Jackson Katz Ted Talk Analysis

During Jackson Katz’s TED talk, he discussed how violence against women is portrayed more as a woman issue, but in reality is a men’s issue. He discussed a paradigm-shifting perspective on issues that deal with gender violence such as: sexual assault, domestic violence, relationship abuse, sexual harassment, and sexual abuse of children. These topics are all issues that women deal with on a day-to-day basis, but calling gender violence a women’s issue is part of the problem that Katz discusses. Katz further explained that defining gender violence as a women’s issue gives men an excuse not to pay attention. The dominant group in every situation maintain and reproduce themselves, which allows that group to never be challenged. Katz goes on to explain that powerful men are the ones that are going to be able to change the gender violence issues. Powerful men that are part of the dominant group will be the ones that will be heard by the majority of society.

The issues dealing with gender violence that Katz discussed relate directly to what we have been discussing in our lectures. Katz talked a lot about the issue of victim blaming. In lecture we discussed multiple trends in victim blaming since the 1970’s such as; “battered woman,” date rape, and stalking. All three of those phrases were established not very long ago that blame victims rather than help them. In lecture we discussed that just world belief is “people who have a need to believe that their environment is a just and orderly place where people get what they deserve,” (Buist, 2018, lecture 3). This automatically creates the human tendency to blame victims. As Katz discussed in his lecture, blaming victims only diverts the real issue, that is the perpetrators. The goal of his discussion is to get men that are not abusive to challenge others that