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Katz
kicks off awareness month
By Alexis Kindig
On-line Forty-Niner
Cal State Long
Beach kicked off Sexual Assault Awareness Month with a lecture
by Jackson Katz, an expert on gender violence prevention.
The event, co-sponsored by the Women's Studies Association,
Women's Resource Center, Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender
Resource Center, College of Liberal Arts Student Council and
the Sexual Assault Crisis Agency of Long Beach, drew a large
crowd to the University Student Union Small Auditorium.
Katz's lecture, "Manhood and Violence," focused
on getting men to speak up about sexual violence against women,
including rape, sexual abuse, and battery. Katz wants men
to feel connected to the issue of gender violence because,
he said, it doesn't just affect the women who are victims
-- it affects the men who love them.
"Silence is a form of consent and complicity," Katz
said.
Katz drove his point home by having female audience members
volunteer the kinds of things they do every day to keep from
being sexually assaulted. A blackboard on stage was soon filled
with things such as "check the back seat of the car,"
"carry keys as a weapon" and "sleep with a
kitchen knife."
He asserted that women wouldn't have to take so many steps
like these if men would be more vocal in making it known that
sexual violence will not be tolerated.
Katz also asked men what they do to keep from being sexually
assaulted. Their side of the blackboard remained blank.
Katz is the founder of Mentors in Violence Prevention Strategies,
an organization that, provides gender violence prevention
training and materials to colleges, high schools, law enforcement
agencies, and community organizations, according to Katz's
Web site.
Katz is currently a member of the secretary of defense's task
force on domestic violence in the military. In 1982, he became
the first man at University of Massachusetts Amherst to minor
in women's studies.
Katz, a former all-star football player, said his eyes were
opened to gender violence in college when he took a history
course that focused on the women's movement and other social
movements, and a literature course that featured feminist,
gay and lesbian, and multicultural literature.
Though he grew up in a very masculine environment -- what
he calls a "jockocracy" -- Katz said he was willing
to listen to the plight of women and minorities because he
himself was the victim of violence, since he and his siblings
were physically abused by their stepfather, who in turn had
been abused by his own father.
Sexual Assault Awareness Month continues with a speakout sponsored
by the Women's Resource Center and the Sexual Assault Crisis
Agency at the Unitarian Church on Saturday.
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