by Jackson Katz
In my experience—and contrary to the expectations of many of my civilian colleagues—working with Marines on domestic violence and sexual assault prevention is no more difficult than working with other groups of men. In fact, there are some characteristics of the Marine Corps that make our trainings with them run more smoothly than in other places. This is because MVP adopts a positive approach to working with Marines that is similar to the approach used by the Duluth Domestic Abuse Intervention Project in their groundbreaking work with the Corps during the 1990s. In a fascinating article entitled “Strange Bedfellows: Feminist Advocates and U.S. Marines Working to End Violence,” Valli Kanuha, Patricia Erwin, and Ellen Pence explain that D.A.I.P. tried to use key aspects of Marine Corps ideology to argue that domestic violence was not only illegal but “un-Marine-like.” In their words, “Instead of resisting the hyper-patriotic and paternalistic aspects of [Marine Corps core values], we embraced them as tools to build buy-in.” The D.A.I.P.’s attempt to institute a comprehensive coordinated community response to domestic violence in the Marine Corps ultimately failed when marine leaders in the late 1990s discontinued the ambitious program, but not before this group of self-described “feminist outsiders” had successfully made allies of countless marines who agreed there was a need to bolster a warrior identity that did not include abusing women and children.
The language of leadership that is so important to the success of the MVP approach resonates especially strongly in the Marine Corps. When MVP trainers say that our culture desperately needs more male leadership in the gender-violence area, many Marines hear and respond to this as a positive challenge; and they are used to challenges. It is deeply imbedded in the ethic of the Marine Corps that Marines are not average or ordinary people. They proudly stand apart from the rest of society, and do things that others are not able or willing to do: they endure spartan living conditions, they work long hours for low wages, and they take significant risks with their lives in the service of helping others. There is much to discuss and criticize about the tasks to which marines are assigned by their political leaders. And there are many aspects of Marine Corps culture that offend progressive sensibilities—especially issues of gender and sexual equality. Not surprisingly, the Marine Corps has the lowest percentage of women in the U.S. military, approximately 6 percent. But in spite of all this, individual Marines are characteristically highly motivated, they have the courage of their convictions, and they are ready to sacrifice for the common good. Their credo is Honor, Courage, Commitment. This is perfectly consistent with the MVP philosophy of empowering men—and women—to speak up when they see a person mistreat another—even if doing so entails some personal risk.
The MVP model is basically the same in the Marine Corps as it is any place else. The language in the playbooks is slightly different; instead of “teammate,” the Marine Corps playbooks say “squad member.” But the key concepts are the same, especially the idea that silence in the face of abusive behavior is consent to that behavior. Consider the following scenario from the Marine Corps playbook, called “Barracks Heroes”:
In the barracks or gym one afternoon, some of your squad members are making sexist and degrading comments and jokes about a female Marine who is a friend of yours. They say she’s a “bitch in heat” who can’t lay off anyone, and several state they’d like to $#@% her.
Some guys—inside and outside the Marine Corps—think this is taking things too far. They might say, “Rape and abuse is wrong, but this is getting so I can’t even tell jokes or look at women without people jumping down my throat.” But this scenario raises some important questions about the relationship between attitudes and behaviors. For example, is it ever just “harmless fun” when a group of guys tell each other sexist jokes with no women around? Once in the late 1990s when a colleague and I were doing this scenario at an MVP-MC training in Quantico, Virginia, the Marines in the room could not see why this would be a problem. There was laughter and commotion in the room and we seemed to be losing control of the session. “Okay,” I said. “Let me ask you this. Would it be okay if a group of white Marines was making racist comments and telling racist jokes about black or Latino Marines, even if there were no black or Latino Marines present? Would that be okay behavior in the United States Marine Corps?” One Marine, a charismatic African American gunnery sergeant, turned to his fellow Marines and said sincerely, “That’s it. It’s a slam dunk. There’s no way I’m gonna argue with that,” as the mood in the room noticeably shifted.
For more than five years, MVP-MC has been part of the curriculum at the Staff Non-Commissioned Officer (NCO) academies throughout the Marine Corps. The academies employ Marine Corps instructors who provide courses to Marines as they are promoted through the ranks of enlisted leadership, from corporal to sergeant major. This is one way to institutionalize genderviolence prevention as a leadership issue. The message to Marines is that they need to be educated about what they can do, not because they are “good guys” who care, but because they are leaders and it is their responsibility. MVP-MC is far from a comprehensive program, and there is much more that the Marine Corps and all the other services can do to prevent gender violence. Large-scale reforms in this area are in the works throughout the Department of Defense, largely in response to congressional pressure following numerous domestic-violence and sexual-assault scandals in the military over the past decade. Whether or not these reforms will successfully reduce men’s violence against women in the U.S. military is far from certain. But in an authoritarian institution like the military, responsibility for what the troops do resides at the top. Command sets the tone. So while programs like MVP-MC and others that target junior level leaders and young service members are important, ultimately the buck stops with senior leadership. If the male leadership in the Department of Defense—starting with the president of the United States—began to treat gender violence prevention not as a distraction or a public relations challenge but as an absolute institutional priority, the rates of domestic violence, sexual assault, and sexual harassment perpetrated by members of the armed forces would begin to decline precipitously.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Teach Our Children Well
“There’s a lot of ugly things in this world, son. I wish I could keep ’em all away from you. That’s never possible.”
—Atticus Finch, To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
“The belief that violence is manly is not carried on any chromosome, not soldered into the wiring of the right or left hemisphere, not juiced by testosterone. Boys learn it.”
—Michael Kimmel
A public service announcement produced by the Family Violence Prevention Fund highlights the need for adult male leadership in the lives of boys. It features three vignettes where young boys approach older men. In the first, a boy walks up to a letter carrier on the sidewalk. “Excuse me,” he says to the man. “I’ve been getting mixed messages about women and violence. I need a little clarification.” In the second, a boy is riding on a train, seated next to his uncle. “Uncle Bill,” he asks, “how am I supposed to grow up to respect women when I have such lousy role models?” In the third, a boy approaches a man on a basketball court and says, “Can you help me reshape my attitudes toward women?” As the piece ends, a male narrator intones in an authoritative voice, “Boys are never going to approach you. You need to teach them that violence against women is wrong.”
The Fund’s Coaching Boys Into Men campaign is a highly visible example of a positive development in the field of gender violence prevention: an increased focus on boys and young men. The idea behind this approach is simple. Since domestic and sexual violence are largely learned behaviors, it is important to reach boys before they learn to abuse girls. And since these types of violence are so closely linked to men’s beliefs about what it means to be a man, it is also important to provide boys with alternative ideas about manhood to counterbalance all of the hypermasculine posturing and misogyny they encounter in their peer culture
and the media.
There is general agreement among researchers in the domestic and sexual violence fields that boys’ and men’s violence against girls and women is not the expression of innate, biological impulses, but is the result of some combination of personal experience and social conditioning. Theories differ on the exact nature of this social conditioning, but by far the most influential one of why gender violence is so common in our society begins with the premise that men’s violence against women is the result of the power imbalance between men and women, which carries with it a set of cultural messages to boys and men, including the idea that “real” men are supposed to control and dominate women. The ultimate solution to the problem of men’s violence against women, therefore, is equality between the sexes. The closer we get to a society where there is economic, social, and political equality between the sexes, the less need there will be for one sex to learn how to dominate the other. But despite the historical gains of the multicultural women’s movement, a truly egalitarian society is still a long way off. Thus we are faced with a daunting challenge: how to keep victims safe and hold offenders accountable, even as we work toward a society where boys and men do not learn the sexist attitudes and beliefs that lead some of them to emotionally, physically, or sexually abuse girls and women.
Where do boys learn to abuse girls? Many people assume they learn it at home, in a self-perpetuating cycle of violence which is passed down from one generation to the next. But numerous studies of men who batter show something different. Boys who witness wife abuse are much more likely to abuse their wives than are boys who grew up in non-violent homes. But the vast majority of boys who witness do not become abusive. In addition, the strong majority of men who are abusive toward women did not grow up with fathers who were batterers. It is useful to think about the intergenerational transmission of violence in terms of the intergenerational transmission of alcoholism. Children of alcoholics are at greater risk of developing their own drinking problems. Research shows that when one parent is an alcoholic, the children have a greater statistical chance of becoming alcoholic; when both parents are alcoholic, their chances are even higher. But the majority of children of alcoholics do not become alcoholics—and the majority of alcoholics did not grow up in alcoholic families.
So if most men who physically or sexually abuse women are not simply perpetuating a sad family tradition, where did they learn to be abusive? Unless you believe that each abusive man is unique, and that his attitudes and behaviors bear no relation to those of millions of his fellow abusers, the answer is not reassuring. They learn to be abusive in the same way they learn to be men. In other words, they do not just learn to be violent; they learn that violence is manly. One of the most important theoretical contributions of the battered-women’s movement is the insight that men’s abusive behavior in relationships is best understood as a manifestation of a masculinist ideology of power and control. The crime of domestic violence is not simply caused by men’s poor anger management skills. Instead, it is the product of a belief system—itself deeply rooted in male dominance—whose central tenet is that men should be in control in a relationship, their needs should come first, and if force is necessary to gain the woman’s compliance, then that is just an unpleasant fact of life. Similarly, one of the most important theoretical insights of the rape crisis movement is that rape is not about a man’s inability to control his sexual desire; it is more about his need to conquer and possess another person.
Where do so many men develop this burning need for dominance? Take a look around. Everywhere you turn, you see manhood equated with power and control—of other men as well as women. Some boys get this message at home, from influential adult male role models. But there are many other sources: their neighborhood, their peers, and the media. They learn it on Saturday morning cartoons and trips to the toy store, where “action heroes” with rippled muscles convey the powerful lesson that might makes right; on the playground, where recent research shows that bullies are not social misfits but often the most popular kids; in the sports culture, where dominating one’s opponent is seen as the height of athletic achievement; in NASCAR racing, whose most popular icon was nicknamed “The Intimidator”; in hiphop, where rich and famous rappers denigrate women and gays; in professional wrestling, where ritualized bullying, humiliation, and sexual harassment is normal behavior, and caricatured portrayals of brutish manhood are celebrated; in video games, where mastery of the joystick and the ability to “kill” at will—and sometimes beat up prostitutes—is equated to manly competence; and in the larger adult world, where they see abuses of power by men in business and government.
At the same time that impressionable boys absorb these lessons about how to earn respect in the world of men, they get the complementary message that what is considered “feminine” has less value than what is considered “masculine.” It is a short step from there to the belief that women are supposed to be subordinate to men—and sexually available to them. Despite important gains in gender equity sparked by the modern multicultural women’s movement—or perhaps because of them—our culture is saturated with stark visual evidence of women’s continued subservience to men, especially in the sexual realm. The stylistic conventions of pornography have become decidedly mainstream. From advertising billboards to magazine covers, scantily-clad female bodies are ubiquitously on display as objects for men to use and discard. Pornography itself—the vast majority of which eroticizes male dominance and control—is a $10 billion-a-year industry. Major recording artists glamorize pimps, and radio shock jocks openly humiliate women—with little or no public outcry. In the context of this cultural environment, can we credibly profess to be surprised when boys and men verbally, physically, and sexually harass and abuse girls and women?
The values and beliefs of men who become batterers and rapists in their twenties and thirties typically begin to take shape when they are much younger. That is why there is a growing clamor for prevention strategies that target kids in middle school. Early adolescence is a time of rapid growth and development, and it is a time when both girls and boys learn powerful lessons about femininity and masculinity. If young boys at that critical juncture are provided with guidance from men—and women—who can impress upon them that strong, confident men respect women as their equals and do not feel the need to put them down or control them in order to feel good about themselves, they are much more likely to successfully resist sexist pressures in the dominant male culture. But if this is true, what did abusive men learn about what it means to be a man when they were younger? Studies of men who batter show that while there is variation between types of abusive behavior, and not all batterers have the same psychological makeup, they tend to believe in men’s superiority and “natural” right to control women. Similarly, on the Rape Myth Acceptance Scale, an instrument used to measure the belief systems that underlie rapist behavior, men who rape tend to score high on belief in “traditional” and rigidly defined gender roles, acceptance of violence as part of relationships, and the idea that relationships are basically exploitive. There can be warning signs early in a boy’s life that should alert adults to serious problems. For example, boys who abuse animals have a high risk of becoming domestic-violence perpetrators when they grow up. However, just because the crimes of batterers and rapists often have earlier roots in their socialization does not mean that their later behavior was predictable.
When I was in my twenties, I worked as a counselor in the Boston area in a detention center for adolescent males. The boys, aged ten to seventeen, had committed crimes ranging from petty theft to rape. Many of them came from troubled, poor families (although not always); many had already been abused and neglected by parents and other caregivers; many had alcohol and drug problems. To someone reading about their crimes in the newspaper, or encountering them on the streets, a lot of these boys could appear intimidating and incorrigible. But youth counselors like me who worked with them saw a more complex reality. Mostly we saw vulne
rable, needy boys. As survivors of physical and sexual abuse, many of them had built walls around themselves long before they were taken into custody. They were clearly at risk for committing more crimes and hardening into adult criminals. Still, with a little bit of love and a lot of guidance from firm but caring adults—both sorely lacking in most of these kids’ lives so far—many of them stood a good chance of turning their lives around. In fact, to this day some of the best counselors in the juvenile justice system were in that system when they were kids.
Countless studies show that boys who are exposed to violence in their families are at greater risk for violence themselves. But “greater risk” does not imply inevitability. There are so many “resiliency factors” that can mitigate their damaging experiences, so many possible interventions along the way, that it is unfair to write them off as hopeless. In fact, most experts believe that if they receive quality professional attention, even boys who have been physically traumatized or sexually abused are not destined to repeat the familiar pattern.
This raises the question: is it ever too late to intervene? It is clearly important to reach boys when they are very young with messages challenging sexism and separating manhood from violence, provided it is done sensitively in an age-appropriate manner. But a person’s gender ideology is not fixed. We do not simply have to accept that the ideas about manhood which boys learn early in life can never be challenged or changed. This point was reinforced for me at—of all places—a Marine Corps base in the desert at Twenty-Nine Palms, California. I had just started working with the Marines, and I was giving a talk to about one hundred uniformed, non-commissioned officers. I began to explain the MVP approach, discussing the need to teach young men not to be passive bystanders in the face of their friends’ abusive behaviors toward women. I had been talking for a few minutes when a thirty-something male Marine raised his hand and with a dismissive tone said, “If you think this is going to work here, you’re mistaken. These young guys come to us at seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. Their attitudes about women, relationships, and those kinds of things were formed years before. It’s a done deal. You’re not going to change them.” Since the program I co-founded, MVP, begins with the premise that gender violence is learned behavior and thus can be unlearned, this man was essentially challenging the very heart of the program.