Jackson Katz joins Chelsea Clinton for panel on the global pandemic of gender-based violence

Longtime MEF colleague and collaborator Jackson Katz stepped onto the international stage earlier this week as part of a featured panel moderated by Chelsea Clinton at the Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York City.

Katz, whose innovative gender violence-prevention work is profiled in our bestselling film The Bystander Moment: Transforming Rape Culture at Its Roots, appeared on a panel called “The Pandemic of Gender-Based Violence: How to Address the Threats” alongside Clinton, Beverly Tillery of the Anti-Violence Project (AVP), and Kalpana Viswanath of Safetipin.

During the discussion, Katz stressed the importance of re-framing gender violence, violence against women, and violence against the LGBTQ+ community primarily as men’s issues linked to traditional gender norms and regressive ideas about manhood.

“We need more men who are willing to say out loud that this is a men’s issue,” Katz said during the panel. “Men’s violence against women has long been one of the great tragedies of the human species, and women’s leadership in a multiracial, multi-ethnic sense has been incredible and transformative in world-historical terms for a long time and will continue to be so. But men have not met the moment.”

More than anything else, Katz said, the global pandemic of gender violence calls for more men in positions of power and authority to step up and start showing leadership on the issue. “We need to start calling men in,” he said, “men in positions of institutional leadership, political leadership, cultural leadership, at all levels, and I’m including Presidents of the United States as well as 15-year-old boys. We need more men who have the courage and the strength to say, ‘I don’t care if other men are going to say that I’m hating on men, or that I’m soft, or that I’m a soy boy, or I’m a virtue-signaler’ – all the kinds of idiocy that men and young men hear online and offline if they just have the chutzpah to tell the truth.”

You can watch the full panel here. Ashley Judd makes a stirring introduction at the 19:55 mark, and the conversation between Chelsea Clinton, Beverly Tillery, Kalpana Viswanath, and Jackson Katz begins at the 36:04 mark. You can also skip to when Chelsea introduces Jackson by scrubbing ahead to the 42:13 mark.

To help raise awareness about the scourge of gender violence and dig deeper into Katz’s groundbreaking bystander-based violence-prevention work, we encourage you to screen The Bystander Moment in your classes, on your campuses, and in your communities during Domestic Violence Awareness Month in October. We’re offering 15% off The Bystander Moment between now and October 31 with the code DVAM2023 at checkout.

The Bystander Moment is also streaming on Kanopy through universities and public libraries. Click here to see if your university subscribes to Kanopy.

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