Men asked to take up domestic violence issue on Flathead Reservation
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PABLO – The face of domestic and sexual violence is often painted as that of the battered woman or child, broken and helpless. Little is done to make society contemplate exactly how or why men abuse their partners and children.
“They’ve been seen as women’s issues that some good men help out with, but I have a problem with that frame and I don’t accept it,” said Anti-Sexist Male Activist Jackson Katz in a TED Talk played at Victor Arlee Theater for a men-only audience last week. “I don’t see these as women’s issues that some good men help out with. In fact, I’m going to argue that these are men’s issues first and foremost.”
For years, women have raised their voices in an attempt to stop domestic violence, but often lose men in the conversation.
“Calling gender violence a women’s issue is part of the problem for a number of reasons,” Katz said. “First, it gives men an excuse to not pay attention. A lot of men hear the term ‘women’s issues’ and we tend to tune it out. We think ‘Hey, I’m a guy, that’s for the girls and the women,’ and a lot of men literally don’t get beyond the first sentence as a result. It’s almost like a chip in our brain is activated and the neuropathways take our attention in a different direction.”
This excludes scrutiny for a major part of the domestic violence equation.
“The dominant group is rarely challenged to think about its dominance,” Katz said. “That’s one of the key characteristics of power and privilege: the ability to go unexamined, lacking introspection, in fact, being rendered invisible in large measure about issues that are primarily about us. It’s amazing how … men have been largely erased from so much of the conversation that is essentially about men.”
Instead society focuses on what women did to deserve a beating. Was she wearing a short skirt or drinking with men? Why is she attracted to such terrible people? Why doesn’t she leave the man?
This does nothing to help solve the larger societal problem of abuse, Katz argues.
“This is not about individual perpetrators,” Katz said. “That’s a naïve way of understanding what is a much deeper and systematic social problem. The perpetrators aren’t these monsters who crawl out of the swamp and come into town and do their nasty business and then retreat into the darkness. That’s a very naïve notion, right?” Katz went on to say that perpetrators are much more normal and everyday than that, questioning: what are the roles of the various institutions in helping to produce abusive men? What’s the role of religious belief systems, the sports culture, the pornography culture, the family structure, economics, race and ethnicity and how it all intersects?
On the Flathead Reservation, domestic abuse occurs every day. Tribal domestic violence investigator Joe Paul said tribal police handled approximately 40 cases in the month of October alone.
“If you listen to the radio, it happens almost every week here,” said Virgil Brave Rock, social work field education director for Salish Kootenai College. “Many times us Indian men, and men in general, think we’re bystanders; that it’s not our problem, that we don’t have to do anything about it because it happened next door or that we don’t have to do anything about it because we know what it’s like. Many of our children, young boys, are raised with domestic violence on a daily basis. They get raised in violence and they mimic it when they become men themselves.”
According to statistics for the Department of Justice, for every domestic case reported, two more go unreported. Additionally, Native American women are twice as likely to be victims of domestic or sexual abuse.
“I talk to witnesses who don’t want to get involved,” Paul said. “Nobody wants to stand up and say something.”
Paul said victims and witnesses should report the crimes to law enforcement, even if they don’t want to.
“Make it my problem,” Paul said. “Make it law enforcement’s problem. We really don’t need the victim’s statement. We just need to see the victim was injured in some way or scared of her attacker or his attacker. That’s enough under state and tribal law to make an arrest and send someone to jail.”
Other than reporting individual incidents, men can start a conversation about abuse and treatment of women before it takes place, Katz argues.
“One of the powerful roles men can play in this is that we can say some things that sometimes women can’t say, or better yet we can be heard saying something that women often can’t be heard saying,” Katz said. “Now I appreciate that’s a problem, that’s sexism, but it’s the truth. One of things I always tell my colleagues is that we need more men that have the courage and the strength to start saying some of this stuff, and standing with women, not against them; pretending that somehow this is a battle between the sexes and other kinds of nonsense.”
The blueprint for societal norm emerges in locker rooms, at sports bars, and at boys’ nights where women are not present.
“(If) someone says something sexist or degrading or harassing about women, instead of laughing … or pretending you didn’t hear it, we need people to say ‘Hey, that’s not funny. That could be my little sister you are talking about. Joke about something else,’” Katz said.
Correcting someone might not be easy, but it can make a difference, said SKC Men’s Basketball Coach Zachary Camel. The team once had a long-standing tradition of giving team members swats on the bottom their birthday. Camel did away with the ritual after someone called and asked him not to because it was a form of harassment.
“We immediately stopped it and I said that if one person is offended by this, there’s no reason to do it,” Camel said. “Just one thing like that can help us.”
Camel said he often tells players that they should be on their best behavior in public, but there’s room for improvement.
“Character is what happens when no one is watching,” Camel said. “…We ride on a van, we’re all together, a bunch of guys together, every once in a while you hear some things said … sometimes you have to stop it and say ‘hey, you can’t be talking like that.’”
Brave Rock said he hopes men will take up the fight against domestic abuse issues.
“We need men to step up and be leaders,” Brave Rock said.
