Katz Violence Against Women

Gender violence includes offenses such as domestic violence, sexual abuse, and sexual harassment, and anyone of any gender can become a victim. However, the stereotypical victim of gender violence is female because a large proportion of victims are women. Consequentially, as Jackson Katz discusses in his TED Talk “Violence against women – it’s a men’s issue”, many people believe that issues such as domestic violence and sexual harassment only affect women and, thus, are deemed “women’s issues”. One obvious consequence of this stereotype is that male victims are often overlooked or dismissed, but Katz sheds light upon other consequences of referring to gender violence as a “women’s issue” that contribute to its perpetuation. For example, he discusses how thinking of gender violence as a “women’s issue” often causes men to feel like they don’t need to address the problem at all; this label leads to the false assumption that gender violence only affects women, so men may believe that this problem …show more content…
Furthermore, Katz points out that this terminology shifts the focus and sense of responsibility away from men, particularly the male perpetrators of the violence. Instead, a disproportionate amount of attention is placed on the female victim, and this frequently results in victim-blaming. Katz explains that “our cognitive structure is set up to blame victims. This is all unconscious. Our whole cognitive structure is set up to ask questions about women and women’s choices and what they’re doing, thinking, wearing” (Katz 2012). The phenomenon of victim-blaming and its role in the perpetuation of an issue are ideas that are also presented in Buffington, Luibheid, and Guy’s text A Global History in Sexuality: The Modern Era. In the essay “Sex and Disease from Syphilis to AIDS”, Laura J. McGough and Katherine E. Bliss discuss how socially inferior