01/15/2026
Correcting the script…
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1Fk2qUqWx6/?mibextid=wwXIfr
The room was full of men with influence.
College administrators. Coaches. Student leaders. Men responsible for shaping young lives.
Jackson Katz stood at the front, invited to speak about preventing violence against women. Most of the audience expected familiar advice—respect, awareness, maybe a checklist of good behavior.
Instead, he asked a question no one expected.
“Why,” he said calmly, “do we teach girls how not to get r***d instead of teaching boys not to rape?”
The room went still.
Katz didn’t stop there.
He offered a familiar scenario: a woman assaulted by her partner. Then he repeated the questions society always asks.
What was she wearing?
Was she drinking?
Why didn’t she leave?
Why did she stay?
Heads nodded. Everyone recognized the script.
Then Katz shifted the lens.
“Why did he do it?”
“What taught him that this was acceptable?”
“Who stayed silent when the warning signs appeared?”
The silence deepened.
That silence was the point.
For decades, violence against women had been treated as something women were responsible for avoiding. Self-defense classes. Safety tips. Curfews. Fear disguised as protection.
Men were rarely asked to examine their own culture.
Katz saw the problem clearly: when we focus on victims’ behavior, perpetrators disappear from the conversation. Accountability evaporates.
So in the early 1990s, he flipped the model.
Instead of treating men as threats—or saviors—he treated them as bystanders with power. People embedded in peer groups who could interrupt harm before it escalated.
He started where culture is forged: locker rooms, fraternities, military units. Places where degrading jokes were dismissed as harmless and silence was expected.
Katz taught men to notice the earliest signals of violence—not fists, but language. The joke that dehumanizes. The bragging that objectifies. The laughter that rewards cruelty.
Because abuse doesn’t begin with an assault.
It begins with permission.
And most men, Katz discovered, already felt uneasy about it.
When asked privately, many admitted they’d witnessed behavior that crossed a line. But speaking up felt dangerous. Social standing mattered. Brotherhood mattered. Being “one of the guys” mattered.
So Katz reframed courage.
Calling out harmful behavior wasn’t weakness.
It was leadership.
The man who interrupts a joke isn’t betraying his peers—he’s protecting them from becoming something worse.
The Mentors in Violence Prevention program spread. Athletes, students, soldiers learned to intervene—not violently, but socially. To change norms instead of waiting for consequences.
Then the culture shifted again.
Online spaces amplified resentment. Communities formed around grievance and entitlement. Misogyny found algorithms. Silence grew louder.
Katz watched decades of progress strain under backlash.
Still, he stayed.
Because culture isn’t changed by outrage alone. It’s changed by repetition. By modeling. By men refusing to let harm pass unchallenged.
His message never became complicated.
Violence against women is not a women’s issue.
It is a men’s issue—because men shape the environments where it either thrives or dies.
And every moment of silence is a choice.
The question Katz asked decades ago still hangs in the air.
Not because it’s provocative.
But because answering it requires responsibility.
