Jackson Katz is social researcher known for his work around gender violence and how to prevent it in the first place. His biography lists him as: Jackson Katz, Ph.D., is an educator, author, filmmaker, and cultural theorist who is internationally renowned for his pioneering scholarship and activism on issues of gender, race, and violence.
In 2013, he gave a TED Talk (which can be seen below) in which he said the way we talk about gender violence is all wrong. This quote went viral last year at the start of the #MeToo movement. It’s powerful.
We talk about how many women were raped last year, not about how many raped women.
We talk about how many girls in a school district were harassed last year, not about how many boys harassed girls. We talk about how many teenager girls in the state of Vermont got pregnant last year, rather than how many men and boys impregnated teenage girls.
So you can see how the use of the passive voice has a political effect.
It shifts the focus off of men and boys and onto girls and women. Even the term ‘violence against women’ is problematic.
It’s a passive construction; there’s no active agent in the sentence.
It’s a bad thing that happens to women, but when you look at that term ’violence against women,’ nobody is doing it to them.
It just happens to them.
Men aren’t even a part of it.
In fact, Katz wrote in his 2006 book The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help that he frequently spoke to groups of men and women and asked them (as groups) how they avoided being sexually assaulted. The results are stunning, although not surprising to any woman reading this right now.
No comments: