06/13/2026
Jackson Katz is a national treasure.
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He wrote five sentences on a whiteboard. By the fifth sentence, the man who committed violence had disappeared completely.
The room sat in stunned silence. They'd never seen it before.
Dr. Jackson Katz stood before a room full of college administrators, coaches, and student leaders in the early 1990s.
They expected the usual speech about respecting women. About being good guys. About helping out with women's issues.
What they got changed everything.
Katz picked up a marker and wrote on the whiteboard:
John beat Mary.
Simple sentence. Subject, verb, object. Active voice. Clear who did what to whom.
Then he wrote the second sentence:
Mary was beaten by John.
"Notice what's happened," Katz said. "We've moved to passive voice. The focus has shifted from John to Mary. John is now at the end of the sentence—very close to dropping off the map of our psychic plane."
Third sentence:
Mary was beaten.
"John is gone," Katz said. "Now it's all about Mary. We're not even thinking about John anymore."
Fourth sentence:
Mary was battered.
"We've substituted 'battered' for 'beaten.' The term we've used for a generation."
Fifth sentence:
Mary is a battered woman.
Katz stepped back from the whiteboard.
"Notice what just happened. Mary's very identity is now what was done to her by John in the first instance. And the man who committed the violence? He's completely disappeared from the conversation."
The room was silent.
Then Katz asked the question that would become famous:
"Calling gender violence a 'women's issue'—isn't that part of the problem?"
Jackson Katz wasn't supposed to be doing this work.
He was a former college football player. Philosophy major from UMass Amherst. Got his Master's from Harvard's Graduate School of Education, PhD in cultural studies from UCLA.
In 1990, he started speaking at colleges about something nobody was talking about: men's role in ending violence against women.
Not how men could "help out" with women's issues.
How this was fundamentally a men's issue that men needed to address.
It was a radical idea.
"The overwhelming majority of domestic and sexual violence is perpetrated by men," Katz said. "But most men don't see these as their issues. They say, 'These are problems. But they're not my problem.'"
Katz remembered living in a coed dorm in college. He could walk home from parties at 2 or 3 AM without worrying about his safety.
The women on his floor had a completely different experience. Constantly worried about how they'd get home, who they'd get home with, constantly changing plans based on safety.
"That inequality in freedom of movement—that's a men's issue," Katz realized.
In 1993, he co-founded the Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP) program at Northeastern University.
The approach was revolutionary: Instead of telling men "don't r**e" or "don't hit women," MVP focused on the bystander role.
What do you do when your friend makes a sexist joke? When you hear someone bragging about getting a woman drunk? When you see something that doesn't look right?
"The question isn't just what the perpetrator does," Katz said. "It's what the other guys do. What is their responsibility?"
MVP started in sports culture. College athletics. Then professional sports—nine NFL teams, several Major League Baseball teams, NASCAR.
Then the military. All major branches of the U.S. military adopted MVP training.
By 2013, when Congress reauthorized the Violence Against Women Act, it required all colleges to provide bystander intervention training to new students.
But Katz's most powerful tool remained that simple linguistic exercise on the whiteboard.
He credits author Julia Penelope for developing it. But Katz brought it to hundreds of campuses, thousands of audiences.
And every time, the same reaction: stunned silence.
Because people had never noticed how language erases perpetrators and centers victims.
"When we talk about gender violence," Katz explained, "we say things like: 'How many women were r**ed last year?' Not 'How many men r**ed women?'"
"We ask: 'Why do these women stay with abusive men?' Not 'Why do these men abuse their partners?'"
"We say: 'She's a battered woman.' Not 'He's a man who batters his partner.'"
The passive voice isn't just bad writing. It's political.
It shifts responsibility from the person who committed violence to the person who experienced it.
And it makes violence seem like something that just happens to women, rather than something men do.
Katz's TED Talk—"Violence Against Women: It's a Men's Issue"—has been viewed more than 5 million times. Available with subtitles in 27 languages.
He's presented at over 2,700 colleges, universities, high schools, professional conferences, and military installations in all 50 states, eight Canadian provinces, and on every continent except Antarctica.
He created award-winning educational videos: Tough Guise, Tough Guise 2, The Bystander Moment, The Man Card.
He wrote The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help.
From 2000-2003, he served on the U.S. Secretary of Defense's Task Force on Domestic Violence in the Military.
But his message remained the same: This is not a women's issue. This is a men's issue.
"Dominant groups often go unchallenged in society," Katz explained. "Their power and privilege goes unexamined. That's one of the key characteristics of power—the ability to go unexamined, to be rendered invisible."
"Men have been largely erased from the conversation about a subject that is centrally about men."
The backlash was predictable. Katz received criticism from "armies of anti-feminist armchair warriors online."
But he also received support from men who came to his talks expecting to be criticized and left learning how to stand up for others and themselves.
"I try to help men think about how they can live up to the best aspirations they have for themselves," Katz said. "To stand up for justice and what's right even if it might be uncomfortable."
"Men standing up about sexism is like whites speaking out about racism, or heterosexual people challenging heterosexism."
The bystander approach resonated because it gave people something concrete to do.
Not "don't be a rapist"—most people already know that.
But: What do you do when your friend says something degrading about women? When you hear someone making excuses for a teammate's behavior? When you witness harassment?
"Isn't your silence a form of consent and complicity?" Katz asked.
The approach worked because it recognized that most men aren't perpetrators. But all men live in a culture where they witness sexism, harassment, degradation.
And their response—or lack of response—shapes that culture.
Katz called it leadership training, not sensitivity training.
"In a society with gender diversity, sexual diversity, racial and ethnic diversity," he said, "if you make sexist comments, you're failing at your leadership."
"What's needed is for powerful men and women at all levels of institutional authority to prioritize this issue. That will change the paradigm of people's thinking."
Thirty years after co-founding MVP, Katz's work has influenced millions.
The bystander approach is now standard in colleges, sports programs, military training.
But the linguistic exercise remains his most powerful teaching tool.
Five sentences. Active voice becoming passive. A perpetrator disappearing. A victim becoming defined by what was done to her.
John beat Mary.
Mary was beaten by John.
Mary was beaten.
Mary was battered.
Mary is a battered woman.
And in those five sentences, a revelation: How language shapes perception. How passive voice enables violence. How centering victims erases perpetrators.
Dr. Jackson Katz stood before that room in the 1990s with a whiteboard and a marker.
The audience expected a speech about respecting women.
What they got was a fundamental challenge to how they thought and spoke about violence.
Not "Why do women stay?" but "Why do men abuse?"
Not "How many women were r**ed?" but "How many men r**ed?"
Not "She's a battered woman" but "He batters his partner."
Active voice. Accountability. Centering the perpetrator, not the victim.
It seems so simple.
But for decades, people hadn't seen it.
The man who committed violence had been linguistically erased. Made invisible. Allowed to disappear from the sentence and the conversation.
Katz made him visible again.
And in doing so, changed how millions of people think about gender violence.
Not a women's issue that good men help out with.
A men's issue that men must address.
Because language matters. Voice matters. Who we center in our sentences and our conversations matters.
And until we keep the perpetrator in the sentence—in the active voice, accountable, visible—we'll never address the real problem.
John beat Mary.
Not Mary was beaten.
Not Mary is a battered woman.
John beat Mary.
And what are the other men in John's life going to do about it?
That's the question Jackson Katz has been asking for thirty years.
And it's the question that's changing the conversation about violence
