The boundary of spectator sports

Sporting News, The, Jan 29, 1996 by Mariah Burton Nelson

Whether you watch the Super Bowl in a bar or a living room or Sun Devil Stadium, chances are good that during the game you will hear from your fellow fans at least one derogatory comment about women or women's bodies. You might even see a drunken man grab or assault a woman.

If so, think about Jackson Katz, a former top high-school football player. Through a project he co-created called Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP) at Northeastern University's Center for the Study of Sport in Society, Katz urges college athletes not to be passive bystanders when they witness verbal, physical or sexual assaults against women. Katz tries to convince men that sexual assault is not a proper topic for locker-room humor and that domestic violence and date rape are not "private matters."

By putting men in the role of potential by-standers rather than potential abusers, Katz "reduces the defensiveness that is so often men's first response to discussions about male violence," he says. Though "there are varying levels of sophistication and maturity, most of the men respond positively." Since 1993, the MVP staff has offered workshops for 1,400 athletes at 10 universities (including kentucky and Northeastern), has trained 52 college athletes to work with adolescents, and has lectured to 3,500 high-school students.

When he visits teams - usually football, basketball, baseball, hockey and lacrosse - Katz typically begins the first of three 90-minute sessions by asking, "How many of you have a sister, girlfriend, mother, grandmother or female friend?" Amid laughter, all hands go up.

Then Byron Hurt, a former quarterback for Northeastern and Katz's partner at MVP, asks the men to visualize an assault against the woman they most cherish. "Now imagine," Hurt continues, "that there's a man in a position to stop the assault. But he doesn't.

He just ignores the situation, or watches."

The athletes agree the bystander who does not intervene is a coward. Katz and Hurt then ask, "What would you do if you saw a teammate slap a woman? If you heard rape jokes in the locker room? If you saw teammates harassing gay men or lesbians?" Together, they brainstorm options: Talk to a coach, ask a woman if she's Ok. The "do nothing" response is the only one strongly discouraged.

The goal of the project: to encourage athletes to speak out against sexual harrassment, date rape, gang rape and battering. Given their high status on campus, Katz reasons, athletes are perfectly positioned to impress and influence other men.

Asking football players to be moral exemplars for other men may seem a wee bit ironic. Who shall lead the crusade? Warren Moon? Lawrence Phillips? O.J. himself?

"We're not naive," Katz says. "We know that in any group, there will be men who are abusive to women. But we're trying to create a peer climate within which it's damaging to a man's reputation to abuse women. He should be an outcast among men."

Last year, MVP added a women's division. Female athletes are asked to think about their role as bystanders to male violence against women. Project Coordinator Michelle King, a former softball player for the University of Maine and a rape survivor, says she's "trying to empower women so they're not looked upon as victims, and so they can stand up to and confront sexism and abusive behavior." King has trained athletes at four schools - Northeastern, Kentucky, Nevada and Canisius. Since starting the women's program, King has become more outspoken herself, she says, "always" intervening when she sees physical violence and "much more likely" to speak out against sexist or homophobic jokes.

Katz also speaks out these days, but he's still haunted by an event that happened 18 years ago, when he was 17. Standing 40 yards away, Katz watched as a bully kicked a smaller," special-needs kid, a kid who was often the object of ridicule and ostracism."

Horrified, Katz nevertheless "didn't do anything." His passivity not only allowed the assault to continue but also "diminished me as a person," he says. "It was a failure on my part that I don't want to repeat."

Katz, who is Jewish, also became interested in bystanders when hearing stories about the Holocaust. "One thing that always interested me was, how could German people afterwards say, "I didn't know what was going on?"

He reached this conclusion: "Silence in the face of injustice is a form of complicity."

When Moon, the Vikings' quarterback, choked his wife, Felicia, it was their 7-year-old son Jeffrey who called 911. No one had to]d him domestic violence is a private matter. He did what all bystanders should do: intervened.

Something to think about during the Super Bowl.

What will you do?

Anything?

Mariah Burton Nelson is the author of "The Stronger Women Get, the More Men Love Football: Sexism and the American Culture of Sport," recently released in paperback by Avon Books.