships in our violent culture, and one of the hidden costs of men’s violence. Many adult men have conflicted feelings about their fathers due to the way their mothers were treated. They might love them but harbor intense anger toward them. In some cases, these feelings can last for decades after the actual abuse has stopped. I have known men who can never forgive their fathers, and have no wish to ever speak with them again.
There was a case in Massachusetts in the mid-1990s where a man, Daniel Holland, shot his wife eight times as their son Patrick, then eight years old, slept in the next room. Daniel Holland was arrested and eventually sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Several years later, in a case that generated national news coverage, the boy initiated a “parental divorce” in order to force his incarcerated father out of his life completely. Patrick Holland, by then fourteen years old, filed suit to terminate his father’s parental rights. After the father agreed to a settlement, the boy said, “It’s like a big weight’s been lifted from my shoulders, knowing that I don’t have to worry about him being in my life.”
Consider as well the experience of boys whose mothers are sexual-assault survivors. There are no conclusive national statistics on this subject, but when you figure that female rape survivors number in the millions, you have to assume that millions of boys and men in our society have mothers who have been raped. Suffering a rape need not be a defining life experience for a woman, or in any way prevent her from being a good mother, but its ramifications can linger in the lives of her sons (and daughters).
For example, the percentage of rape survivors who develop alcohol problems is much greater than it is in the general population. There is also evidence to suggest that rape survivors are more prone to develop addictions to antidepressants, methamphetamine, or other drugs, in part as a way to medicate the effects of their trauma. Their addiction, in turn, can then lead to all manner of destructive and self-destructive behaviors, which inevitably affect the kids. Sons (and daughters) are thus often the secondary victims of the original assault by a man against their mother.
Juvenile detention centers across the country are filled with boys whose mothers are survivors—or current victims—of men’s violence. How many of these boys are in the system for acting out their family traumas in antisocial ways? The poignancy of this was brought home for me when I was working as a counselor in a staff-secure detention facility in the Boston area for boys aged nine to seventeen. Staff-secure means there are alarms on the doors but no locks. One night, one of the kids in my section, a sixteen-year-old African American who lived in Boston, was on the phone in the common area, talking with his mother. It was a half-hour after lights out. I was standing quietly near the doorway, making sure the five other kids in my dorm had settled down and stopped talking to each other across the room. I was keeping one eye on Darryl (not his real name), trying not to eavesdrop too noticeably on one of the few semi-private conversations he was allowed to have. Quite abruptly he slammed the phone down and ran by me to his cubby, where he plopped down onto his uncomfortable twin-sized bed and buried his head in the pillow. I could hear his muffled sobbing. I subsequently learned that right in the middle of the phone conversation, Darryl’s mother’s boyfriend started to scream and beat her while her son was on the line. This sixteenyear-old—who just a few hours before had been acting the part of the nothin’-fazes-me, street-savvy tough guy—was locked up and utterly powerless to protect his own mother.
Advocates and researchers in the battered women’s movement
have increasingly drawn attention to this sort of trauma. Their focus has been not just on whether girls in abusive situations are more likely to grow up and become abused, or boys to become abusers. Their goal is to understand how “delinquent” and self-destructive behavior—by girls and boys—is related to the traumatic experience of growing up in a home with an abused mother. How does the violence done to a mother affect her children? How do they cope? What are some of the gender differences in the ways that children of battered women handle the abuse?
At the time, I wondered what it must have felt like to be in Darryl’s position. How would I feel if I were powerless to stop a man from assaulting my mother? Would I be able to focus on anything else—the daily routine of a juvenile facility, going to class, doing chores, playing cards? I knew Darryl was feeling guilty—if not outright responsible—for his mother’s suffering. He had no one to blame but himself for doing the things he had done to get arrested; but when he ran away from the facility a week later, foolishly, impulsively, who was surprised? I never learned what happened to him.
Some men who are hesitant to talk about violence against women are eager to talk about the victimization of boys and men. “Guys are victims, too,” they will say, as if anyone ever implied otherwise. Yes, they are. For one thing, they are most certainly the secondary victims of other men’s crimes against the women in their families. But some men (or women) who say “men are victims, too” really mean that men are frequent victims of women’s violence.
Female-on-male violence is a serious issue, especially mother-to-son child abuse. But the frequency and severity of violence by adult women against adult men is often wildly overstated by “men’s rights” activists. Women do assault men, and unless it is in self-defense it is indefensible. But the incidence and severity of this violence pales in comparison to male-onfemale violence. It is important to emphasize that in the vast majority of cases where boys and men are the victims of violent crime, they are the victims of other men’s violence. For example, the rape of men in prison is a shamefully common event in this country. But prisoner rape is largely a phenomenon of men raping other men (as male authorities avert their eyes). To reduce men’s violence, then, is to reduce it against other men as well as against women.
His stories
When I first began giving speeches on college campuses about men’s violence against women, the first person to raise a hand during the Q&A period—almost always a woman—would comment on how unusual it was to hear a man talk about this subject with such passion. “I’m not sure if this is too personal,” she would say, “but how did you get into this?”
A friend once advised me that I shouldn’t respond to predictable questions about my personal motivation, because the answers are irrelevant. “This isn’t about you,” she argued, “or any of the other men who speak out against gender violence. It’s about the millions of female victims and survivors. It’s about their lives. Women’s lives. It’s not about men. It shouldn’t matter what drives a small number of you to speak out. You’re just doing what decent men should be doing.” While there is truth in this, there is another truth as well: not enough men are doing it.
In every decade since the beginning of the feminist-led anti-rape and anti-battering movements in the 1970s, there has been a steady stream of young men who have been politicized in college or graduate school who have subsequently volunteered in campus or community-based women’s centers, gone to work in batterer-intervention programs, or have done other gender violence related work in social service agencies and educational institutions. But it is not enough. Untold millions of other men, guys who love and care about women and are upset by harm done to them, are not yet ready or willing to think critically about violence against women as a men’s issue, or to actively do something about it. Why not? Why are so few men willing to talk straight about this subject? Why are relatively few of us willing to engage in critical dialogue—with women as well as with other men—about cultural constructs of masculinity and their relationship to the violence some men do to women?
I have had countless conversations over the years with women and men in the field—in community settings and on college campuses—who struggle daily for men to be visible allies in their gender violence prevention work, to participate in public events, serve on committees, attend meetings and other programs. Some domestic and sexual violence programs have significant male support in their communities; others have a history of tense relations with men in law enforcement, the courts, and the school system.
On college campuses in every part of the country, women’s center directors and sexual-assault educators tell me repeatedly that they only have a handful of vocal male allies in the administration or the faculty. They constantly seek suggestions about how to get more. The questions are always the same: How can we get more men with power to prioritize these issues? How can we broaden our base of male supporters? How can we get more young men involved? How can we connect with the Average Joes, the young men on college campuses who “sit in the back row with their caps pulled down,” as the college professor and educational filmmaker Sut Jhally refers to them—young men who would not dream of intentionally signing up for a course on gender, volunteering at their campus women’s center, or engaging feminism as something more complicated than a PC attack on their manhood? How do we get these guys to think “outside the box” and to understand these issues as their own?
I have learned that the surest way to grab men’s attention is to get personal. To make this about the women they know and love. It is one thing for guys to agree in principle that violence against women is a serious problem, but quite another to talk about their mothers, daughters, or wives. In order to dramatically expand the number of men who make these issues a priority, there is no better motivating force than the power of men’s intimate connection to women.
I have heard countless testimonies from men about the pain gender violence caused in their lives, from the time they were boys right up to the present. Consider a handful:
• At a gender-violence prevention training on a United States Marine Corps base in Hawaii, a forty-something first sergeant with still-taut muscles bulging out of his shirt and a ruddy, freckled complexion stands up to speak. He quietly recounts the time his father pulled a gun on him when he tried to defend his mother from a drunken beating. His eyes moisten as he speaks. I wonder if this is the first time in his life that he has ever talked publicly about this.
• The top cadet at a U.S. military service academy approaches me backstage after a speech I have just delivered to the entire corps of cadets. He shakes my hand and thanks me. He apologizes for the immature behavior of some of his fellow cadets, who had done some heckling and ill-timed laughing during my speech. He assures me that there will be consequences for the rude behavior. Then he leans over, and his voice cracks as he tells me that his fiancée was raped as a teenager, and that they sat up together and cried many nights.
• A middle-aged white man who is a powerful law enforcement official in a big city government in the Pacific Northwest states plainly, in a workshop with many of his colleagues, that he has long been motivated by his abusive, alcoholic father’s negative example. “From the time I was a kid,” he says, “I vowed never to be like him.”
• A college classmate approaches me at a reunion in Massachusetts, after a few beers, and takes me aside. He tells me that his wife sometimes wakes up in the middle of the night, flailing about and punching the pillow. She has nightmare flashbacks to the night many years ago when she was raped. He asks me, “What am I supposed to do?”
• In a workshop with ten National Football League rookies, three of the men disclose that they grew up in homes where their mother was battered. The men—all former college football stars on the cusp of achieving their professional football dreams—struggle to maintain composure as their fellow rookie sobs openly, recounting his traumatic childhood when he was forced to watch helplessly as his mother was beaten.
It is no secret that many women in the domestic and sexual violence fields are survivors of men’s violence. These women often talk publicly about their personal experiences, both to counteract the popular caricature of battering and rape victims as weak women who wallow in victimhood, and to model for other women (and men) a way to integrate personal experience with professional commitment. You can find these women on the national stage and in every community. They run shelters, youth outreach initiatives, and even batterer-intervention programs. They work as advocates, educators, and therapists.
Many men who are drawn to the gender violence prevention field have their own relevant personal and family histories. The journey for some begins when they are called on to provide emotional support for a girlfriend or wife experiencing the symptoms of trauma from a past relationship. Others are politicized when a girl or woman close to them is sexually assaulted. Regardless of where their consciousness was before this experience, supportive men who love and care about their female partners often come to see the world through their eyes, an often unsettling experience. The novelist and poet Marge Piercy offers some insight as to why in her deeply moving “Rape Poem”:
