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.