05/05/2026
How we interpret what we say about abusers and the abused ……
A professor walked into a room full of students, athletes, and community leaders.
They expected a lecture. What they got was a marker.
He uncapped it and wrote five sentences on a whiteboard. Just five. No slides. No statistics. No raised voice.
The first sentence was simple:
John beat Mary.
"Good sentence," he said. "Subject. Verb. Object. You know exactly who did what to whom."
Then he wrote the second:
Mary was beaten by John.
"Notice what just happened," he said quietly. "We shifted to passive voice. The focus moved from John to Mary. John is now drifting toward the edge of the sentence."
Third:
Mary was beaten.
"John is gone."
Fourth:
Mary was battered.
"We changed one word. John is still gone."
Fifth — and he paused before writing it:
Mary is a battered woman.
He set the marker down.
"Mary's entire identity is now defined by what John did to her in sentence one. And the man who committed the violence? He has disappeared — from the sentence, and from our thinking."
Nobody moved.
Because every person in that room had read sentences like that. Written sentences like that. Never once noticing what was quietly being erased.
This exercise was developed by linguist Julia Penelope and brought into gender violence prevention work by educator Dr. Jackson Katz — a man who spent decades asking one question nobody else seemed to be asking:
Why do we keep framing this as a women's problem?
The statistics are clear: the vast majority of violence against women is committed by men. But through the slow, invisible drift of language from active to passive voice, men had been written out of the conversation entirely.
"How many women were assaulted last year?" — not "How many men chose to assault?"
"Why do women stay?" — not "Why do men choose to abuse?"
Every passive sentence quietly handed responsibility from the person who acted to the person who suffered. And once that happened, the response naturally became: What do we do about these women?
When the real question was always: What do we do about these men?
Katz didn't respond by lecturing men on what not to do. He tried something different. He asked what the other men in the room would do. Not the perpetrators. The bystanders. The friends, teammates, and colleagues who heard the comment, sensed something was wrong — and said nothing.
"Isn't your silence a form of consent?" he asked.
That question changed things. Because it gave every person in the room a role — not as a villain, but as someone who could either reinforce a culture or interrupt it. One moment. One conversation.
He called it leadership training. Not sensitivity training.
"If you make degrading comments about women," he said, "you are failing as a leader — full stop."
His Mentors in Violence Prevention program spread from college campuses to professional sports organizations, to the U.S. military. His TEDx talk has been viewed more than five million times in 27 languages. But his most powerful tool never changed.
Five sentences. A marker. And the quiet, radical act of writing a person back into the story — in active voice, accountable, impossible to ignore.
John beat Mary.
Not Mary was beaten. Not Mary is a battered woman.
John beat Mary.
And what are the people in John's life going to do about that?
That's the question that changes everything.
Because language isn't just how we describe the world. It's how we decide who is responsible for it — and who gets to quietly disappear.
