by Jackson Katz
Recently I was talking on the phone with a woman I had come to know through our work together over the past couple of years. She runs a campus women’s center at a large southwestern university. She shared with me her frustration that a number of women students on her campus had been raped or sexually assaulted by male students, and in each case the administrators with whom she was interacting seemed either indifferent to the alleged victims or openly sided with the accused men. I asked her if she could recall any instances of men listening to her and being supportive.
“The most powerful example of this was not from my professional life but from my personal experience as a college student. When I was nineteen, I was raped by a guy who lived in my dorm. He was a popular guy, a senior and a fraternity member. The next day, I confronted him about what he had done. He told me that no one would believe me because he had so much more status on campus. Soon thereafter a group of the rapist’s friends began to make nasty comments to me in hallways, the cafeteria, and just walking across campus. I also began to receive menacing phone calls, and unsigned notes under my door with dark and cryptic messages. I never identified the people responsible for these messages, but assumed they were the same men. I wondered if they were doing all of this to intimidate me into not reporting that the popular guy raped me. As all of this was happening, I told a supportive male friend. He enlisted some of his friends, and over the next several months, they publicly defended me, and whenever possible, confronted the guys who were making abusive comments, which eventually stopped. To this day I draw strength from that experience, and the knowledge that there are men who will believe and support women. Sadly, this is not always true of the college women rape victims whom I advocate for, many of whom feel isolated and unsupported, especially by their male peers.”
I asked my colleague if she mentioned this experience in her public talks on campus. She told me that I was only the fourth or fifth person with whom she had shared this story since college, more than a decade ago. I thanked her for sharing it with me.
Survivors of sexual violence today—women and men—are more likely than in decades past to find supportive friends and professionals who believe them and advocate for them. But the idea that men’s violence is either women’s fault, or their responsibility to deal with, is deeply ingrained in both women and men’s psyches. In fact, one of the chief obstacles standing in the way of redefining sexual and domestic violence as men’s issues is the lingering power of this sort of victim-blaming mentality. One woman who is a prominent gender violence prevention activist in the Midwest said that when she was in college in the early 1970s, she accepted an invitation from her date to spend the night after she had found her dorm locked for the night. (College students may not relate, but at the time in many traditional colleges the women’s dorms were locked at curfew hour, and if you were late you had to go through the judgmental dorm mother to reenter. Men’s dorms were open all the time.)
“The man ended up raping me several times, with the threat of a gun. He allowed me to leave in the morning. I truly thought I would be shot in the back. Because at the time I was a practicing Catholic, I went to a priest later that day and he told me that while it was a bad thing that happened, ‘What did I expect, a young woman spending the night with a man?’ I decided not to go to the police because I was so ashamed of what I had done and did not want to hear another speech about how dumb I was.”
Women who are members of racial and ethnic minorities face special pressures about when and where it is acceptable for them to raise their voices and assert their own needs. According to Lori Robinson, who wrote I Will Survive: The African American Guide to Healing from Sexual Assault and Abuse, black women have historically been trained to always put others’ needs first, to be skeptical about utilizing professional services, and to deny their own need for support. African American women who have been abused might also choose to remain silent because although they want the violence to stop, they do not want their boyfriend or husband to go to jail. If he is black, they know that he is much more likely than a white man to do time for a gender violence crime. They might also feel pressure from members of their family and community to keep the abuse private and not air “the dirty laundry” in communities of color, because it will validate the racist stereotypes held by the white majority about African American men. In other words, black women’s silence is expected as a form of loyalty to their racial or ethnic group, whose needs take priority over their own needs for healing. Robinson’s book grew out of her own experience of being raped in 1995 when she was on staff at the now-defunct Emerge magazine, which billed itself as “America’s Black Newsmagazine.” She explains that an article she wrote in Emerge about her assault and the alleged assault of an African American college student generated an outpouring of letters from readers affected by sexual violence, which convinced her of the need to write a book.
Jewish women belong to another ethnic minority that has its own special tensions around the issues of domestic and sexual violence. Historically there was a powerful sense of denial about gender violence in the Jewish community. The conceit was that “nice Jewish boys” were not like the crude and aggressive Gentiles, and hence did not have those kinds of problems. This conveyed to Jewish women who were being abused by their Jewish husbands and boyfriends that they must be at fault, or that they should remain silent for the sake of family stability. Like women from other ethnic minorities, Jewish women also felt pressure to remain silent because if they disclosed the abuse it would somehow bring shame on them and their children—or the entire Jewish community. But over the past decade or so, in defiance of those pressures, Jewish women from all denominations, including Orthodox, have organized at the local and national level to call attention to the problem of men’s violence against women in the Jewish community—which occurs at approximately the same rate as in the larger society. In doing so these women have provided much-needed moral leadership on an issue of importance to the entire community, and issued an implicit challenge to Jewish men—including male rabbis—to speak out and thus not be complicit in their silence.
If women in long-established racial and ethnic communities feel pressure to be silent about gender violence issues, new immigrant women can face even more pressure, along with some added considerations. Many of them are reluctant to report abuse, or even tell anyone about it, because they do not trust the authorities. They might have fresh memories of police corruption in their countries of origin. In some cases, the man who is abusing or harassing her might skillfully use the woman’s uncertainty about her immigration status—or threats to call the Immigration and Naturalization Service—as a means to keep her quiet. Frequently these women speak a language other than English, which can make it more difficult for them to communicate their problems or access services—whose availability they might not even be aware of to begin with.
Men who work in gender-violence prevention—especially those men who are recognized and well-rewarded for our work—have an obligation to acknowledge women’s leadership in this area whenever we get the chance. Some of the biggest fears women have about men’s entry into this movement are that they will replicate traditional patterns of egocentric male behavior, women’s leadership will be supplanted by men’s, and women’s voices will be drowned out. These fears mirrors one of the most frequent complaints that women have about men: that they do not listen to them. Men often cut women off in conversation, or treat women’s contributions to a conversation with less weight than a man’s. Many women describe group conversations where they say something, and several minutes later a man says the same thing and does not give her credit. The source of this kind of marginalization of women’s opinions is not mysterious: it is a logical outcome of a sexist social system that assigns unfair weight to men’s opinions and minimizes women’s. One charismatic woman I know in the gender-violence prevention world recounted a conflict she had with a man she was seeing.
“He had been play-fighting with my
four-year-old nephew, and I argued that he should not do that, because it would lead to problems with his peers on the playground, in the classroom, etc. This is a subject about which I know a great deal, as I work in the gender-violence area and have a lot of experience dealing with the connections between various forms of violence, and the effects of this violence on children. He had no such experience or training, but he did not accept the validity of my opinion. He argued that play-fighting with a four-year-old was necessary to toughen the boy up, and implied that it was intrinsically connected to masculinity. But what really got me upset was his attitude. I felt that he did not think I knew what I was talking about because I am a woman, and therefore he did not have to take into account my opinion. Most of the times I have gotten into heated exchanges with men—in my personal or professional life—it has had less to do with unbridgeable ideological differences than with the fact that men would not listen to me or consider my opinion worthwhile.”
Sometimes the opinions of women in the sexual and domestic-violence fields are not solicited or welcomed because people have a vested interest in ignoring their perspective. In other words, it is not simply that these women’s opinions are minimized as a result of sexism. They are silenced because people with power do not like the conclusions they reach, especially if they are critical of how an individual or institution handles the sensitive issue of gender violence.
One woman I know runs the women’s center at a small private college in the East. In order to maintain her anonymity, I am going to paraphrase her comments. According to her, violence against women is systematically ignored and hushed up by the dean of students, who is in charge of the judicial process, policies for the student handbook, and just about every other factor that influences the kind of response that women on campus face after they have been sexually or physically assaulted. She is the person on campus with the most expertise on gender violence, but is completely excluded from meetings on sexual assault and barred from providing training to the judicial board and other staff and students. She reports that in private meetings, the dean regularly yells at her, refers to rape as “regretted sex,” and forbids her from talking about the concept of rape culture, which he denies exists. On her campus in 2005, a student was seriously assaulted by her exboyfriend in a textbook domestic violence case. Although the women’s center director provided the dean with research on the risk of escalation in cases like this and had expressed concern for the victim’s ongoing safety on campus, he chose not to protect the victim. The perpetrator was back on campus the Monday following his attempt to kill his ex-girlfriend. The dean actually made the ignorant assertion that this was not a dating-violence situation, since he had asked the victim if the perpetrator had hit her before and she said no.
Women who work in this field often have to contend with a lack of respect for what they do from members of their own families. Gender violence is still a taboo subject for many people, and the women who defy the taboo and face the issues in their professional or personal lives frequently pay a price for their boldness. Many women I know have had the experience at family gatherings, dinner parties, and other social events where someone has asked them what they do for work, and their answer was greeted with awkward silence and a change of subject. One woman I know who lives in the South and works in a prominent domestic-violence advocacy organization tells this story:
“I have six brothers and three sisters, and with the exception of one brother, they tend not to ask me about my work, or domestic violence in general. This is in a culture where domestic-violence homicide cases like the Scott Peterson and Robert Blake trials are on TV every night of the week. At a family reunion, my brother told me that he has many female coworkers who are in abusive relationships, and that they are completely capable of leaving. They have a job, they can support themselves, etc., but they will not leave the abuser. He asked me why. I started to explain some of the reasons that someone might not leave and he cut me off. ‘Oh, don’t give me any crap about some kind of syndrome,’ he said. My other siblings asked if they could please discuss something else; that was the end of the discussion.”
One woman who is well-known and respected nationally in the sexualassault field has had an ongoing struggle with her in-laws around subjects related to her work. She tells the following story:
“Several years ago, during a visit to our home, my mother-in-law asked me about my work. At the time I was working at a statewide domestic-violence and sexual-assault coalition. My mother-in-law asked if there were differences between working on these issues in the Midwest, where we had recently located, compared to the East Coast, where we had previously been for many years. I responded that I noticed a more pronounced reluctance to address sexual violence overall, and that law enforcement officers seemed to have less training and to be much more biased against victims. Very few victims report their rapes in rural areas due to the social structures of small towns. Consequently, law enforcement officers have extremely limited experience investigating these crimes, which causes its own set of problems. My mother-in-law asked me what I meant by ‘biased’ against rape victims. I shared with her the details of an incident of outright victim-blaming, where the police refused to facilitate and pay for a hospital exam to collect forensic evidence because the responding officer simply did not believe the victim’s story, because it did not match up with the mythical ‘real rape,’ which should have included visible injuries and a sober, well-respected victim. My fatherin-law interrupted the conversation and said, ‘So you don’t think rape victims are responsible at all?’ And I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘Oh, come on! You don’t think that when a woman is dressed provocatively she isn’t asking for it?’ or something to that effect—I was so angry that I cannot remember his exact words. My mother-in-law told him that he was wrong and ridiculous.”
What happened next was even more hopeful, and speaks to the fact that many women in the gender violence field have supportive men in their lives. Her husband came out of the kitchen and informed his father that one more comment like that would result in a stay in a hotel for the rest of the visit.
Understandably, all parties subsequently sought to avoid similar conversations. But the unspoken tensions in these sorts of family relationships have a way of resurfacing. She recounts a conversation she had with her father-inlaw many years after the above incident.
“He said to me ‘Have you actually ever really helped someone? Do you know if you’ve made a difference?’ I was annoyed but not surprised at the arrogance of the question. What did he expect me to say? ‘No, I’ve spent nearly fourteen years wasting my time and taxpayers’ money on something that has been completely futile?’ I can’t help but wonder if I were a doctor or teacher with many years of experience, would they feel so free to argue with me about the causes of cancer, trends in literacy, etc.? They grill my husband for detailed information about what he does in his job, but I have never heard them question his facts or challenge basic assumptions in the mainstream of his field.”
Women—especially young women—frequently hear unsolicited comments of a sexual nature from boys and men on the streets, in parks, at sports events, and in other public spaces. While a small percentage of women might actually enjoy the attention, many others feel objectified, intimidated, or angry. But they often do not say anything, because they find it less stressful to just keep their head down and keep walking, or because they do not want to give the man the satisfaction that his comment caused any sort of rise in them. I frequently hear men say that it had never even occurred to them that women feel assaulted by this sort of unsolicited commentary, in part because they read women’s silence as approval. A close friend of mine shared a story with me of an incident that happened to her one day several years ago when she was on an Amtrak train. She was in the cafe car working on her computer—the project happened to be on gender equity for a major non-governmental organization. After an hour or so, she stood up to go the snack bar, and a man sitting with two other
male friends began to make extremely embarrassing comments about her breasts.
“The entire train car full of people heard what he said. I was horrified and humiliated and felt assaulted. I responded by making what I consider immature and insulting comments back to the man, who I found out was drunk. One of his friends saw how upset I was, and apologized out loud for his friend. I did not know if I should move to another train car or not. I wanted to escape the embarrassment, but instead decided to hold my ground. I sat back down at my table and pretended to do my work, all the time wishing I had had the gumption to pour a hot cup of coffee in the offender’s lap.
“A while later, the man who apologized for his friend came over to discuss what had happened. He told me that he thought I had overreacted to what he considered a compliment. He said he hoped his three daughters would not behave as I did if a man made comments about their bodies. I looked him right in the eye and said he had better pray that his daughters react as I did, or he may have to worry that they will be sexually assaulted or humiliated as I was. ‘Humiliated?’ he asked. ‘Why was that humiliating? I thought my friend was admiring you.’”
This is a common perception among men. A lot of them think women like to hear unsolicited feedback about their bodies—when it is positive. Some men are genuinely taken aback that many women take this not as a compliment but as dehumanizing and invasive. My friend told him that his friend was not admiring her and his attention was not flattering in any way. His comments, she said, were disrespectful of her as a person, as a human being. “I think he really heard me,” she said. “I suggested that he ask his wife what she thought about the situation, and in ten years, ask his daughters.”
