by Jackson Katz
The first responsibility of people who work with battered women, and rape and incest survivors, is to meet the needs of the women and their children. With shelters filled to overflowing and hotlines ringing off the hook, many battered women’s advocates stopped publicly using 1970s language about violence against women as a tool of patriarchal oppression and other similar phrases. They did not want to risk being labeled “anti-male,” lest the men in power turn off the still-meager flow of funds for direct services. They had to learn to act, and to compromise. They had to learn to smile when district attorneys made patronizing comments addressed to “you ladies,” and to endure ignorant judges who lectured battered women from the bench. Most of all, if they wanted to secure the services that women and girls desperately needed, they learned to avoid telling the truth to men in power.
To this day, much of the literature produced and distributed by battered women’s and rape crisis programs is written in language that avoids saying that men’s behavior is the heart of the problem. In fact, you can read through dozens of pamphlets and handouts from these groups and not see the word “man” or “men” even mentioned. For example, you might see statements like this (emphasis added):
• The primary risk factor for violence is gender.
• Abuse is used by one person to gain power and control over another.
• Domestic violence is a learned behavior, a choice, and the responsibility of the person who uses it.
• Sexual violence can occur at any time and be perpetrated by anybody.
• You are more likely to be sexually assaulted by someone you know—a friend, date, classmate, neighbor, relative—than by a stranger in a dark alley.
One of the silliest slogans to emerge in recent years is “Domestic violence is not just a women’s problem. It’s everyone’s problem.” Why not come right out and say that it is not just a women’s problem, but a men’s and women’s problem? To say it is “everyone’s” problem is yet another way to avoid implicating men.
As women’s programs grew cautious about how they played the gender politics of the issues, public discourse about “violence against women” became increasingly degendered. In newspaper articles and television newscasts, men who physically abused their wives or girlfriends went from being called “abusive” husbands or boyfriends to being called “domesticviolence perpetrators,” or “offenders” in need of “treatment.” The old term “wife-beater,” which used to suggest a shameful man, gave way to genderneutral terms like “abusive spouse.” When the word “rape” even made it into public discourse, it was almost always introduced in the passive voice, as in “x number of women were raped last year at state university.” To the casual observer, it appeared as if men were not even involved.
For some lesbian feminists and their allies, the gender neutrality was intentional. Their reason for using less gender-specific language was to acknowledge that not all women are heterosexual, to explicitly include lesbians, and to recognize abuse in lesbian relationships. If the language always referred to abusers as men, wouldn’t that render invisible women who were battered by their female partners? But in this case, under the guise of inclusivity and gender neutrality, individual men and male-dominated institutions evaded accountability. There is abuse in lesbian relationships, and a very small percentage of sexual violence against women is perpetrated by women; but men’s violence against women—in or outside of heterosexual relationships—is by far the more pervasive problem.
“Offender accountability” emerged in the late 1970s to early 1980s as a critical piece of what came to be known as the “coordinated community response” model for domestic violence and sexual assault. The notion that men should be held legally liable for their abusive behavior—behavior understood to be criminal, and not relegated to the private realm of individual or couples counseling—represented a major conceptual breakthrough. The implication of this shift was clear. The women who had been doing the bulk of victim advocacy work in these fields were tired of having to pick up the pieces in women’s lives after men had wreaked havoc, often with impunity. It was time that men—perpetrators and bystanders alike—were forced to shoulder more individual and collective responsibility.
The idea of accountability went beyond that of individual perpetrators. If violence against women was a social problem, there had to be institutional accountability. This included accountability in the law enforcement system and the judiciary for the prosecution, sentencing, and punishment of offenders. But it also encompassed the prevention role played by political, educational, business, and religious leaders—the majority of whom are men.
Unfortunately, it is very difficult for women to push gender politics in this way while at the same time maintaining cordial relations with powerful men. Theoretically, in order to hold men accountable, women need to confront men in positions of institutional authority with uncomfortable truths. But in order to maintain those cordial relations, they often cannot afford public honesty. They cannot call men out on their personal sexism without fear of reprisals. They cannot say that masculine entitlement, not “a few bad apples,” lies at the heart of our crisis of domestic violence. They cannot say—except in feminist journals and list serves that are read by an already-politicized constituency—that the U.S. incidence of rape is so high because we live in a “rape culture” that is supported by millions of men, the majority of whom would be offended at any suggestion that they are aiding and abetting rapists.
Which brings us to the current impasse, where gender-neutral language dominates public and private conversation about a problem whose roots are gender-specific. But this may be changing. Oddly enough, one effect of men’s growing involvement in this work is that men are often much less reluctant than women to say openly that men’s attitudes and behaviors are part of the problem. As more men speak out, we will hopefully hear less watered-down, gender-neutral commentary, and more straightforward discussion, including discussion around such touchy subjects as the relationship between men’s use of pornography and the ongoing pandemic of sexual violence.
Men are in a position to utter both controversial opinions and uncomfortable facts because they are less vulnerable than women to the withering accusation that they are “male-bashers.” In fact, men who work to end men’s violence often possess great empathy for the experiences and struggles of other men—even when those men have hurt women and children. As so many women know, you do not have to hate men in order to hold them accountable for violence—linguistically or otherwise.
LANGUAGE MATTERS
What follows is a brief discussion of five significant events from the past few years that illustrate how gender-neutral language effectively obscures men’s responsibility for gender violence: the Jonesboro, Arkansas school shooting in 1998; Woodstock 1999; the group sexual assault at the Puerto Rican Day festival in New York’s Central Park in 2000; the Child Abduction Summer of 2002; and the U.S. military rape scandal of 2003–2004.
The Jonesboro Massacre: “Kids killing kids”
The first school shooting that attracted the attention of a horrified nation occurred on March 24, 1998, in Jonesboro, Arkansas. Two boys opened fire on a schoolyard full of girls, killing four and one female teacher. In the wake of what came to be called the Jonesboro massacre, violence experts in media and academia sought to explain what others called “inexplicable.” For example, in a front-page Boston Globe story three days after the tragedy, David Kennedy from Harvard University was quoted as saying that these were “peculiar, horrible acts that can’t easily be explained.”
Perhaps not. But there is a framework of explanation that goes much further than most of those routinely offered. It does not involve some incomprehensible, mysterious force. It is so straightforward that some might (incorrectly) dismiss it as unworthy of mention.
Even after a string of school shootings by (mostly white) boys over the past decade, few Americans seem willing to face the fact that interpersonal violence—whether the vi
ctims are female or male—is a deeply gendered phenomenon. Obviously both sexes are victimized. But one sex is the perpetrator in the overwhelming majority of cases. So while the mainstream media provided us with tortured explanations for the Jonesboro tragedy that ranged from supernatural “evil” to the presence of guns in the southern tradition, arguably the most important story was overlooked.
The Jonesboro massacre was in fact a gender crime. The shooters were boys, the victims girls. With the exception of a handful of op-ed pieces and a smattering of quotes from feminist academics in mainstream publications, most of the coverage of Jonesboro omitted in-depth discussion of one of the crucial facts of the tragedy. The older of the two boys reportedly acknowledged that the killings were an act of revenge he had dreamed up after having been rejected by a girl. This is the prototypical reason why adult men murder their wives. If a woman is going to be murdered by her male partner, the time she is most vulnerable is after she leaves him. Why wasn’t all of this widely discussed on television and in print in the days and weeks after the horrific shooting?
The gender crime aspect of the Jonesboro tragedy was discussed in feminist publications and on the Internet, but was largely absent from mainstream media conversation. If it had been part of the discussion, average Americans might have been forced to acknowledge what people in the battered women’s movement have known for years—that our high rates of domestic and sexual violence are caused not by something in the water (or the gene pool), but by some of the contradictory and dysfunctional ways our culture defines “manhood.” For decades, battered women’s advocates and people who work with men who batter have warned us about the alarming number of boys who continue to use controlling and abusive behaviors in their relations with girls and women. Jonesboro was not so much a radical deviation from the norm—although the shooters were very young—as it was melodramatic evidence of the depth of the problem. It was not something about being kids in today’s society that caused a couple of young teenagers to put on camouflage outfits, go into the woods with loaded .22 rifles, pull a fire alarm, and then open fire on a crowd of helpless girls (and a few boys) who came running out into the playground. This was an act of premeditated mass murder. Kids didn’t do it. Boys did.
We will get nowhere if we continue to ignore the way masculine socialization helps to produce abusive boys, or boys who grow into abusive men. And we are not going to further our understanding of this process by using gender-neutral language to talk about the crisis of “youth” violence. We all know deep down that the problem is not “kids killing kids.” How many people, when they heard about a schoolyard shooting that involved eleven- and thirteen-year-old shooters, thought that a couple of young girls must have “lost it”? Girls and women are obviously capable of violence; quotable experts are constantly trotted out to remind us of this. A small but growing percentage of adolescent violence is perpetrated by girls. But the default category for adolescent (and most other) violence is male. Serious violence committed by girls is still rare enough that a local incident can become a major story in the national media. The brutal hazing incident that was captured on videotape in Glenview, Illinois, in 2003 is a good example. The tape showed high school senior girls kicking, beating, and forcing younger girls on the powder puff football team to eat raw fish, pet food, feces, and dirt. Not surprisingly, that story ignited millions of conversations private and public: “What’s up with girls?” “Did you see how violent those girls were?” The story had legs for several weeks.
Conversely, when boys act out violently, their gender is rarely deemed worthy of comment. Few people ask “What’s up with boys?” They say things like, “Kids today have so many problems and pressures that we didn’t have when we were young.” In fact, we are no longer particularly shocked by violence done by boys which—if done by girls—would create an endless amount of hand-wringing and outraged calls for action.
The Jonesboro tragedy—which preceded Columbine by a year—might have been a national wake-up call. It did help set the stage for the popularity of several “boy books” of the late 1990s, most notably Real Boys by William Pollack, Raising Cain by Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson, and Reaching Up for Manhood: Transforming the Lives of Boys in America by Geoffrey Canada.
But it did nothing for the movement to end violence against women. It did not catalyze a national conversation about what it means for boys to grow up in a culture which teaches that violence against women is manly. Post-Jonesboro, few people asked what it does to vulnerable young boys’ psyches when they grow up and learn—at home or in their peer culture, and reinforced in the media—that it is okay for a “real man” to use force when in distress, or when he has scores to settle? How does it affect them to be told repeatedly by their male family members and friends—or by movie characters, comedians, or rap/rock lyricists—that when a girl has defied, disrespected, or rejected them, it is understandable if they have the urge to inflict physical pain on them? Unless we are satisfied with the deeply cynical, reductive explanation that human males are somehow biologically predisposed to assault human females, these are not questions we can put off until the next tragedy.
Woodstock ’99
Woodstock ’99 was a rock/rap festival in upstate New York that turned violent, doing serious damage to the peace and love legacy of the original. Not surprisingly, it was a hugely hyped event, just what you would expect for the thirtieth anniversary of the legendary music festival. But it went badly. The audience was overwhelmingly white, with a lot of college students, mostly from the northeast. Some of the biggest names in white rock/rap performed, including Limp Bizkit and Korn. The musical reviews were unexceptional. But what captured everyone’s attention was the fury of the crowd, which erupted in violence, it was said, in response to the incredibly uncomfortable, unsanitary, disgusting conditions of the grounds, the poor access to overpriced water, filthy bathrooms, etc. If the music was a disappointment, the concert planning and logistics were a debacle. According to numerous published reports and dramatic video footage, the three days ended in a frenzy of vengeful violence early Monday morning, when “concertgoers” overturned automobiles, destroyed ATMs, and looted and burned concession trailers.
The outburst would have been disturbing enough if it had been confined to vandalism or wanton destruction of private property. But in the wake of the troubled weekend, reports surfaced of sexual violence on the concert fairgrounds. Eventually, it was clear that Woodstock ’99 had been the site of numerous rapes and sexual assaults, including one reported incident during the Limp Bizkit set where a young woman who was crowd-surfing was pulled down by a group of men and gang-raped.
The rape angle did get some media play. Sample headline from Salon.com:
“Three Days of Peace, Love, and Rape.” Someone coined it Rapestock. Rolling Stone published a lengthy dispatch that detailed much of the criminal violence, including numerous anonymous sexual assaults on young women who had found themselves trapped and hemmed in by angry, aggressive men, some of whom were drunk and high and bingeing on physical displays of anger and power.
The problem was the degendered way the rapes were discussed. The passive voice was everywhere: “at least four rapes occurred,” “ . . . this girl was being raped.”
And the perpetrators were almost never identified as men. They were “people,” “offenders,” or “bands of concert goers.” But mostly they were members of a “crowd.” The dominant frame on the story quickly became how a “crowd” of people—after being subjected to a weekend of trying and uncomfortable conditions—lost its cool. Experts on crowd and mob psychology were widely quoted explaining the concept of deindividuation, or how people in large, anonymous groups can lose a sense of their personal boundaries and get swept up in a collective sea of raging humanity.
But it wasn’t a crowd of people at Woodstock ’99 that lost its cool. It was a crowd of men. The video footage of some of the looting told the story visually: it was plainly evident that dozens of men were
the instigators of the rioting and destruction. Remarkably, it was rare to see explicit mention of this in print or on TV. If you read print stories about the mayhem, you would have thought that both sexes were equally involved. Moreover, coverage and commentary about the violence tended to center on the logistics failures of the event, as if the sexual assaults and vandalism were solely the result of poor planning, and had nothing to do with gender politics. And because this was Woodstock, after all, the event prompted many cultural critics to wax philosophic and melancholy about a “generation searching for its identity.”
For a moment, let us take the critics at their word; Woodstock ’99 was a metaphor for a generation’s quest for identity. But if it is truly something about a “generation” that holds clues to the debacle, why didn’t women burn and destroy private property? Why didn’t women commit sexual assault? Weren’t the women at Woodstock members of the same generation as the men?
To understand how misleading it is to talk about the Woodstock rapes using passive language, all you have to do is imagine the same conversation had women been the perpetrators. That would be the whole story. Girls riot! Women out of control at rock concert! Women commit dozens of sexual assaults! Those headlines would have captured everyone’s attention. People desperate for insight about the gendered factors that caused the outburst would ask: “Why women? Why would they act out in this brutal way? What does their behavior say about contemporary (white) femininity? What went wrong in the socialization of girls?” But when men are the perps, either as individuals or as a group, we rarely ask these questions. Especially when it is white men. In fact, we manage to figure out ways to sidestep the questions entirely.