“Listen to Women for a Change.”
—Feminist slogan
“It all started with women learning to listen to each other. The battered women’s and rape crisis movements drew strength from our understanding that what happened to individual women was not isolated. At first we just wanted to help . . . later we began to hear about women’s experiences, and see commonalities and patterns not only in the abuses they suffered but in the responses to them by the police, the courts, the clergy. We then began to use what we’d learned to confront men both at a personal and an institutional level.”
—Debby Tucker, cofounder of the National Center on Domestic and Sexual Violence, volunteer in the first rape crisis center in Texas, and director of the first battered women’s shelter in Texas
I memorized the words to “The House of the Rising Sun” before I was out of elementary school. Like some of the enduring classic tunes, that song possessed an indescribable, mystical power. I was a sexually naïve young boy, but shivers went down my spine each time I heard the signature guitar lick that opened the famous cover by the Animals. I knew what was coming: a cautionary tale of temptation, sin, and the hint of illicit sex in the dark purples and deep burgundies of a New Orleans bordello.
The most famous couplet in the song struck an especially personal note with millions of boys of my generation:
And it’s been the ruin of many a poor boy
And God, I know I’m one
How many of us imagined ourselves to be that poor boy? How many of us sang along with Eric Burdon as we daydreamed about what it would be like to spend our lives in “sin and misery” surrounded by girls in black garter belts? It was not until many years later that I learned the back story behind the British group’s number one hit. In order to make the lyrics acceptable for radio play in the 1960s, the Animals had changed the main character of the song from a prostitute to a gambler. But no one was fooled. We knew it was about a house of prostitution. What we did not know is that “The House of the Rising Sun” was a traditional blues-folk song from the 1920s and 1930s whose original lyrics were written in the voice of a female prostitute. But the classic rock version—with a male narrator—positioned the listener to identify with that poor boy. It was his experiences—and his reality—that were the stuff of fantasy for many of us sex-starved pubescents.
Then I heard Tracy Chapman’s version, recorded in 1990. By that time I had sung along to “The House of the Rising Sun” thousands of times. But her words stopped me cold:
It’s been the ruin of many poor girls and oh God, I’m one.
The song’s meaning changed for me forever. Now, every time I hear the Animals version on the radio I think about the girls and women who are used up and kicked to the curb by the callous and indifferent men (and women) who run the “sex industry.” One old version of the song has a line that says, “Tell your baby sister not to do what I have done.” This had not even occurred to me until I heard Tracy Chapman’s version. Up to that point, I was too busy envying the corrupted life of the “poor boy” to empathize with the girls and women who live, work, and sometimes die in the seedy and dangerous world of prostitution and sex trafficking.
It can hardly be a coincidence that my guide in this mini consciousnessraising experience was a socially conscious female artist. This often happens when women have the opportunity to describe their reality—and when men are in a position to listen and hear what they have to say. I know I have learned a great deal about gender violence and other forms of sexism from some of the women in my life. Some of this knowledge is unsettling, because it has forced me to reassess my thoughts about certain customs and rituals in male culture, as well as certain types of people. For example, a number of years ago I was in a car on the highway with a close woman friend and we passed a shiny, gleaming semi-trailer. I said something about what an impressive machine it was, how I loved trucks, and how I was fascinated by some of the varieties of trucker masculinity. She had a different take on the subject. Ever since she started driving, she said, she had been objectified, harassed, and intimidated by male truckers. They regularly leered down at her, trying to catch a glimpse of her breasts. Some had mouthed sexually aggressive comments. One man pushed a handful of twenty-dollar bills up against his window. One time a trucker actually started to masturbate in his cab as he rode alongside her car. As a result of these experiences, she has a pretty negative visceral impression of male truckers—even though she knows it is unfair to the majority of them who do not do those sorts of things. When she told me about her experience with truckers, I quickly realized why so many women I know loved the scene in the 1991 film Thelma and Louise where the women blew up a fuel tanker. The explosion represented a cathartic release for so many women who could identify with the female characters’ sense of anger and outrage—emotions I had never before experienced in relation to trucks or truckers.
Men can learn a lot about women’s experience of men’s violence by simply listening to the women in their lives, and asking them questions about their perceptions. In addition, the modern women’s movement catalyzed a dramatic increase in the volume of women’s voices in the public sphere. Today, many women expect to speak—and be heard—in a way that previous generations of women could not even imagine. Women who have come of age since the 1970s have historically unprecedented public voices as community leaders, politicians, business leaders, members of the clergy, college professors, journalists, television producers, songwriters, playwrights, artists, novelists, and poets. (Of course white, middle-class women are much more likely to have a public voice than are women of color or poor women.) And yet public conversation continues to be dominated by privileged white men.
To cite one example: recently a spirited debate arose in newspapers across the country about the fact that women comprise less than 20 percent of opinion columnists in print journalism. Parity between the sexes might be a stated ideal, but it remains an elusive goal. An even more insidious way that women’s experiences are marginalized and their voices silenced is the stillcommon sexist practice of using the word “man” or “mankind” to refer to “humanity,” like when a headline writer invokes “man’s quest for meaning,” or the president of the United States talks about the benefits of peace “for all mankind.” In the late 1970s the sociologist Gaye Tuchman popularized the term “symbolic annihilation” to convey the effect this sort of linguistic exclusion has on women and their ability to be recognized as full persons whose reality, scholarship, and opinions are every bit as valid as men’s. As Richard Tarnas, author of the 1991 bestselling intellectual history The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View, writes, “Like many others, I do not consider it justifiable for a writer today to use the word ‘man’ or ‘mankind’ when straightforwardly referring to the human species or the generic human individual…I do not believe that such usage can be successfully defended.” His explanation is that no motive— such as style or brevity—is sufficient “to justify the implied exclusion of the female half of the human species.”
Of course sexism is also alive and well in popular culture, especially when it comes to the question of who gets to narrate the stories we tell about ourselves. Women studio executives have made advances in recent years, but most Hollywood films and television shows are written, produced, and directed by (white) men. Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the five hundred greatest rock-and-roll songs of all time included fewer than ten that were written by female songwriters, and Source magazine’s list of the one hundred best rap albums includes but a handful of women artists. Outside of the world of entertainment, men far outnumber women in positions of economic and political influence. There is still a glass ceiling for women in the business world and many of the professions. At the end of 2005 there were only seven female CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. And of course millions of women (and men) continue to be stifled by the deprivations of poverty and racism. Even among relatively privileged whites, as Carol Gilligan famously observed, girls in patriarchal culture feel significant pressure to censor expressions of their authentic selves in order to fit in and avoid social stigma for not being “good girls.” There are generations of men who have grown up with the modern women’s movement, have learned a lot from women, and sincerely respect women as their equals. But make no mistake: the beating heart of the backlash against feminism that continues to this day is the desire of some men to put the genie back in the bottle; to tell strong, smart, vocal women to sit down and shut up—and stop complaining.
The battered women’s and rape crisis movements were created by women who had the audacity to stand up and speak out about the ongoing crisis of men’s violence. Many of the slogans that came out of those movements reflected this theme: End the silence, no more violence. Break the silence. Silent no longer. In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, feminist authors wrote books about rape and domestic violence, and feminist collectives published pamphlets and leaflets—the precursors to today’s websites and email list-serves. Activists organized speak-outs to give a public voice to rape survivors. They tried—with varying degrees of success—to get mainstream media to cover violence against women as a social problem with deep cultural roots, not simply as an endless succession of salacious crime stories.
By the 1990s, all of these efforts had begun to shift the terms of the discussion toward women’s experience, women’s reality. But change has not come easily. The courageous women who built the movements to end men’s violence—and they come from the full spectrum of racial and ethnic backgrounds—have pushed us all to look at the world through the eyes of women, especially women who have been raped, stalked, battered, and abused by men. They have achieved a great deal in the past thirty years. But their efforts have come at a huge personal cost to many of them. Women who work with battered women, rape survivors, and sexual-harassment victims—as well as women who have been at the forefront of reform efforts in the courts, law enforcement, higher education, and K–12 school systems—have routinely been ignored or marginalized by men in positions of influence and authority. I hear stories from women all the time about men in power—or in their personal lives—who just “do not get it.” For many of these women, the growing presence of men in gender violence prevention evokes mixed feelings. They are happy to see more men shoulder the burden of responsibility for changing men’s and boys’ attitudes and behaviors, but they are also frustrated that some men can be heard in ways that women cannot.
In 1990, when I first started to give speeches on college campuses about men’s violence against women, I knew that some students came out to hear me because I was a man. Likewise, when I decided to write a book about violence against women as a men’s issue, I assumed that many people would be particularly interested in my perspective on this subject because I am a man. I am fully aware that this is unfair to women whose voices have been stymied or ignored. I am also cognizant of the fact that many of the ideas presented in this book originated with women, and many of my own ideas rest on a foundation that was built by women. This is true for all the men in the U.S. and around the world who are part of a growing movement of men opposed to men’s violence against women. We would not be doing this were it not for the leadership of women in our own lives and in the larger culture. As a small token of the debt we owe them, I want to share some testimonies from women about their efforts to speak to men and to advocate for themselves or other women, and what happened when they did. (Note: some names have been changed and descriptive details slightly altered to protect the privacy of individuals.)
It is no secret that many women who work in the battered women’s and rape crisis movements are themselves survivors of men’s violence. It has been this way since the beginning of these movements in the 1970s, as many of the founding mothers in the field were formerly battered women or rape survivors. The experiences of survivors have always played a critical role in the movements to end men’s violence; after all, they are the ones whose lives have been most directly affected. Their testimonies provide conclusive documentary evidence of the extent of the problem, and put a human face on what otherwise could be seen as dry and abstract statistics. From women who disclose to their loved ones that they were sexually abused as children to college students who talk in front of public gatherings at Take Back the Night rallies about their experiences of being raped to domestic violence survivors who testify in legislative hearings when new legislation is before the Congress, the courageous voices of women who dare to speak out loud about their own pain and trauma have provided the moral foundation of this work for decades.
One of the most powerful public education/political art campaigns ever conceived is the Clothesline Project, created in 1990 by a group of women in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Its design is deceptively simple: a clothesline with Tshirts hung in building lobbies in college campuses, community centers, museum lobbies, and other venues. On each T-shirt is a hand-written message from a survivor of incest, rape, domestic violence, sexual harassment, homophobic violence, or stalking, or from a friend of a homicide victim. Most of the messages are written by women, some by men. The idea is to give voice to survivors in a public forum. T-shirts say things like “For years I drank to numb the pain, guilt, and shame. No one asked me. I didn’t tell. Today I know a child can never be responsible for rape or incest.” “Tears, blood, and scars. But I’m here. I’m winning.” “What part of no didn’t you understand?” “Erase my memory so I can feel free again.” “You battered my body but my spirit survived,” etc. People walk down the row of shirts in respectful silence and read each one. The power of this display is that while each survivor is anonymous, their T-shirt makes an eloquent and emotional statement about their refusal to be shamed into silence. For men who walk down the line and read the shirts, the experience can be deeply moving and sobering. When the clothesline is displayed on a college campus, men who have the courage to attend are exposed to the intensity of their female peers’ feelings in a way that many have never encountered directly. The personal testimony contained in the shirts conveys an intensity of grief and perseverance that can touch them in a way that no recitation of statistics could ever match.
Of course it is true that survivors are not always embraced with open arms. Their stories are often ignored or disbelieved, and they are often bullied and shamed into silence. Many women who have been assaulted by men do not talk about their experiences, either to family and friends or to colleagues and coworkers. In fact, many women who work on the issues of domestic and sexual violence do not publicly discuss their own experiences. They might wish to retain their privacy, or perhaps they are concerned that people will not take them as seriously if they suspect they are motivated by personal trauma.
Recently I was talking on the phone with a woman I had come to know through our work together over the past couple of years. She runs a campus women’s center at a large southwestern university. She shared with me her frustration that a number of women students on her campus had been raped or sexually assaulted by male students, and in each case the administrators with whom she was interacting seemed either indifferent to the alleged victims or openly sided with the accused men. I asked her if she could recall any instances of men listening to her and being supportive.
“The most powerful example of this was not from my professional life but from my personal experience as a college student. When I was nineteen, I was raped by a guy who lived in my dorm. He was a popular guy, a senior and a fraternity member. The next day, I confronted him about what he had done. He told me that no one would believe me because he had so much more status on campus. Soon thereafter a group of the rapist’s friends began to make nasty comments to me in hallways, the cafeteria, and just walking across campus. I also began to receive menacing phone calls, and unsigned notes under my door with dark and cryptic messages. I never identified the people responsible for these messages, but assumed they were the same men. I wondered if they were doing all of this to intimidate me into not reporting that the popular guy raped me. As all of this was happening, I told a supportive male friend. He enlisted some of his friends, and over the next several months, they publicly defended me, and whenever possible, confronted the guys who were making abusive comments, which eventually stopped. To this day I draw strength from that experience, and the knowledge that there are men who will believe and support women. Sadly, this is not always true of the college women rape victims whom I advocate for, many of whom feel isolated and unsupported, especially by their male peers.”
I asked my colleague if she mentioned this experience in her public talks on campus. She told me that I was only the fourth or fifth person with whom she had shared this story since college, more than a decade ago. I thanked her for sharing it with me.
Survivors of sexual violence today—women and men—are more likely than in decades past to find supportive friends and professionals who believe them and advocate for them. But the idea that men’s violence is either women’s fault, or their responsibility to deal with, is deeply ingrained in both women and men’s psyches. In fact, one of the chief obstacles standing in the way of redefining sexual and domestic violence as men’s issues is the lingering power of this sort of victim-blaming mentality. One woman who is a prominent gender violence prevention activist in the Midwest said that when she was in college in the early 1970s, she accepted an invitation from her date to spend the night after she had found her dorm locked for the night. (College students may not relate, but at the time in many traditional colleges the women’s dorms were locked at curfew hour, and if you were late you had to go through the judgmental dorm mother to reenter. Men’s dorms were open all the time.)
“The man ended up raping me several times, with the threat of a gun. He allowed me to leave in the morning. I truly thought I would be shot in the back. Because at the time I was a practicing Catholic, I went to a priest later that day and he told me that while it was a bad thing that happened, ‘What did I expect, a young woman spending the night with a man?’ I decided not to go to the police because I was so ashamed of what I had done and did not want to hear another speech about how dumb I was.”
Women who are members of racial and ethnic minorities face special pressures about when and where it is acceptable for them to raise their voices and assert their own needs. According to Lori Robinson, who wrote I Will Survive: The African American Guide to Healing from Sexual Assault and Abuse, black women have historically been trained to always put others’ needs first, to be skeptical about utilizing professional services, and to deny their own need for support. African American women who have been abused might also choose to remain silent because although they want the violence to stop, they do not want their boyfriend or husband to go to jail. If he is black, they know that he is much more likely than a white man to do time for a gender violence crime. They might also feel pressure from members of their family and community to keep the abuse private and not air “the dirty laundry” in communities of color, because it will validate the racist stereotypes held by the white majority about African American men. In other words, black women’s silence is expected as a form of loyalty to their racial or ethnic group, whose needs take priority over their own needs for healing. Robinson’s book grew out of her own experience of being raped in 1995 when she was on staff at the now-defunct Emerge magazine, which billed itself as “America’s Black Newsmagazine.” She explains that an article she wrote in Emerge about her assault and the alleged assault of an African American college student generated an outpouring of letters from readers affected by sexual violence, which convinced her of the need to write a book.
Jewish women belong to another ethnic minority that has its own special tensions around the issues of domestic and sexual violence. Historically there was a powerful sense of denial about gender violence in the Jewish community. The conceit was that “nice Jewish boys” were not like the crude and aggressive Gentiles, and hence did not have those kinds of problems. This conveyed to Jewish women who were being abused by their Jewish husbands and boyfriends that they must be at fault, or that they should remain silent for the sake of family stability. Like women from other ethnic minorities, Jewish women also felt pressure to remain silent because if they disclosed the abuse it would somehow bring shame on them and their children—or the entire Jewish community. But over the past decade or so, in defiance of those pressures, Jewish women from all denominations, including Orthodox, have organized at the local and national level to call attention to the problem of men’s violence against women in the Jewish community—which occurs at approximately the same rate as in the larger society. In doing so these women have provided much-needed moral leadership on an issue of importance to the entire community, and issued an implicit challenge to Jewish men—including male rabbis—to speak out and thus not be complicit in their silence.
If women in long-established racial and ethnic communities feel pressure to be silent about gender violence issues, new immigrant women can face even more pressure, along with some added considerations. Many of them are reluctant to report abuse, or even tell anyone about it, because they do not trust the authorities. They might have fresh memories of police corruption in their countries of origin. In some cases, the man who is abusing or harassing her might skillfully use the woman’s uncertainty about her immigration status—or threats to call the Immigration and Naturalization Service—as a means to keep her quiet. Frequently these women speak a language other than English, which can make it more difficult for them to communicate their problems or access services—whose availability they might not even be aware of to begin with.
Men who work in gender-violence prevention—especially those men who are recognized and well-rewarded for our work—have an obligation to acknowledge women’s leadership in this area whenever we get the chance. Some of the biggest fears women have about men’s entry into this movement are that they will replicate traditional patterns of egocentric male behavior, women’s leadership will be supplanted by men’s, and women’s voices will be drowned out. These fears mirrors one of the most frequent complaints that women have about men: that they do not listen to them. Men often cut women off in conversation, or treat women’s contributions to a conversation with less weight than a man’s. Many women describe group conversations where they say something, and several minutes later a man says the same thing and does not give her credit. The source of this kind of marginalization of women’s opinions is not mysterious: it is a logical outcome of a sexist social system that assigns unfair weight to men’s opinions and minimizes women’s. One charismatic woman I know in the gender-violence prevention world recounted a conflict she had with a man she was seeing.
“He had been play-fighting with my four-year-old nephew, and I argued that he should not do that, because it would lead to problems with his peers on the playground, in the classroom, etc. This is a subject about which I know a great deal, as I work in the gender-violence area and have a lot of experience dealing with the connections between various forms of violence, and the effects of this violence on children. He had no such experience or training, but he did not accept the validity of my opinion. He argued that play-fighting with a four-year-old was necessary to toughen the boy up, and implied that it was intrinsically connected to masculinity. But what really got me upset was his attitude. I felt that he did not think I knew what I was talking about because I am a woman, and therefore he did not have to take into account my opinion. Most of the times I have gotten into heated exchanges with men—in my personal or professional life—it has had less to do with unbridgeable ideological differences than with the fact that men would not listen to me or consider my opinion worthwhile.”
Sometimes the opinions of women in the sexual and domestic-violence fields are not solicited or welcomed because people have a vested interest in ignoring their perspective. In other words, it is not simply that these women’s opinions are minimized as a result of sexism. They are silenced because people with power do not like the conclusions they reach, especially if they are critical of how an individual or institution handles the sensitive issue of gender violence.
One woman I know runs the women’s center at a small private college in the East. In order to maintain her anonymity, I am going to paraphrase her comments. According to her, violence against women is systematically ignored and hushed up by the dean of students, who is in charge of the judicial process, policies for the student handbook, and just about every other factor that influences the kind of response that women on campus face after they have been sexually or physically assaulted. She is the person on campus with the most expertise on gender violence, but is completely excluded from meetings on sexual assault and barred from providing training to the judicial board and other staff and students. She reports that in private meetings, the dean regularly yells at her, refers to rape as “regretted sex,” and forbids her from talking about the concept of rape culture, which he denies exists. On her campus in 2005, a student was seriously assaulted by her exboyfriend in a textbook domestic violence case. Although the women’s center director provided the dean with research on the risk of escalation in cases like this and had expressed concern for the victim’s ongoing safety on campus, he chose not to protect the victim. The perpetrator was back on campus the Monday following his attempt to kill his ex-girlfriend. The dean actually made the ignorant assertion that this was not a dating-violence situation, since he had asked the victim if the perpetrator had hit her before and she said no.
Women who work in this field often have to contend with a lack of respect for what they do from members of their own families. Gender violence is still a taboo subject for many people, and the women who defy the taboo and face the issues in their professional or personal lives frequently pay a price for their boldness. Many women I know have had the experience at family gatherings, dinner parties, and other social events where someone has asked them what they do for work, and their answer was greeted with awkward silence and a change of subject. One woman I know who lives in the South and works in a prominent domestic-violence advocacy organization tells this story:
“I have six brothers and three sisters, and with the exception of one brother, they tend not to ask me about my work, or domestic violence in general. This is in a culture where domestic-violence homicide cases like the Scott Peterson and Robert Blake trials are on TV every night of the week. At a family reunion, my brother told me that he has many female coworkers who are in abusive relationships, and that they are completely capable of leaving. They have a job, they can support themselves, etc., but they will not leave the abuser. He asked me why. I started to explain some of the reasons that someone might not leave and he cut me off. ‘Oh, don’t give me any crap about some kind of syndrome,’ he said. My other siblings asked if they could please discuss something else; that was the end of the discussion.”
One woman who is well-known and respected nationally in the sexualassault field has had an ongoing struggle with her in-laws around subjects related to her work. She tells the following story:
“Several years ago, during a visit to our home, my mother-in-law asked me about my work. At the time I was working at a statewide domestic-violence and sexual-assault coalition. My mother-in-law asked if there were differences between working on these issues in the Midwest, where we had recently located, compared to the East Coast, where we had previously been for many years. I responded that I noticed a more pronounced reluctance to address sexual violence overall, and that law enforcement officers seemed to have less training and to be much more biased against victims. Very few victims report their rapes in rural areas due to the social structures of small towns. Consequently, law enforcement officers have extremely limited experience investigating these crimes, which causes its own set of problems. My mother-in-law asked me what I meant by ‘biased’ against rape victims. I shared with her the details of an incident of outright victim-blaming, where the police refused to facilitate and pay for a hospital exam to collect forensic evidence because the responding officer simply did not believe the victim’s story, because it did not match up with the mythical ‘real rape,’ which should have included visible injuries and a sober, well-respected victim. My fatherin-law interrupted the conversation and said, ‘So you don’t think rape victims are responsible at all?’ And I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘Oh, come on! You don’t think that when a woman is dressed provocatively she isn’t asking for it?’ or something to that effect—I was so angry that I cannot remember his exact words. My mother-in-law told him that he was wrong and ridiculous.”
What happened next was even more hopeful, and speaks to the fact that many women in the gender violence field have supportive men in their lives. Her husband came out of the kitchen and informed his father that one more comment like that would result in a stay in a hotel for the rest of the visit.
Understandably, all parties subsequently sought to avoid similar conversations. But the unspoken tensions in these sorts of family relationships have a way of resurfacing. She recounts a conversation she had with her father-inlaw many years after the above incident.
“He said to me ‘Have you actually ever really helped someone? Do you know if you’ve made a difference?’ I was annoyed but not surprised at the arrogance of the question. What did he expect me to say? ‘No, I’ve spent nearly fourteen years wasting my time and taxpayers’ money on something that has been completely futile?’ I can’t help but wonder if I were a doctor or teacher with many years of experience, would they feel so free to argue with me about the causes of cancer, trends in literacy, etc.? They grill my husband for detailed information about what he does in his job, but I have never heard them question his facts or challenge basic assumptions in the mainstream of his field.”
Women—especially young women—frequently hear unsolicited comments of a sexual nature from boys and men on the streets, in parks, at sports events, and in other public spaces. While a small percentage of women might actually enjoy the attention, many others feel objectified, intimidated, or angry. But they often do not say anything, because they find it less stressful to just keep their head down and keep walking, or because they do not want to give the man the satisfaction that his comment caused any sort of rise in them. I frequently hear men say that it had never even occurred to them that women feel assaulted by this sort of unsolicited commentary, in part because they read women’s silence as approval. A close friend of mine shared a story with me of an incident that happened to her one day several years ago when she was on an Amtrak train. She was in the cafe car working on her computer—the project happened to be on gender equity for a major non-governmental organization. After an hour or so, she stood up to go the snack bar, and a man sitting with two other male friends began to make extremely embarrassing comments about her breasts.
“The entire train car full of people heard what he said. I was horrified and humiliated and felt assaulted. I responded by making what I consider immature and insulting comments back to the man, who I found out was drunk. One of his friends saw how upset I was, and apologized out loud for his friend. I did not know if I should move to another train car or not. I wanted to escape the embarrassment, but instead decided to hold my ground. I sat back down at my table and pretended to do my work, all the time wishing I had had the gumption to pour a hot cup of coffee in the offender’s lap.
“A while later, the man who apologized for his friend came over to discuss what had happened. He told me that he thought I had overreacted to what he considered a compliment. He said he hoped his three daughters would not behave as I did if a man made comments about their bodies. I looked him right in the eye and said he had better pray that his daughters react as I did, or he may have to worry that they will be sexually assaulted or humiliated as I was. ‘Humiliated?’ he asked. ‘Why was that humiliating? I thought my friend was admiring you.’”
This is a common perception among men. A lot of them think women like to hear unsolicited feedback about their bodies—when it is positive. Some men are genuinely taken aback that many women take this not as a compliment but as dehumanizing and invasive. My friend told him that his friend was not admiring her and his attention was not flattering in any way. His comments, she said, were disrespectful of her as a person, as a human being. “I think he really heard me,” she said. “I suggested that he ask his wife what she thought about the situation, and in ten years, ask his daughters.”
Ultimately, decisions about who gets listened to come back to questions of social power: the more you have, the more your voice is heard. That is why around the world, as women make progress in achieving economic and political power, they are increasingly in a position to push for the reform of laws, institutional practices, and customs that perpetuate gender violence. One of the first—and most important—steps in the reform process is to provide opportunities for women and girls to tell their stories, to make visible and public their experiences of violence, harassment, and abuse. For example, when an institution such as a college or the military decides to implement systemic gender violence prevention strategies—due to the initiative of responsible leaders or as a result of public pressure—they need to devise mechanisms to hear from women about how they have been treated within that institution. From 2000 to 2003 I served on the Department of Defense Task Force on Domestic Violence by appointment of the Secretary of Defense. As part of our fact-finding mission, the joint military and civilian task force traveled all over the world and met with personnel at U.S. military installations. Task force members met with commanders, enlisted leaders, military police, chaplains, and civilian social workers. But due to strong advocacy from both civilian and military members of the task force, we also met with civilian military wives who were survivors of domestic violence. Their testimony often cut right through some of the bureaucracy-speak and diplomatic niceties and told us exactly what had happened to them and how people in power had handled their cases. These women’s voices made an invaluable contribution to the task force’s process of designing recommendations for transforming Department of Defense policies on domestic violence.
Each time I hear a woman (or a man) talk in public about her or his experience of domestic or sexual violence (both the violence itself and then the often-ineffectual response of the authorities) my belief is strengthened that all male leaders—in educational institutions, religious organizations, sports management, the military—should be required to listen to survivors’ stories as a basic part of their training. This secular form of “bearing witness” should be seen not as something that “good guys” do to learn more about women’s lives, but as a fundamental responsibility of leadership.