Before I begin my presentation
I want to say it's a great honor for me to be part of a program
with so many impressive women.
I also want to say thank you to the organizers
[who invited] me to be part of this.
It's important that I say and that men say
when we do the work that we do,
especially in the field of gender violence prevention
that I'm going to talk with you about this morning,
it's important that we acknowledge that the growing movement of men
in the United States in a multicultural sense
and all around the world in an international sense,
the growing movement of men
who are standing up and speaking out
about men's violence against women,
and going into parts of male culture
that have historically been either apathetic about
or openly hostile to women's efforts to engage them,
that movement of men
is indebted to the leadership of women
on a personal level,
on a professional level,
on political level,
on an intellectual level,
on every level -
women built these movements
and these are movements that are affecting
in a positive way everybody.
Not just women and girls
but also men and boys.
And often times men like myself
get a lot of credit and public acclaim for doing the work
that women have been doing for a long time.
So one of the ways that we can use the spotlight
is to thank women and honor women's leadership,
going forward today, tomorrow, and you know, into the future.
(Applause)
Having said that,
I'm going to share with you a paradigm shifting perspective
on the issues of gender violence -
sexual assault, domestic violence, relationship abuse, sexual harassment,
sexual abuse of children, that whole range of issues
that I'll refer to in short hand as gender violence issues.
They have been seen as women's issues that some good men help out with.
But I have a problem with that frame and I don't accept it.
I don't see these as women's issues that some good men help out with.
In fact I'm going to argue that these are men's issues, first and foremost.
(Applause)
Obviously, they are also women's issues, so I appreciate that,
but calling gender violence a women's issue
is part of the problem, for a number of reasons.
The first is, it gives men an excuse
not to pay attention, right?
A lot of men hear the term 'women's issues'
and we tend to tune it out, and we think
"Hey, I'm a guy, that's for the girls, for the women."
And a lot of men literally don't get beyond the first sentence as a result.
It's almost like a chip in our brain is activated,
and the neural pathways take our attention in a different direction
when we hear the term "women's issues".
This is also true by the way of the word "gender"
because a lot of people hear the word "gender"
and they think it means "women".
So they think "gender issues" is synonymous with "women's issues".
There is some confusion about the term "gender",
and actually let me illustrate that confusion by a way of analogy.
So let's talk for a moment about race.
In the US, when we hear the word "race",
a lot of people think that means African-American,
Latino, Asian-American, Native American,
South Asian, Pacific, on and on.
A lot of people, when they hear the word "sexual orientation",
think it means "gay", "lesbian", "bisexual".
And a lot of people when they hear the word "gender",
think it means "women".
In each case,
the dominant group doesn't get paid attention to, right?
As if white people don't have some sort of racial identity,
or belong to some racial category or construct?
As if heterosexual people don't have a sexual orientation?
As if men don't have a gender?
This is one of the ways
that dominant systems maintain and reproduce themselves,
which is to say
the dominant group is rarely challenged to even think about it's dominance,
because that's one of the key characteristics of power and privilege:
the ability to go unexamined, lacking introspection,
in fact being rendered invisible in large measure
in the discourse about issues that are primarily about us.
And this is amazing how this works
in domestic and sexual violence,
how men have been largely erased
from so much of the conversation
about a subject that is centrally about men.
And I'm going to illustrate what I'm talking about
by using the old-tech.
I'm old school on some fundamental regards.
I make films, I work with high-tech,
but I'm still old school as an educator.
And I want to share with you this exercise,
that illustrates on a sentence structure level
how the way that we think,
literally the way that we use language,
conspires to keep our attention off of men.
This is about domestic violence in particular
but you can plug in other analogues.
This comes from the work of the feminist linguist Julia Penelope.
It starts with a very basic English sentence
"John beat Mary" - that's a good English sentence,
John is the subject, beat is the verb, Mary is the object.
good sentence.
Now we're going to move to the second sentence
which says the same thing in the passive voice:
"Mary was beaten by John"
and now a whole lot has happened in one sentence.
We've gone from "John beat Mary" to
"Mary was beaten by John", we've shifted our focus
in one sentence, from John to Mary.
And you can see John is very close to the end of the sentence,
close to dropping off the map of our psychic plane.
The third sentence, John is dropped, and we have,
"Mary was beaten" and now it's all about Mary.
We're not even thinking about John, it's totally focussed on Mary.
Over the past generation
the term we've used synonymous with "beaten" is "battered",
so we have, "Mary was battered."
And the final sentence in this sequence,
flowing from the others,
is "Mary is a battered woman."
So now Mary's very identity,
"Mary is a battered woman,"
is what was done to her by John in the first instance,
but we've demonstrated
that John has long ago left the conversation.
Now those of us who work in domestic and sexual violence field know
that victim blaming is pervasive in this realm,
which is to say
blaming the person to whom something was done
rather than the person who did it.
And we say things like,
Why do these women go out with these men?
Why are they attracted to them? Why do they keep going back?
What was she wearing at that party?
Why was she drinking with this group of guys in that hotel room?
This is victim blaming.
And there are numerous reasons for it,
but one of them is that our whole cognitive structure
is set up to blame victims.
It's all unconscious,
our whole cognitive structure is set up to ask questions
about women and women's choices,
and what they are doing, thinking and wearing.
And I'm not going to shout down people who ask questions about women,
it's a legitimate thing to ask.
But let's be clear.
Asking questions about Mary is not going to get us anywhere
in terms of preventing violence.
We have to ask a different set of questions
and you see where I'm going with this.
The questions are not about Mary, but about John.
The questions like,
Why does John beat Mary?
Why is domestic violence still a big problem in the Unites States
and all over the world? What's going on?
Why so many men abuse
physically, emotionally, verbally and in other ways
the women and girls and the men and boys that they claim to love?
What's going on with men?
Why do so many adult men sexually abuse little girls and little boys?
Why is that a common problem in our society
and all over the world today?
Why we hear over and over again about
new scandals erupting in major institutions
like the Catholic Church or the Penn State Football Program
or the Boy Scouts of America? On and on and on!
And in local communities all over the country and all the world.
We hear about it all the time - sexual abuse of children.
What's going on with men?
Why do so many men rape women
in our society and around the world?
Why do so many men rape other men?
What is going on with men?
And then -
What is the role of the various institutions in our society
that are helping to produce the abuse of men at pandemic rates?
Because this is not about individual perpetrators.
That's a naive way of understanding
what is a much deeper and more systematic social problem.
You know, the perpetrators aren't these monsters
who crawl out of the swamp and come into town
and do their nasty business
and then retreat into the darkness.
That's a very naive notion, right?
Perpetrators are much more normal than that and everyday than that.
So the questions is,
What are we doing here in our society
and in the world?
What are the roles of various institutions
in helping to produce abusive men?
What is the role of religious belief systems?
The sports culture, the pornography culture,
the family structure, economics?
And how that intersects?
And race and ethnicity and how that intersects?
How does all this work?
And then, once we start making those kinds of connections
and asking those important and big questions,
then we can talk about how can we be transformative.
You know, how can we do something differently,
how can we change the practices?
How can we change the socialization of boys
and the definitions of manhood
that lead to these current outcomes?
These are the kind of questions
that we need to be asking
and the kind of work that we need to be doing.
But if we're endlessly focused on
what women are doing and thinking
in relationships or elsewhere
we're not going to get to that piece.
Now I understand
that a lot of women who have been trying to speak out about these issues
today and yesterday and for years and years
often get shouted down for their efforts.
They get called nasty names like
"male-basher"
and "man-hater"
and the disgusting and offensive "feminazi".
Right?
And you know what all this is about?
It's called "kill the messenger".
It's because the women who are standing up and speaking up
for themselves and for other women
as well as for men and boys,
it's a statement to them to sit down and shut up.
Keep this current system in place
because we don't like it when people rock the boat,
we don't like it when people challenge our power.
You better sit down and shut up, basically.
And thank goodness that women haven't done that!
Thank goodness that we live in a world
where there is so much women's leadership
that can counteract that.
But one of the powerful roles that men can play in this work
is that we can say some things that sometimes women can't say.
Or better yet,
we can be heard saying some things
that women often can't be heard saying.
Now I appreciate, that's a problem, it's sexism, but it's the truth.
And so one of the things my colleagues and I always say, is,
we need more men who have the courage and the strength
to start standing up
and saying some of this stuff
and standing with women and not against them
pretending that somehow this is a battle between the sexes
and other kinds of nonsense.
We live in the world together.
And by the way, one of things that really bothers me
about some of the rhetoric against feminist and others
who have built the battered women's, and crisis movements around the world
is that somehow, like I said,
that they're "anti male".
What about the boys who are profoundly affected
in a negative way,
by what some adult man is doing against their mother,
themselves, their sisters?
What about all those boys?
What about all the young men and boys
who have been traumatized by adult men's violence?
You know what,
the same system that produces men who abuse women,
produces men who abuse other men.
And if you want to talk about male victims, let's talk about them.
Most male victims of violence
are the victims of other men's violence.
So it's something
that both women and men have in common.
We are both victims of men's violence.
So we have it in our direct self-interest -
not to mention the fact that most men that I know
have women and girls that we care deeply about.
In our families, in our friendship circles,
and in every other way.
So there is so many reasons why we need men to speak out.
It seems obvious saying it out loud doesn't it?
The nature of the work that I do and my colleagues do,
in the sports culture, in the US military, in schools,
we pioneer this approach
called the "bystander approach"
to gender violence prevention.
And I just want to give you
the highlights of the bystander approach,
because it's a big, sort of, thematic shift,
although there is lots of particulars.
The heart of it is:
Instead of seeing men as perpetrators,
women as victims,
or women as perpetrators, men as victims,
or any combination in there.
I'm using the gender binary.
I know there is more than men and women,
more than male and female.
And there are women who are perpetrators,
and of course men who are victims, there's a whole spectrum.
But instead of seeing it in a binary fashion,
we focus on all of us as what we call bystanders.
And a bystander is defined as anybody
who is not a perpetrator or a victim in a given situation.
So in other words:
friends, teammates, colleagues, coworkers,
family members,
those of us who are not directly involved in a dyad of abuse.
But we are embedded
in social family, work, school,
and other peer culture relationships
with people who might be in that situation.
What do we do? How do we speak up?
How do we challnge our friends?
How do we support our friends?
But how do we not remain silent in the face of abuse?
Now when it comes to men and male culture,
the goal is to get men who are not abusive to challenge men who are.
And when I say abusive,
I don't mean just men who are beating women.
We're not just saying that a men
whose friend is abusing his girlfriend
needs to stop the guy, at the moment of attack.
I mean, that's a naive way of creating a social change.
It's along a continuum
we're trying to get men to interrupt each other.
So for example if you are a guy
and you are in a group of guys,
playing poker, talking, hanging out, no women present,
and another guy says
something sexist or degrading or harassing about women,
instead of laughing along
or pretending you didn't hear it,
we need men to say,
"Hey, that's not funny."
"You know it could be my sister you're talking about.
Can you joke about something else?"
or "I don't appreciate that kind of talk."
Just like if you are a white person
and another white person makes a racist comment,
you'd hope - I hope -
that white people would interrupt that racist enactment
by a fellow white person.
Just like with heterosexism,
if you are a heterosexual person,
and you yourself don't enact harassing or abusive behavior
towards people of varying sexual orientations.
If you don't say something
in the face of other heterosexual people doing that, then in a sense,
isn't your silence a form of consent and complicity?
Well, the bystander approach
is trying to give people tools to interrupt that process
and to speak up
and to create a peer culture climate
where the abusive behaviour will be seen as unacceptable,
not just because it's illegal,
but because it's wrong and unacceptable in the peer culture.
And if we can get to the place
where men who act out in sexist ways
will loose status,
young men and boys who act out in sexist and harassing ways
towards girls and women,
as well as towards other boys and men,
will loose status as result of it, guess what?
We'll see a radical diminution of the abuse,
because the typical perpetrator is not sick and twisted,
he's normal guy in every other way, isn't he?
Among the many great things
that Martin Luther King said in his short life was,
"In the end, what will hurt most is not the words of our enemies,
but the silence of our friends."
"In the end, what will hurt most is not the words of our enemies,
but the silence of our friends."
There has been an awful lot of silence in male culture
about this ongoing tragedy
of men's violence against women and children, hasn't there?
There has been an awful lot of silence.
And all I'm saying
is that we need to break that silence.
And we need more men to do that.
It's easier said than done.
Because, I'm saying it now, but I'm telling you,
it's not easy in male culture
for guys to challenge each other.
Which is one of the reasons why,
part of the paradigm shift that has to happen
is not just understanding these issues as men's issues,
but they are also leadership issues for men.
Ultimately, the responsibility
for taking a stand on these issues
should not fall on the shoulders of little boys
or teenage boys in high school
or college men.
It should be on adult men with power.
Adult men with power are the ones we need to be holding accountable
for being leaders on these issues.
Because, when somebody speaks up in a peer culture
and challenges and interrupts,
he or she is being a leader, really, right?
But on a big scale,
we need more adult men with power
to start prioritizing these issues
and we haven't seen that yet, have we?
Now, I was at a dinner a number of years ago,
and I worked extensively with the US military, all their services.
And I was at this dinner, and this woman said to me
- I think she thought she was a little clever, she said,
"So how long have you been doing
sensitivity training with the marines?"
And I said, "With all due respect,
I don't do sensitivity training with the marines.
I run a leadership program in the marine corps."
Now I know it's a bit pompous, my response,
but it's an important distinction, because I don't believe
that we need a sensitivity training.
We need leadership training.
Because, for example,
when a professional coach
or a manager of a baseball team or a football team
- and i work extensively in that realm as well -
makes a sexist comment,
makes a homophobic statement,
makes a racist comment,
there'll be discussions on the sports blogs
and in sports talk radio,
and some people say,
"Well, he needs sensitivity training."
Others will say,
"Get off it, that's political correctness run amok,"
and "He made a stupid statement, move on..."
My argument is, he doesn't need sensitivity training,
he needs leadership training.
Because he's being a bad leader,
because in a society with gender diversity and sexual diversity,
(Applause)
and racial and ethnic diversity,
you make those kinds of comments,
you're failing at your leadership.
If we can make this point that I'm making
to powerful men and women in our society
at all levels of institutional authority and power,
it's going to change.
It's going to change the paradigm of people's thinking.
For example, I work a lot in college and university athletics
throughout North America, right.
We know so much about how to prevent domestic and sexual violence, right?
There is no excuse for a college or university to not have
domestic and sexual violence prevention training
mandated for all student athletes,
coaches and administrators
as part of their educational process.
We know enough to know that we can easily do that
but you know what's missing?
The leadership!
It's not the leadership of student athletes.
It's the leadership of the athletic director,
the president of the University,
the people in charge who make decisions about resources and priorities
in the institutional settings, right?
That's a failure, in most cases of men's leadership.
Look at Penn State.
Penn State is the mother of all teachable moments
for the bystander approach.
You had so many situations in that realm
where men in powerful positions
failed to act to protect children, in this case boys.
It's unbelievable, really, but when you get into it,
you realize there are pressures on men,
there are constraints within peer cultures on men
which is why we need to encourage men
to break through those pressures.
And one of the ways to do that
is to say there is an awful lot of men
who care deeply about these issues.
I know this. I work with men.
I've been working with tens and hundreds of thousands of men
for many many decades now.
It's scary when you think about it how many years, but ...
There is so many men
who care deeply about these issues,
but caring deeply is not enough.
We need more men
with the guts, with the courage, with the strength,
with the moral integrity
to break our complicit silence
and challenge each other,
and stand with women, not against them.
By the way, we owe it to women
there's no question about it.
But we also owe it to our sons,
we also owe it to young men
who are growing up all over the world
in situations where they didn't make the choice
to be a man in a culture that tells them that manhood is a certain way.
They didn't make the choice
we that have a choice, have an opportunity
and a responsibility to them as well.
I hope that going forward
men and women working together
can begin the change
and a transformation that will happen
so that future generations won't have the level of tragedy
that we deal with on a daily basis.
I know we can do it.
We can do better.
Thank you very much. (Applause)