Status of Women Committee on Jan. 27th, 2015

[The Chair, NDP, Hélène LeBlanc]

Welcome. I would like to wish all of you a happy new year.

This is the 42nd meeting of the Standing Committee on the Status of Women.

I would like to welcome our new clerk, Cynara Corbin, who will replace Ms. Boivin, who is leaving us for reasons that are becoming fairly obvious. We wish her all the best with her pregnancy and wish her a very good maternity leave. We thank her for her services.

I would also like to welcome Joyce Bateman, who is joining the committee. We will confirm this after the lists are made, but I believe that Pat Perkins will also be joining us.

I would also like to welcome Mylène Freeman, who is the official opposition critic on the status of women.

Since our committee always does good work, without further ado, we will continue our study on promising practices to prevent violence against women.

We are pleased to welcome Jackson Katz by video conference today.

from MVP Strategies.

Welcome, Mr. Katz. You have 10 minutes for your presentation, followed by a period of questions.

[Jackson Katz, PhD, Founder and Director, MVP Strategies]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair, and thank you very much for this opportunity. This is a great opportunity and an honour for me to be with all of you this morning.

I'm in Atlanta, Georgia. I don't live here but I'm travelling, giving a series of talks, and I'm happy to be talking with you.

I'm going to lay out a few ideas of my work and thoughts and a conceptual framework about how to think about preventing men's violence against women. I will give you a little background as to the different areas my colleagues and I work in, and then obviously I look forward to your comments and questions.

I'm going to use the words “gender violence” or “gender-based violence” inclusive of domestic violence, sexual assault, sexual harassment, and even the sexual abuse of children, stalking, the whole range.

The first thing I think we need to think about in the prevention of all forms of gender-based violence is that historically, those issues have been understood as women's issues that some good men help with, but a big part of my work is to help people think beyond that frame. I don't see these issues as women's issues that some good men help with; in fact, I'd rather think about them as men's issues. Having said that, of course they're women's issues, I understand this, but just for the conceptual piece of this, please bear with me for a moment.

For example, I think that calling rape a women's issue is a subtle form of victim blaming, because the vast majority of perpetrators of rape are men. So just saying that rape is a women's issue clouds or almost erases the fact that men are the ones doing the overwhelming majority of rapes. Whether the victims are female, which they are in approximately 90% of rape cases; or male, which they are in approximately 10% of rape cases, the overwhelming majority of rape is perpetrated by men, but we call it a women's issue.

I think that's a problem in itself because it hides the accountability of men. The conceptual piece I often go into in my writing and in other parts of my work is to say that we need to think differently about this subject. We have to think that this is really a problem of men and the way we socialize boys, and the way we define manhood, crossing cultural and subcultural differences, and geographic and class differences, and ethnic and religious differences. Obviously, complexities are involved in this, but these are global problems and obviously not exclusively North American problems. They are manifested in virtually every society and there is something deep and structural about why we have a continuing problem with men's violence. It has to do with deeper structures of gender and that literally impacts the linguistic discussion of this.

For example, we talk about how many women have been raped in Canada, rather than how many men raped women. We'll say things like how many girls in the Ottawa school system have been harassed or abused rather than how many boys harassed or abused girls. That comes up over and over again.

Again, a big piece of the work we have to do conceptually going forward is to understand that this is not just a problem about women that men are helping out with, but that we really have to have some focus on men.

Having said that, let me be clear. Obviously, as you are in your own work, women have been at the forefront of all this work. In Canada and the United States and all over the world, women are the leaders of all these movements intellectually, politically, personally, and in every other way.

What I'm saying in terms of the shift in focus isn't about supplanting women's leadership in any way; it's just saying that if we really want to do the prevention work that has to be done, we really have to start understanding the centrality of cultural ideas and ideologies of manhood, and the need for men's leadership.

That's another key piece of my work, defining these issues not just as men's issues, but as leadership issues for men. That has implications on all kinds of different levels. If you understand this as a leadership issue for men—as well as for women of course, but again, I'm focusing on the men's piece—it means that men in positions of leadership in various institutional settings, in various sectors, have to understand that this is a mandate of theirs. They have to be knowledgeable and educated about it and trained in all of this subject matter. Then they have to be held accountable for incorporating that knowledge. The work they do has to be accountable for its incorporation of this sensibility and the focus on these issues.

Historically and up to the present day, this has been a big problem. There have not been a lot of men in positions of institutional leadership who have been knowledgeable about these issues, who have been strong leaders on these issues, and who have been held accountable. Largely, they've not been held accountable for that absence of leadership and that absence of knowledge.

Defining the issues of gender violence and the prevention of it as a leadership issue has enormous and positive implications.

I'm one of the architects of the bystander approach to gender violence prevention. Some of you might have heard about the bystander approach, or have had your own experiences with it, or seen it in media. I know some Canadian universities have employed one or another version of it. I don't have the time in this piece of my presentation to go into detail, but there are different versions of how you do this work.

Some of the ways that some people have taken it I don't necessarily agree with, but the basic concept of the bystander approach is that instead of focusing on men as perpetrators and women as victims, or women as perpetrators and men as victims, or any variation therein, we focus on everybody in a given peer culture as to what we call a bystander: friends, teammates, classmates, co-workers, colleagues, family members. Everybody else other than the binary of the perpetrator/victim is brought into the conversation when you employ the bystander approach. The goal is to get everybody in a given community, in a given peer culture, in a given school, in a team or whatever it is, everybody has a role to play in challenging and interrupting abusive behaviour, making it clear within the peer culture that abusive behaviour will not be acceptable, not just because it's illegal and you might get in trouble, but because the peer culture itself doesn't accept the behaviour. It's about changing the social norms within the peer culture.

It's also getting people to support victims and survivors and targets of harassment and abuse, and support them as allies and supportive friends and peers rather than isolate them. It brings everybody into the conversation, men and women.

One benefit of this approach in working with men is that it offers a very good way for men to get involved. A lot of men will say, in response to discussions about men's roles in preventing domestic and sexual violence, that they're not a perpetrator. They don't rape women. They don't abuse their wife or girlfriend. Why should they be concerned? As a result, a lot of men feel it's not their issue. The argument I make and that we present in the bystander approach is yes, it is your issue. All of us have a role to play. If you yourself are not abusive but you don't use whatever platform of influence you have in your peer culture, or in a hierarchical sense if you have a leadership platform in your community, in your workplace, etc., then you're being a passive bystander in the face of abusive behaviour. Let's talk about how you can do something more active and more transformative. That's the bystander approach.

Again, one of the beauties of that is everybody feels they have a role to play.

By the way, when I say “have a role to play”, I don't mean just at the point of attack. That's why I think some of the programs that have employed this approach have taken it in a narrow way that reduces its effectiveness. It's not just about intervening at the point of attack. It is about a sensibility that you have a responsibility to challenge and interrupt attitudes and beliefs and micro-aggressions and behaviours that fall short of physical aggression or physical assault. Everybody has a role to play in challenging the attitudes that underpin the abuse, not just stopping the abuse when it's happening.

I believe the overwhelming majority of domestic and sexual violence is preventable, not all of it, but the vast majority. The typical perpetrator is not sick or sociopathic. The typical perpetrator is much more normal than that. What I mean by “normal” is that he has absorbed a set of attitudes and beliefs from the culture that he grows up in, not just in his own family but in the larger culture, and he acts on that. Some of those men act on that. They didn't come out of nowhere. The behaviour doesn't come out of nowhere. There's a cultural context for it. The goal of this approach is changing some of the social norms that underpin that cultural context.

The sectors I've worked in primarily are the education sector, the military sector, the sports culture, and the law enforcement sector. I'm an educator. That's my training and my inclination, but it's not just in the classroom. There are all kinds of different ways of thinking about education. If we want to do true transformative change in prevention over time, we need institutional buy-in and we need institutional change. We need to build prevention and education around these issues organically into existing infrastructures of education.

Age-appropriate education should be in every school, K to 12. It should be in every university, and it shouldn't be a separate class. It should be built in, in various ways, to the educational expectations. It should also be a basic part of Canadian military training. It should be education on preventing sexual assault and relationship abuse. It shouldn't be seen as an add-on. It shouldn't be seen as a special thing because of a scandal. It should be part of the basic training, and not just basic training at the beginning of service. I'm talking about basic, ongoing training for commanders, for new recruits, etc.

In the sports culture, it should be understood as training for coaches at all levels. Coaches at the kids' levels, at the level of high school, at the level of university, and obviously in the professional ranks need to understand—

[The Chair, NDP, Hélène LeBlanc]

Mr. Katz, I'm very sorry to have to interrupt you, but the 10 minutes is up. I would certainly appreciate, if you have any more things you would like to complete as part of your very fascinating presentation, if we could hear them during the time for questions. If at the end of our questions there are other things you would like to add, we would be very glad to hear them.

We'll start the questions with Mrs. Truppe for seven minutes.

[Susan Truppe, Conservative, London North Centre, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you for being here today. I can see you're very passionate about this.

I'm glad you said in your statement that it's a men's issue and not just a women's issue. We should be asking how many men have raped women versus how many women have been raped. I think you're the first one I've heard say that.

In your experience, do you feel the way our societies have defined men's power, in the way boys are raised to be men, contributes to some of the violent behaviour of men and boys towards women?

[Jackson Katz]

Yes. I think if there's a single answer, that's the answer: yes. I don't think boys are born biologically predetermined and genetically predestined to be abusive towards women or to treat women with disrespect. I think it's learned behaviour. A lot of people will use the term “learned behaviour”, but I'd rather say it's “taught behaviour”, because everything that's learned is taught. If you shift the language from “learned behaviour” to “taught behaviour”, it shifts the onus of responsibility onto those of us who are teaching boys what it means to be a man. That's both women and men. That includes the media culture, which is a great pedagogical or teaching force. It includes the sports culture. It includes religious belief systems. It's across the board. We as a community, if you will, are socializing our sons and daughters into certain kinds of norms. So, yes, I think at the heart of it is what we're teaching our sons and daughters.

[Susan Truppe, Conservative, London North Centre, ON]

That would be society as well as families, I guess, in the way they're being taught in families.

[Jackson Katz]

That's correct, because families are one constituent part of a larger society, so families themselves are profoundly impacted by all of the other forces in society.

For example, I'm a father. My wife and I have a 13-year-old son, and clearly I am the most important man in my son's life. I know I've had great influence on my son's life, but everything that has influenced me influences my parenting of my son. So what influences me is not just my linear experience of my stepfather; it's also my peer culture, my mother obviously, my sports culture experiences, my consumption of media. Everything about my life as it is impacts how I father my son, so there's no such thing as a family that's isolated from the larger forces at work.

[Susan Truppe, Conservative, London North Centre, ON]

Right. Thank you.

You've lectured, I think I read, at 1,400 colleges, preparatory schools, high schools, middle schools, and military installations. Have you found a difference in the perception of women in the various countries you've lectured in? Right now you're in Georgia, I think you said, so you travel all over the place. Do you find different perceptions when you go from place to place?

[Jackson Katz]

Yes. Just as one point of information, I'm in Atlanta, Georgia, rather than the country of Georgia.

[Susan Truppe, Conservative, London North Centre, ON]

I guessed it was Atlanta.

[Jackson Katz]

I appreciate that.

Some people would say it's a different country. Some of the states in the United States are so different from each other, but we're all in the United States. One of the ways I would put this is that there are differences but the similarities are bigger than the differences. There are subcultural differences within Canada and within the United States, regionally, racial-ethnically, and socio-economically. Obviously, there are differences and variations. A big part of my work and my colleagues' work—and we work in multi-racial and multi-ethnic environments all the time—is to take into account in our pedagogy or in our work that there are differences. You can't just make blanket statements as if everybody has the same life experience or the same belief systems around gender, for example. It's not fair and it's not accurate. I think the similarities are much more profound than the differences.

We're talking about patriarchal cultures, male-dominated cultures, and they have certain things in common. Some societies are further ahead than others in addressing efforts to achieve gender equity, obviously, and some are not as far ahead. They're all in the same general path, if you will. I shouldn't say it like that, it's more complicated. I've spent a lot of time in Canada and a lot of time obviously in the States. I've travelled a lot in Europe, in Australia, and in parts of Africa. I can't say that I have complete, comprehensive, personal experience in all the different cultural contexts.

[Susan Truppe, Conservative, London North Centre, ON]

Right. Thank you.

From your travels you've also obviously heard a lot of stories as well. Best practices is what we're looking for in this study. Do you have one or two best practices or some that stand out in your mind that you'd like to share with us so they're on record; things like great programs or something great that you've witnessed or heard over there that we could keep in our report?

[Jackson Katz]

Even though it doesn't seem like a tough question it's a tough question. I think so much needs to be done that hasn't been done. I think people get bits and pieces. I don't know that I can say what I think needs to be done has been done comprehensively anywhere. For example, I travel on university campuses constantly. I was at a university last night and the night before and tonight. Each night I'll be at a different university here in the south. People ask me what colleges and universities are doing this right, that you can point to. I told them I can't even point to one in the United States. I can say good people are doing good things in bits and pieces but does anybody have a comprehensive strategy that I would say I would hang my hat on? The answer is no.

There are great NGOs in parts of the world that are against huge odds and doing good work. Like Sonke Gender Justice in South Africa. South Africa has a huge problem of sexual and domestic violence. They're a small NGO. One of the things they've done in their outreach to men—and it's a brilliant strategy—is they're combining issues of direct concern to men, not to altruistic concern for women, in other words, working with men. It's not just saying to men, you need to help women because it's your responsibility, it's because your mothers are women, and all that kind of stuff. It's not just that. It's also due to the transmission of HIV being a huge problem for men as well. A lot of men are buying into these cultural ideas of manhood, not using a condom, and acting in certain ways that are self-destructive. A lot of men get caught up in buying into some of these definitions of manhood that are both self-destructive and hurtful to others, including women. If you integrate a direct self-interest piece into your discussions with men, like Sonke Gender Justice does, you're going to get more men paying closer attention.

[The Chair, NDP, Hélène LeBlanc]

Great. Thank you very much.

Ms. Freeman, you have seven minutes.

[Mylène Freeman, NDP, Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

I was on this committee in the first year after I was elected, and it is a real pleasure to be back.

Thank you, Dr. Katz, for being with us today.

I'm going to get right to it.

Would you support a federal government-led national action plan to address and end violence against women?

Does that make sense to you?

[Jackson Katz]

Yes.

[Mylène Freeman, NDP, Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC]

Go for it.

If you have something to elaborate, I would see it as something that needs to have policies to prevent violence. We need independent research, data, and resources that are earmarked. I don't know if you have the same kinds of thoughts.

What are your thoughts on what a federally led national action plan would look like?

[Jackson Katz]

Thank you very much for asking the question and seeking my input.

In thinking about this opportunity here with all of you today, part of what I was thinking was.... Obviously I don't know anywhere near what you know about the kinds of legislation you could be effective in passing or not passing, and what it could do or what it couldn't do, but I can give you some ideas about what occurs to me that could be done at the federal level.

Think about all the federal employees you have some sort of mandate to address, and as an example, I'll give you the military. I think this needs to be built into military training at all levels, period, end of sentence. It needs to be every commander and every new recruit, to the chiefs of all the services, the admirals and the generals and all the top officials, as well as the grunts on the ground. Everybody needs to be trained in all of this, period, end of sentence. It needs to be part of the organic training, and again, not just an add-on, some special event that happens, or some response to some specific scandal. That's a federal mandate.

As for the RCMP, everybody in the RCMP should be trained regularly and should be up to date with best practices in prevention. I'm not just talking here about law enforcement tactics and how to make arrests. I'm not talking about the police procedural piece of this. Obviously they get that kind of training.

[Mylène Freeman, NDP, Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC]

You mean within the culture itself.

[Jackson Katz]

That's right, and in the role they play. For example, RCMP officials and RCMP officers, etc., are embedded in communities and families and some of them are coaches in communities where they coach kids' hockey teams. They're a part of the community, but you have access to them in the sense that they are employees of the government. That's what I mean by what the government can do. You can mandate certain things for federal employees, if you follow my line of reasoning here.

Obviously the federal government can do other things. When you say “a national action plan”, I'm assuming you're talking about federal legislation of some kind. Again, I don't know all the intricacies of the relationship between the federal and provincial governments in Canada. I really don't know those kinds of details but the federal government can set a tone, certainly, and can perhaps help to fund provincial efforts. I don't know, perhaps not, but I think there is a lot that government can do.

May I just give you one micro example? You might be able to figure out how this would work on a broader scale. At a city level—not the federal level but the city level—a mayor or the city manager, the chief executive of a city, has a huge workforce that he or she oversees. That workforce includes everybody from the senior-level politicians to the truck drivers and everybody in between. If you take a given city, the number of employees in that city could be tens of thousands in a big city and certainly thousands in other smaller cities. Those people have enormous contact, exponentially, with thousands and thousands of other people. What about everybody being trained in all of this?

When I say “trained”, I mean trained in understanding how they can use whatever position of influence they're in to interrupt and challenge abusive behaviours, get help for people, get resources for both perpetrators and victims, and help to create the message that abusive behaviour is not accepted, etc.

[Mylène Freeman, NDP, Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC]

Right.

I'm just going to move on to a different question. How do you see the correlation between economic inequity—women living in poverty, etc.—and gender-based violence? Could you describe how you see that and how you would like to see that addressed?

[Jackson Katz]

Again, this is a big, important question. Obviously, and I'll say this for the record and you all know this, these are issues across the board in socio-economically disadvantaged communities and in wealthy communities. It cuts across the board. They are in first nations communities obviously but they are also in wealthy, white communities.

For example, on university campuses, there is the rape pandemic, if you want to call it that, or the serious problem of rape and sexual violence. A lot of this is happening at elite universities with young students who are very well-to-do and still acting in these abusive ways.

A gentleman in the United States whose name is Oliver Williams is a professor at the University of Minnesota. He is an African-American and one of the founders of The Institute on Domestic Violence in the African American Community. He has been saying for years that we can't have this one-size-fits-all approach to the prevention of domestic and sexual violence because some approaches that might work in some communities don't work as effectively in others.

For example, if law enforcement is the single focus of the approach or the most important or powerful focus of the approach then poor and impoverished communities are going to face disproportionately the brunt of law enforcement's power. We know that people in wealthier communities have ways of avoiding detection by government authorities. There are all kinds of class-based reasons why there's more surveillance, if you will, in poor communities. So just saying law enforcement is the approach means that a lot of poor communities will be alienated from that strategy because for example a lot of poor women will be concerned that their husband will lose his job or her economic means will be threatened if he's in jail and she just wants the violence to stop and she doesn't want him to go to jail.

We have to be culturally, ethnically, and socio-economically sophisticated in how we apply some of these concepts in different communities and that includes poor communities with poor women.

[The Chair, NDP, Hélène LeBlanc]

Thank you very much.

Ms. O'Neill Gordon, you have seven minutes.

[Tilly O'Neill-Gordon, Conservative, Miramichi, NB]

Thank you, Madame Chair. Thank you, Dr. Katz. We certainly appreciate your taking time to be with us today.

Our group study and our committee study certainly focuses on a lot of these topics you have touched on. You have certainly given us great, positive ideas.

I noticed in your bio that you were the co-founder of the mentors in violence prevention program. I wonder if you could elaborate a bit on this.

[Jackson Katz]

Sure. Madam, thank you.

MVP—that's the acronym—was a program I created back in 1993 in Boston at the Center for the Study of Sport in Society, which is an institute that was created in 1984 with the idea of using sports culture as the platform or catalyst for social activism around various issues, including racism and other issues.

I was a graduate student in Boston at the time. My thought was if we could get more men who were athletes to speak out about rape, sexual assault, and domestic violence, it would open up space not just within the athletic subculture but in the larger culture that is influenced by the sports culture. We know how big sports are in Canada and the United States. My thinking was not that there was a particular problem in athletics of men assaulting women—although there was and is—it was the larger culture's problem and the positive role that athletics could play.

So we started the MVP program with the intent of engaging men in the sports culture. It moved beyond men and we started working with women as well, women and men in the sports culture. The goal was always to move beyond sports culture into the larger community, especially in education, in universities and high schools, and that's what we've done. MVP was the first bystander program, the first program that employed this approach that I referenced, which is instead of focusing on men as perpetrators or potential perpetrators, we focused on them as bystanders, friends, teammates, classmates, and it has grown from there.

The bystander approach that we started in MVP is now the mainstream of the prevention field in North America. So MVP still exists. I still run MVP and we still do training all over the place. We are running from one thing to the next in professional sports, and in college and university athletics. We've moved now into five countries around the world but most of our work historically has been in the States and now increasingly in Canada.

[Tilly O'Neill-Gordon, Conservative, Miramichi, NB]

What are some of the greatest ways we can gain men's support in the fight to end gender-based violence? Sometimes men don't want to come outright, openly...sometimes they might see it as their problem as well. What are some of the best, most effective methods we've put in place?

[Jackson Katz]

One of them, as I've said, is defining it as a leadership issue. If you define it as a leadership issue, that's a positive thing. They won't feel they're being blamed, in a sense, but they're being challenged in a positive way. If it's framed as a leadership issue, a lot of men can hear what you're saying and join in.

Over time it becomes an expectation, not a hope. In other words, we're not hoping that men will join us, if you will. We're saying we expect you to join us. If you're a person who's a leader in your faith community, in your business community, in labour, in politics, in sports, in education, in your family, by definition you need to be knowledgeable about and engaged with these issues. When that is said to men, I think a lot of men can hear that.

I've worked with men for a long time. I've done a lot of leadership breakfasts in Canada, in various provinces, where men come together from various sectors of the community, men who are not already involved, typically, in domestic violence or sexual assault issues. Business leaders, labour leaders, sports figures, and others come to these breakfasts. The theme of the breakfast is that everybody in the community has a role to play.

We know that not all of these guys are going to become activists. We understand that, of course, but they are members of the community, and they can play supportive roles. Sometimes it means writing a cheque and supporting a program, but other times there are other forms of support people can give. A lot of men haven't even thought about what role they can play. As I've said, a lot of men think that if they themselves don't engage in these behaviours and they don't teach their sons to engage in them, they shouldn't be involved. We have to make the case that we have to be involved because these are community issues. Gender equity and the prevention of gender violence are imperatives in a civilized society, and you have to be part of that.

Ma'am, can I say one other piece?

[Tilly O'Neill-Gordon, Conservative, Miramichi, NB]

Yes.

[Jackson Katz]

Thank you.

Another way to get men involved is to make connections between the issues of gender-based violence and men's experiences. Do you know how many adult men have grown up in homes where they were the victims, they and their sisters and brothers were the victims of their father's violence against their mother? How many boys and men have girls and women close to them who have been sexually, physically, and emotionally assaulted and harassed and abused? How many men have experienced both, directly, pain and suffering and sadness, and, secondarily, trauma and suffering and sadness because of our care for and love for women who have been abused? So many men have this as a personal issue.

And, I might add, men's violence against other men is a big problem too. Men assaulting and murdering other men, and men sexually assaulting other men are very big problems. The same system that produces men who abuse women produces men who abuse other men.

If you say to men that yes, men's violence against women is a critical issue and we need their involvement, and we also need them to speak out about bullying and harassment and abuse by men against other men, a lot of men will think, “I hear that, maybe in a way I hadn't heard it before.”

[Tilly O'Neill-Gordon, Conservative, Miramichi, NB]

I like how you say these are leaders in the community and people look up to them, and they offer that kind of support. That too gives these younger men and children the idea of how to act.

I was just going to say that I also like how you mentioned teaming up with a sports team. So many kids look so favourably to hockey players or any players to that extent, so that too is a very good idea to help us with our communities.

[The Chair, NDP, Hélène LeBlanc]

Thank you very much.

Ms. Duncan, you have seven minutes.

[Kirsty Duncan, Liberal, Etobicoke North, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Doctor Katz, thank you for your time and effort this morning, and for your work over the last 20 years.

I'm going to pick up on the comments of my colleague Ms. Gordon. A lot of your work involves engaging professional sports teams to the cause of promoting positive male attitudes towards women, to ending violence against women. Recently and sadly we have seen not the best examples for boys and men of how to treat women. I'm wondering if you think this dichotomy poses any problem. How do you overcome this?

[Jackson Katz]

I think what sports organizations, in this case to be specific, professional sports organizations, need to be doing is providing training and education for their players, their coaches, their staff. Everybody needs to know that just because you're providing training doesn't mean that you're going to prevent every incident from happening. It doesn't mean you're perfect. It doesn't mean you're hypocritical if one of your athletes ends up assaulting a woman. It just means that we're doing our best. Everybody needs to do their part and do their best in being part of the solution to these issues, not that there's any such thing as a perfect solution.

In addition, I would say that in my work with professional athletics my focus has not always been on the athletes themselves. The time we get when we work with a professional team is typically so limited, 90 minutes or something; 90 minutes is good, but it's not what you need.

But my thinking is professional athletic organizations have enormous resources in the community. They have brand power in the community. They have such influence. I'm thinking about kids when I'm thinking about professional athletes. I'm thinking about the message to boys that we can say these professional athletic organizations are part of this campaign. What's the message to young men who have big posters of these guys on their walls? When a guy whose poster is on the wall commits an act of sexual assault or domestic violence, obviously that sabotages the idea that these guys are somebody you should look up to. I understand that. But professional athletic organizations can do so much partnering with local domestic violence programs and sexual assault programs. They can provide resources.

Can I just give you one example? If every one of the Canadian franchises in the National Hockey League decided every year they were going to have training at their facility, high school coaches or youth hockey coaches from their region would come to their arena and have a day-long training on the role of the coach in leading young men and women—mostly young men—in sexual assault and relationship abuse prevention. The Toronto Maple Leafs, the Montreal Canadiens, the Vancouver Canucks, whatever team it is, are the co-sponsors of this event with, say, a local women's organization, and the coach of the team maybe makes an appearance at the training, or one or two high-profile players. in other words, make it a status thing for the local youth hockey coaches or the high school coaches to come to the arena and be trained. That's a way that professional organizations can use their power and brand to enhance the work that's already being done in the community and engage the coaches. A lot of those coaches, for example, wouldn't show up if it was just organized by the local domestic violence program, but if the Toronto Maple Leafs were organizing it, you'd see a lot more people turn up. That's an example of how professional athletics can play a positive role.

[Kirsty Duncan, Liberal, Etobicoke North, ON]

Thanks so much, Dr. Katz.

MVP Strategies, in collaboration with the Ending Violence Association of BC and the BC Lions football team, created the Be More Than a Bystander campaign. Has there been a measurable impact? Was that studied? What has been the response to the campaign, please?

[Jackson Katz]

Yes, I think this has been a fabulous development in Canada, as well as in the world, really. I think the EVA BC and Lions partnership has taken this work to a different level; obviously I'm part of this as well. The campaign consists of, among other things, a public service piece where you have professional football players from the BC Lions Football Club doing public service announcements on television, radio, and billboards. Since 2011 they've gotten over 100 million views. They have studied this in terms of media metrics and everything. Through lots of high-profile placements of these public service announcements on television, etc., they've had 100 million views in a province of four million people or something. It's just amazing, that kind of exposure.

In addition, my colleague and I trained a series of BC Lions players in intensive three-day training to deliver assemblies in high school gymnasiums. For the last three years, BC Lions players in the off-season have been going out in greater Vancouver and throughout the province and doing these big assemblies. A thousand kids march into the big gymnasium, and the BC Lions players do a 45-minute to one-hour presentation where they talk about their personal experiences. They show some clips of their football exploits, and then they talk about the need for men to join with women as partners and allies, to be more than a bystander, to not stand by when you see abuse, speak up, challenge each other. The response has been incredibly positive throughout British Columbia.

The Edmonton Eskimos and the Calgary Stampeders are now doing their version of this campaign in Alberta. They started just last year. During the next stage, we'll be training the Blue Bombers in Winnipeg.

It's good for everybody. It's a win-win, because the sports organizations get good, positive community relations and the fans and everybody wins.

[Kirsty Duncan, Liberal, Etobicoke North, ON]

Sorry; I get it, Dr. Katz, and I—

[The Chair, NDP, Hélène LeBlanc]

Thank you very much, Dr. Katz, and thank you very much, Dr. Duncan.

[Jackson Katz]

I'm sorry.

[Kirsty Duncan, Liberal, Etobicoke North, ON]

I wanted to know the metrics.

[The Chair, NDP, Hélène LeBlanc]

Ms. Crockatt, you have five minutes.

[Joan Crockatt, Conservative, Calgary Centre, AB]

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Dr. Katz, for being with us.

I'm thrilled that you've started to get into the White Ribbon campaign and the work with athletes. I was going to ask you about that and where it was going. Are you involved with those campaigns, the education of the football teams, and getting them excited about joining this campaign with our government?

[Jackson Katz]

Yes, I'm directly involved with all the CFL teams I just referenced, and I hope with more. We started in the western provinces and are kind of moving our way a little bit east; that's how it has been working, at least. I'm definitely involved in that. We haven't worked systematically yet with NHL teams, which I think is the next step. I think the NHL should be involved in all this, but they haven't been. That needs to happen as well.

In the United States my colleagues and I work with various teams in the NFL. We are working with dozens and dozens of teams in the NBA, including the Toronto Raptors. Of course, because of the scandal last year with Ray Rice and the National Football League, all the professional leagues are starting to scramble and ask what they can do to get ahead of the curve here.

So yes, I've been involved, and my colleagues have been involved, in consultation and actual training, with major league baseball, professional football, basketball, and not yet enough with hockey.

[Joan Crockatt, Conservative, Calgary Centre, AB]

Just to be clear, is this the federal government White Ribbon campaign that you are talking about, or is it a hybrid?

[Jackson Katz]

No, this isn't the federal government White Ribbon. What I was just talking about specifically was the Be More Than a Bystander campaign with the Canadian Football League teams. MVP Strategies, which is my organization, is sort of the partner, the United States partner. White Ribbon is a great organization, a Canadian-started organization obviously, that's worldwide and that I have friends and colleagues in all over the world, including in Canada. But what I was just referring to are not White Ribbon-specific campaigns.

[Joan Crockatt, Conservative, Calgary Centre, AB]

Okay. I just wanted to clarify that, because White Ribbon is funded by the Status of Women, which is the group you're speaking to today. It sounds like the objectives are very similar to that.

[Jackson Katz]

They are.

[Joan Crockatt, Conservative, Calgary Centre, AB]

You mentioned that you're now affiliated with the Calgary Stampeders. They are owned by the same organization as the Calgary Flames. Sheldon Kennedy, you might recall, is a former Calgary Flame who is now involved with the Child Advocacy Centre. I would say he's probably a good champion for you to work with there.

[Jackson Katz]

Yes, you're right. Thank you very much. I would love to work with him.

[Joan Crockatt, Conservative, Calgary Centre, AB]

Could I ask you about the media? You mentioned—and I think your testimony was fantastic—about how we see various cultures in society. They seem to suggest that it's okay to commit violence against women. We often see this in celebrity culture and so on, and in the media.

I'm wondering if you can talk about what appears to be a double standard. In one case, the media reports all the time if there seem to be cases of sexual assault and violence against women. On the other hand, the public appears quite willing to look the other way when it happens in the celebrity world. How do we tackle that?

[Jackson Katz]

I appreciate the question. I understand we're all limited by time. I know I can be pretty verbose, and I know there's so much more to this than we can possibly get to in this setting.

I've written about it, and I've thought a lot about this question, about celebrity culture and the excuses people make for behaviour by certain individuals. I think one of the reasons for this is that people have an identity investment in some of the men who do these horrible things. People don't want to think that the person they respect, admire, or appreciate on the basketball court, the music they love to listen to, or the movies they love to see somehow are implicated in abusive behaviour, if they're a fan of this person. There's a built-in mechanism of denial, they don't even want to deal with this. They don't even want to think about this because it's going to make them think differently about something they enjoy. They want to root for this team, and if they think this guy's a rapist, they're going to have a hard time rooting for this team.

It's much easier to blame the victim. It's much easier to say she's just making it up. These women are just trying to exploit these men for money or something. That's much easier than saying they can't keep going to these games. They can't keep listening to this song, because every time they hear this song, they think of this guy as an abuser. I think people have a built-in mechanism, a denial mechanism, that is defensive at base, and it's hard to get beyond this.

By the way, one of the reasons for the idea of “the other” is “the other is the one who commits the violence”. Somebody who's different—a culture that's different from us, an individual who's crazy or different from us—is comforting to people. If we take in that a large percentage of the abuse is perpetrated by guys who are average, normal guys, or in some cases charismatic celebrities, then it really disrupts our world view. What does that mean about our society if some of the people we admire are acting in these ways? I think it's very disconcerting for people.

I know in Canada just recently—I won't name the person but the famous radio individual—

[The Chair, NDP, Hélène LeBlanc]

Thank you very much, Dr. Katz.

[Joan Crockatt, Conservative, Calgary Centre, AB]

Thank you.

[The Chair, NDP, Hélène LeBlanc]

It was very enlightening.

Ms. Sellah, you have five minutes.

[Djaouida Sellah, NDP, Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Mr. Katz, thank you for the excellent work you are doing to prevent violence against women.

[Jackson Katz]

Thank you.

[Djaouida Sellah, NDP, Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC]

I am delighted that you are contributing to our committee's work.

I would like to follow up on what Ms. Crockatt just said since she just stole my question.

I have had this experience. I can tell you that my daughters think that I am not too with it when it comes to current celebrities. One of my daughters has been dreaming of a certain celebrity ever since she found out about him. This celebrity is coming to Canada in February, and I bought tickets for my daughter so that she could go and see him. However, when I learned that my daughter's idol had been violent against women, I was reluctant for her to see him.

I heard you speak about your experience with organized sports teams. I don't naively think that you went to work with these clubs because of their masculine aspect and culture of identification, strength and challenge. We can draw a parallel with the work you are doing. With your experience, what would you do in my place, as a mother who loves her daughter? She is an adolescent, and I don't want to deprive her of seeing her idol. That is my first question.

My second question is this: do you have any suggestions for the federal government? What can we do—step by step—to raise awareness and tell people that they do not need to remain passive when a woman, child or man is attacked like this?

[Jackson Katz]

Thank you. Those are two important questions.

You probably didn't want to say the name of the artist. You don't have to, but maybe I could. This is just one parent to another, if you will. Everybody has to make decisions. I never tell people what they need to do. Everybody has to make decisions. I can just say what we do in my house. For example, I can't prevent my son from listening to certain kinds of music, and I don't want to. I don't want to be that person who says, “You can't listen”, but I can say, “In my house, you're not going to have an Eminem CD. If it comes on the radio, we are turning it off in my house because I don't appreciate this. It is abusive toward women.” I appreciate that people have the right to be artistically creative in whatever direction they want, but I have the right, in my house, to turn it off. I wouldn't pay for it. I wouldn't pay for him to go to a concert of somebody who I think is offensive in that way, and I wouldn't give him a present of a CD or whatever. He can do it on his own, but it's not going to be with my support. That's the line I would draw. Everybody has to make their own decisions.

[Djaouida Sellah, NDP, Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC]

The style is not like Eminem's. He is very sentimental. That's the difference.

[Jackson Katz]

I appreciate that, but some of these sentimental people also have two sides, right?

[Djaouida Sellah, NDP, Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Exactly.

[Jackson Katz]

I probably know who you are talking about, but we can't be perfect. We can just do what we can. These are global problems and they are trans-generational problems. We're going to live and die and they are still going to be huge problems. We just have to figure out what we can do in our time, and in our familial, professional, and political spheres of influence.

I think the federal government can do a lot. Can I just say this, because I have this opportunity? It's a great opportunity. I'll start with the United States. I think every member of Congress should be trained in all these issues. Every staff member of every member of Congress should be. It should be an expectation. If you are going to be a legislator making laws about issues like this, you need to be trained not just by hearing a briefing or reading a pile of papers, which are important, but you need to be in training.

I would also say that the connections between gender-based violence and virtually every other major social problem have been researched for decades. For example, we know there are all kinds of intersections and overlaps between issues of homelessness and domestic violence and issues of alcohol and substance abuse. Victims and perpetrators are much more likely to develop alcohol and drug addictions and other forms of self-medication against the effects of trauma. A big part of the transmission of HIV has to do with men's sexually coercive behaviours, because they refuse to wear condoms, and they pass on the virus. Their sexually coercive behaviours relate to HIV transmission. With depression, we know that perpetrators and victims have higher rates of depression.

Think of all the money the Government of Canada pays in direct and indirect costs for law enforcement, incarceration, and all of the law enforcement side of the house as well as treatment programs for alcoholism and drug addiction and the effects of secondary violence and criminality that result from some of those drug and alcohol dependencies. Think about the millions and billions of dollars that are spent every year.

By the way, one way to think about this, Madam, is that there is no peace on the streets if there's no peace at home. There is no peace in the community if there is no peace in the family. So if you want to deal, for example, with gang violence, gang violence is a big problem—

[The Chair, NDP, Hélène LeBlanc]

Thank you. I'm going to have to interrupt you. That is very good though. It gives us a lot of food for thought at the federal level.

Madam Bateman, you have four minutes.

[Joyce Bateman, Conservative, Winnipeg South Centre, MB]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I am delighted to be a member of the Standing Committee on the Status of Women again.

Thank you so much, Dr. Katz. I'm so very pleased with your opening remarks and comments. I just want you to know that I represent a constituency in Winnipeg, Winnipeg South Centre, and it would be my great pleasure to work with the CFL's Winnipeg Blue Bombers and the NHL's Winnipeg Jets to be part of the solution that you propose. I so appreciate your comments about integration and integrating these concepts right into curriculum.

In your remarks, you mentioned that you didn't think this should be a separate area of study in K to 12, or indeed throughout university, but that it should be just a piece of reality that's integrated. Could you expand on how you see that happening, sir?

[Jackson Katz]

Thank you very much—and I'd love to work with the Winnipeg Jets.

[Joyce Bateman, Conservative, Winnipeg South Centre, MB]

So would I.

[Jackson Katz]

I'll give you an example of what I'm talking about. The University of Northern Iowa, with which I've been working for a number of years, has the Center for Violence Prevention, where they've started to take some of these ideas and some of my work and my colleagues' work to a different level. They have a school of education at the University of Northern Iowa that trains lots of teachers and secondary education administrators. They've infused into the curriculum, for students who are going to become teachers, training on all this subject matter. In other words, how do you as an educator integrate prevention programming into your curricula, into your teaching, into your leadership in the school? It's also for people who are going through master's degree programs, who will become school administrators and principals at high schools and middle schools, people who will be superintendents of school districts, and people who are going through graduate training on mentoring in violence prevention, the prevention strategies, the philosophy, and other programs.

Once they become professional administrators, they won't have to just start from scratch; part of their education, part of their graduate training, will be in understanding how to integrate these ideas and pedagogies into the curriculum and into the leadership of the school. The goal of this program is to create a model that can be replicated in universities throughout the world, really, because we need to build this into the education system in a structural way, not just, as I've said, an add-on program that's in addition to the existing curriculum in the school.

[Joyce Bateman, Conservative, Winnipeg South Centre, MB]

So how do you do that, sir?

[Jackson Katz]

I appreciate that. One way is through the training of the educators on the front end before they get to the school. Another way is to build it into the curriculum itself—in other words, not just an add-on class but in health, in the social sciences, in life skills classes.

But you have to have trained people doing it. I think the problem we've seen in the world here is that the people who are trained in this area tend to be working for domestic and sexual violence programs. They get provincial funding to do educational outreach, but that tends to be inadequate when there's only one program for 50,000 students in a district. One salaried person goes around to school after school for 30 or 40 minutes and then they walk out. The resources aren't there for the ongoing educational work that needs to happen.

[Joyce Bateman, Conservative, Winnipeg South Centre, MB]

Thank you very much.

Madame la présidente, do I have a little bit more time?

[The Chair, NDP, Hélène LeBlanc]

You can ask a little question.

[Joyce Bateman, Conservative, Winnipeg South Centre, MB]

Thank you.

Dr. Katz, please expand on your comments regarding not being a bystander. I know you were cut short in your opening remarks, and I very much would like to hear those comments.

[Jackson Katz]

Well, thank you. The bystander concept, if you will, really has applications at all different levels. It means that everybody in a given community needs to be part of the solution.

By the way, if you're a principal of a high school, you have an enormous platform of influence. If you don't do prevention programming for your staff, faculty, and students, and if you don't engage with various domestic and sexual violence programs in the community and have them come in and do their work, etc., then in a sense you're being a passive bystander in the face of abusive behaviour that's going on. We know that abusive behaviour, I'm sorry, is going on. We know that a number of girls in that high school have already been victimized, already have sexual abuse histories. Sometimes they're in abusive relationships in high school right now. If you are not doing anything proactively as a leader in that school community, then in a sense you're being a passive bystander.

On a micro level, if you're at a party and you're hanging out with a group of friends at university, and you see a guy you know trying to get a really drunk woman upstairs with him and you know he's going to try to have sex with her, which could very well be a rape, and you don't do anything—you know, “I'm not going to get involved in that, I'm just going to go over here”—then in a sense you're being a passive bystander in the face of potential abuse and rape. Our whole approach is that we should think about how we can do this differently. Instead of walking away and pretending it's not your issue, how can you in some fashion engage with this and interrupt this?

There are a whole bunch of strategies of what to do. We can't get into that now, but it's a sensibility. It's not just kids; it's adults. A big part of my work is working with adults. For example, there are lots of adults, in adult workplaces, who are bystanders to abusive behaviour and who don't say anything and don't do anything. Part of the reason is that they know there are consequences, potentially negative consequences, for speaking up.

So it's not just 16-year-old boys and girls who are policed into silence because of the consequences of speaking up; often adults are as well. I think we need bystander training in adult workplaces too.

[The Chair, NDP, Hélène LeBlanc]

Thank you very much, Mr. Katz.

Your testimony was passionate, fascinating and full of information. We would like to sincerely thank you for contributing to our study.

We will now suspend briefly to continue the work of the committee in camera.

[Proceedings continued in camera.]