Naming Men in “Violence Against Women”?

Through volunteer work, my college education, and career, I’ve been involved with “violence against women” issues in some form or another since I was 17 years old (9 years).  I currently volunteer with the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network , I work for an organization that partially addresses sexual harassment & assault on campus & in workplaces, and I’m deeply entrenched in street harassment activism in my free time.

Despite all my involvement and education about various forms of “violence against women,” it wasn’t until I started reading Jackson Katz’s book The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help this week that I finally noticed that men – the perpetrators of about 98% of the violence against women – are absent from the naming of the problem and much of the work around the problem.  Shouldn’t it be called “men’s violence against women ”?  Women are not sitting around just getting hurt – someone is hurting them. 

Shouldn’t we focus just as much time and energy on ending the culture that allows and fosters male violence as we do on helping survivors and teaching women how to try to avoid being a victim?  Why is the focus so often disproportionately on women’s responsibility to not get assaulted? We can spend our whole lives altering the way we live, look, and act and still we may be attacked or assaulted. We may have already been assaulted when we were too little to know it was our responsibility to avoid or stop it….

[Okay, just thinking about this is making me so mad – most of half of the population is harassed or assaulted at home, on dates, on the streets, at work, and at school, yet instead of being able to directly hold men accountable for this reality, we have to tip toe around the issue and frame it as a “women’s issue” so men don’t get upset and offended and hurt.  WTF.]

I suppose the problem with adding men directly into the name and activism strategy is exactly that – it clearly labels it as a “men versus women” problem (which it is) and makes people defensive.  A really important point in Katz’s book is how the societal expectation of men is SO LOW that as long as they don’t hurt women, they are good guys.  (And the men like him and the smattering of guys who I’ve volunteered or worked with on these issues are seen as heroes/gods for caring enough to take action.) Men can tell or laugh at sexist jokes, look the other way when their buddy takes advantage of a drunk young woman, and stand idly by while men around them harass, exclude, and demean women BUT since they don’t engage in abusive actions themselves, they are still good guys.  Because good guys are told they are exempt from the problem, they are likely to become defensive if/when they are implicated as complacent by-standers or simply talked to about violence against women.("Why are you telling me about this? I don’t do it")

Because I know nothing will change without having the “good guys” on board, I realize that a direct, blunt approach is usually not going to work.  I’m only on chapter 3 of the book and so I’m eager to hear Katz’s ideas at the end for how we can hold abusive men accountable for their behavior and getting more men active in ending the violence.

What are your thoughts on bringing more attention to the role of men in “men’s violence against women” and how we can most effectively bring men into the activism effort?  Male readers, what are your thoughts on all this?

(I just noticed that even the category I selected for this post is called "violence against women," not "men’s violence against women")

Disclaimer: This post was written by a Feministing Community user and does not necessarily reflect the views of any Feministing columnist, editor, or executive director.

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