Club Respect

Smart Plays is Club Respect’s podcast that shines a light on uncomfortable topics in Australian sport and aims to rebuild respect as the base platform for interaction between fans, parents, coaches, players and officials.

Listen to Part 1 >

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Overview

• Transcript – See below
• TED Talk – Violence against women — it’s a men’s issue
• Book – The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help
• Book – Every Man: Why Violence Against Women is a Men’s Issue, and How You Can Make a Difference (Release date Feb 2025)
• Program – Be More Than a Bystander – EVA BC & BC Lions
• Program – Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP)
• Program – Coaching Boys Into Men (Futures Without Violence)
• News article – AFL’s minute of silence for female victims of violence important but industry-wide change needed By Kate O’Halloran
• Website – Jackson Katz

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Transcript:

Contents

1. Review of Part 1 [00:29]
2. Why don’t we intervene? [00:49]
3. Club committees taking action [08:15]
4. Responsibility of leaders [11:54]
5. Case study: Be More Than a Bystander [20:44]
6. Jackson’s final thoughts [23:02]

 

1. Review of Part 1 [00:29]

Tarik Bayrakli: 

Welcome back to our conversation with Jackson Katz. If you haven’t already, I recommend listening to part one of this conversation. We spoke about the way men have changed, the way they engage in preventing gendered violence, the predictable pushback, the importance, and challenge of calling out your mates and how society reflects in sport. For now, enjoy part two of our conversation.

 

2. Why don’t we intervene? [00:49]

Tarik Bayrakli: 

You’ve mentioned this idea of leadership and an empowering way for men to take action. It’s similar to what I find with the Club Respect program, where we talk about increasing respect in sports clubs that will lead to a reduction in violence and abuse in all parts of people’s lives. You’re a co-founder of the MVP program, Mentors in Violence Prevention, working with leaders in businesses, military and notably with athletic organisations, which for Australian listeners we might understand more broadly as sports organisations, not just track-and-field athletics. You’ve also introduced the bystander approach to violence prevention in this training. Why can’t people just intervene when they see violent or abusive acts?

Jackson Katz:

Well, I started the Mentors in Violence Prevention program back in 1993 at a place called the ‘Center for the Study of Sport in Society’ at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, my home city. And MVP was the first large scale initiative in the professional sports culture, in the university, athletic and sports culture in North America. And it was the program that introduced the bystander approach, as you suggest, to the sexual assault and domestic abuse and sexual harassment prevention fields.

And the reason why I started the program in the sports culture, I was a graduate student in Boston at the time, the reason why I started in the sports culture was not that there was a problem in athletics of male athletes assaulting women, although there was such a problem and continues to be such a problem, my thinking was, where are we going to find the men, especially the young men who have the status within male peer culture, to speak out on issues that are incredibly important, but very few men have the courage and the strength and self-confidence to speak out about. And I thought, if we can get men who already have some status to break the silence and to speak and to lead, it’ll open up space well beyond the insular athletic subculture.

So, I was convinced that athletics had an extremely important role to play in responding to the problem of gender-based violence all over the world. By the way, athletics again cuts across all the social categories. It’s hardly a specific subculture, it’s an incredibly influential institution in every society. And I was like, okay, this is one of the solutions to the problem. And I thought from the beginning, I thought that people in the athletic world would see how good an idea this was, how important it was, and how it was also in the self-interest of athletic and sports organisations, in addition to being a social justice contribution to society.

And I thought self-interest because if you get young men, for example, and it was initially all young men, it became mixed gender later. But if you get young men thinking about these issues, educated about them, talking to each other, providing leadership, then you’re going to prevent a lot of the abuse from happening because you’re going to change the social norms within athletic organisations that often are the drivers behind some of the abuse of behaviour. So, I thought, okay, athletic organisations are going to realise this and they’re going to take this on because it makes a whole lot of sense.

What I learned fairly early, in the first couple of years, is that it was a much harder slog than I thought it was going to be, but not because of the young people. It wasn’t about the athletes themselves. And for example, I think we figured out, and I’m saying this is now 30 years over 30 years ago, we figured out what to say to young men on athletic teams. We developed curricula, I was the author, the main author of the curriculum, which has now made its way into so many different programs all over the world, but with bystander scenarios and there’s so many different ways in which the MVP program introduced lots of different approaches and exercises.

But we found from the beginning, and our program, by the way, was racially diverse and almost all former athletes and former student athletes, it was like we figured out what to say to young men 30 years ago. What we didn’t figure out is the politics. How do you get into systems? How do you get into sports organisations? How do you get the buy-in of the leadership? How do you get the buy-in of the, not the students, not the young people, how do you get the buy-in of the people who run the leagues, who own the teams, who run the sports organisations, and how do you get that in a sustainable way, not just based on charismatic, individual excitement or motivation? In other words, how do you institutionalise it? And I’m still, 30 years later, working on that one.

But anybody who says to me like, oh, we want to work with athletes, but we’re not exactly sure what to do about it… We know what to do about it. It’s the politics you have to spend your time on. How do you get the athletic organisations to build this stuff into normative training at all levels?

And by the way, one of the pieces of this is when I started working with professional athletics and my program did the first trainings in professional athletics in the United States. And in fact, the New England Patriots Football Club, that’s the dynastic champion American football New England Patriots, where Tom Brady was the quarterback, was the first team we worked with.

My thinking from the beginning was not that we were focusing on elite professional athletes because we wanted to fix them in some way, my thinking was how do you work with youth sports? Well, one of the ways to work with youth sports, which has way more influence on the ground level, is to leverage the power, the brand of athletic organisations like of AFL clubs. How do you leverage their popularity, their influence, their money, their stature in the community to set a model that will reach down into youth and club sports at all levels? And to this day, that’s only partially been realised around the world.

The power of sport to be an effective agent of transformative change around gender equity and gender violence prevention is only in its infancy. And again, it’s not because some of us haven’t been pushing at it, but it’s because the subculture of athletics, including professional athletics, has been very hit-and-miss in terms of its commitment to follow through on this subject. I’m not saying there aren’t any individuals or any organisations or any teams or any leagues that have done nothing. I mean, some have done more than others. So, I want to honour the ones who have done the work and who have actually used their platform in a positive, constructive way. But in my experience is pretty hit-and-miss and there are initiatives that come-and-go and I’ve been doing the work long enough to know that you’ll have a lot of excitement around, like a particular initiative, usually championed by an organisation or some individuals, but when they move on or when the spotlight goes away…

Tarik Bayrakli: 

It’s gone.

Jackson Katz:

…it often dies and then you have to start all over again. And so, we haven’t really achieved anything like a systematic implementation.

And I would say at this time in history with, for example, with all the attention to the issues of domestic violence, homicides and sexual assaults and all kinds of other tragedies that keep happening in Australia. You have an opportunity in Australia to have an incredible initiative, engaging sport at all levels. And again, anybody who’s interested in doing this has to know that there’s this a tonne of research, there’s a tonne of ideas, there’s a tonne of curricula out there already. It’s just a question of who has the will to put it into place.

 

3. Club committees taking action [08:15]

Tarik Bayrakli: 

Generally, club committees believe that action needs to be taken, but other committee members might not think it’s a priority or important at all, saying that they don’t believe there are any cultural issues or prevention work needed. If you’re a committee member wanting to take action, wanting to do the work, what would you say to the others on the committee who don’t think it’s as important?

Jackson Katz: 

My response to that is you’re an incredibly important member, an organisational member of your community, and these are big issues in the community, and you’re a constituent part of that community. You have an influence, you have power, you have a platform, you have status, you have the eyes and ears of young people. You got to be part of the solution. Period. End of sentence.

The argument that somehow, we haven’t had an incident or we’re not the problem is a very, very shallow, way of thinking about the role of sports in the society and the role of people who are engaged in the athletic enterprise in society. I’ll give you another example. If you’re a team that has people come to your games, including women fans, say it’s at the professional level, you have women who are fans. Are you being responsible to those women who care about being treated with respect and dignity? If you are not using the platform that you have as a prominent athletic organisation, are you being fair to those women? Are you being fair to the men who care about these issues, who care about women, who care about the women in their lives, who we have to deal with sexual harassment on the streets, in the workplace, in the sexual violence that they experience, the domestic violence, are you being responsive to the needs of the community that you’re an important institution in? And, I mean, I think it’s pretty clear that if you care about your community and you’re embedded in the community and you have status and you have a platform, you know, putting your head in the sand or saying, it’s not my issue, it’s not my problem, I don’t think is just a very responsible way of thinking.

And by the way, another thing, Tarik, I would say a lot of men in the sports culture, and this is, I, you know, I experienced this, my colleagues experienced this from the beginning, would get defensive, right? They’ll be like, we don’t like the image of men athletes as abusive. We don’t like the being understood to be rapists and abusers. And it’s not fair to blame us for the problems of sexual violence or what have you. And so, I would say to these men, and I still say it to this day, I’ll say, okay, you don’t like the caricature of male athletes, especially in certain sports, as blokes who are abusive, abusive towards women or out of control or whatever. You don’t like that. I get that.

So, you have two choices. One is you can hunker down in a defensive crouch and deny it and say that you’re being unfairly blamed for a problem that you’re not responsible for. Or you can do something about the perception by your good deeds, by your actions, by using your platform, by speaking out, by mentoring young people, by going into schools and talking to young people, by using the platform that you have as an accomplished athlete to provide a role model to young boys, to train coaches, to help train coaches to be more effective working with young people, because they spend huge amounts of time with young people, including young boys and young men, to try to, if you have financial resources, to use your financial resources to train, again, coaches and youth workers and people who work with young people, especially boys, around this subject matter, you can do an incredible amount of good. And so, by doing that, you can counteract the stereotype that you’re claiming is so pernicious and so harmful. It’s your choice. You can hunker down defensively, or you can be a positive agent for change. And I think it’s obvious which one I think is a better choice.

 

4. Responsibility of leaders [11:54]

Tarik Bayrakli:

I reckon there’s definitely been a shift in the way Australian professional sports respond to major incidents like domestic and sexual assaults by players. Not across the board but we’ve seen some professional clubs who are more inclined to take the approach of ‘challenge the behaviour and support the person’.

I first heard that mantra from Peter Robinson, Robbo, actually, who works with the Melbourne Storm Rugby League Club, and it’s a mantra I take into my own relationships, conversations with friends about poor behaviour, they don’t have to be confrontational, especially if you’ve got their best interests at heart.

I’ve heard you describe a way forward in preventing gender advance, where specific prevention style responsibilities are set in Position Descriptions for people in leadership roles. I’m interested in how that would apply in a sports context where you’ve got committee members and a President, you’ve got coaches and captains. How does this play out in real time, where something like this could be set up at a community level club?

Jackson Katz:

The general concept is that all people in positions of leadership, especially leadership in workplaces, in schools, in sports culture, obviously, the military, especially with young people, but not exclusively, needs to have training in how to use their platform of influence and leadership to do at least 3 things, 3 key things around gender violence:

One is to support victims and survivors to the extent that they can. Two, to interrupt abusive behaviour and hold abusers accountable in whatever way they can, and not just legally. And three, they need to help set the tone within the institution, within the organisation, within the team, within the unit, within the workplace. Whereby abusive behaviour is seen as, in this case, misogynist abuse is seen as completely unacceptable within the group.

And that needs to be done proactively, not reactively, not just when an incident has happened, how they react, but they have to set the tone and do that proactively. And this needs to be written into the job description of leaders at all levels. And it needs to be an expectation and not a desire and not a hope.

In other words, we’re not hoping that men who are in positions of leadership in the sports world will go to a training voluntarily. This is going to be an expectation, if you’re going to be a coach, if you’re going to be an athletic administrator, you’re going to go through this training on the annual basis. Period, end of sentence.

Now, when it comes to professional athletics and in the state, university and school athletics that can be mandated through policy, you just have to just change the policy and you just say, we’re going to have annual training for all the coaches when it comes to. And by the way, if that doesn’t happen, it’s a failure of the system to make it happen. It’s not the failure of individuals, it’s the failure of the system and the individuals who are influential in shaping the norms of that system and the expectations embedded therein.

When it comes to youth sports, the biggest challenge, I think, is that it’s, they’re largely voluntary coaches. The coaches are volunteering their time largely. And it’s a challenge when people are volunteering their time to ask them to have extra responsibilities in terms of being trained in this subject and so what that means is you need funding, and the funding has to come from either the governmental sources or private sources. And some of those private sources can include, for example, AFL teams where they can fund. When I say fun, I’m talking about guys on a Saturday, coaches of youth, of a youth footy league on a Saturday, going through a half day training and getting $50 and a free lunch, you know what I mean? Because it’s amazing how much $50 and a free lunch can get you that a free training won’t get you, but you have to come up with the $50 and the free lunch, you know, and make that an expectation if you want to be a coach in this league, because usually it’s parents of kids who are playing, right?

So, the parent, one or two of the parents who are the coaches of kids who are playing in the league will volunteer their time, which I appreciate. I was a parent of a son who was a really good athlete, but I didn’t have the time, and my travel schedule was such that I couldn’t be a coach. So, I always like, oh, my God, did I appreciate the coaches, they spent so much time, an effort and I respect that.

I think we need to say, however, that one of the responsibilities of a coach in the 21st century, who spends enormous amounts of time with young boys, in this case young boys and girls and others, is they need to have some minimal training on how to address some of these issues. And again, let me just say, the expectation is not that they’re going to be an expert in domestic violence or sexual assault or harassment, because if we’re going to raise the bar that high, we’re going to say they have to have expert knowledge. It’s not realistic.

We’re not asking them to be experts, we’re asking them to have basic understanding of how to use their platform to at least provide some guidance and some leadership to the young guys, to at least have some knowledge of what’s going on in the community as a reference point. In other words, know at least at the minimum, know what programs are available, what other, you know, what organisations are dealing with the needs of the victims and survivors, what organisations, if any, are dealing with perpetration or abusive behaviour, what organisations are doing prevention work, whether it’s in the schools or in domestic or sexual violence organisations. In other words, they can be a referral agency so that if these issues come up, they can say to parents of kids on the team, or they can say to the team itself, we don’t accept abusive behaviour in this team, this is not cool, but I want you to know there’s organisations in this community who address these issues. So, if anybody wants to hear about them, I’ll tell you what their email address is or what their website is or whatever.

And again, I know that you can’t get into details, and you can’t expect people to be social workers if they’re not social workers. You can’t expect them to be professional educators if they’re not professional educators. So, I’m not asking them to do this, but there are programs and there are initiatives that have been developed that explicitly address men who are in positions of leadership in the coaching world who don’t have expertise, but that, who can play a really constructive role.

One of them is called Coaching Boys Into Men and it’s organised by the Futures Without Violence organisation, based in San Francisco, California. Futures Without Violence: Coaching Boys Into Men. In other words, people who are wanting to engage with this subject matter don’t have to start from scratch. And it’s like, oh, how are we going to design a program? It’s already designed. You just have to take it on, you just have to be committed to doing it.

And by the way, if you think that Coaching Boys Into Men isn’t exactly what you think is going to be the best program, then create your own or partner with people who are in the universities or in the community based organisations, get funding from the AFL, get funding from the NRL, do something.

I think a lot of men in positions of leadership in the sports world, I think some of them, many of them, respond positively. Not everybody. There’s going to be men who are like, come on, this is not our role, this is not our responsibility. And others are going to say, you know what, I could use some tools. I do realise that I’m in a position of influence with kids, not just my own kid, but with other kids. And I’m eager to do what I can.

And I think we need to mainstream all this. We need to routinise it, we need to make it like just part of being a coach. If you’re a coach, you have to go through background cheques. I don’t know about what you do in Australia, but we have to have background cheques here in the states to make sure that you don’t have criminal convictions, especially around children. And that’s part of being a coach. You’ve got to go through the background cheque. Well part of being a coach is you got to have some, some basic instructional training and leadership training on this subject matter. And if we got to the place where this became the norm, not just an idiosyncratic intervention in one community or another, but rather the norm I’m telling you, this is how change works, this is how social change works.

And over time you’ll find if this becomes normalised, it’ll be at least one important counter-cultural intervention that will at least provide a counter-balance with some of the other pernicious influences in our societies, like the porn culture, like the Andrew Tate manosphere and all the other ways that a lot of young men are immersed in a really misogynist, anti-woman, sort of dominance based manhood culture that is harming them as well as women and girls. I’m not saying it’s going to solve all the problems, it won’t, but it’ll be at least one of the countervailing influences in a positive direction.

 

5. Case study: Be More Than a Bystander [20:44]

Tarik Bayrakli: 

One of the big issues in Australian community sports, particularly with volunteers actually running the showing clubs, is that they’re significantly under resourced. They’re also on the front line, responsible for educating, mentoring and enforcing lots of regulations around safety. Having mainstream support, specifically around making clubs safer places, would definitely reduce the burden for clubs, but obviously would be very costly for whoever funds it. What else can we do differently that can still have a huge impact?

Jackson Katz:

I have to say one really sustaining intervention that has to this day made a huge impact is the partnership between, in Canada, in British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, between an organisation called Ending Violence Association of British Columbia, Eva BC, they unite all the women’s and represent all the women’s sexual assault and domestic violence programs throughout the province. The partnership between Eva BC and the BC Lions Football Club, that’s the professional Canadian Football League club, and they have been in a partnership for the last 13 years and they’ve had an incredible impact on sending out players and former players to do high school auditoriums and do talks about domestic and sexual violence. It’s called the Be More Than a Bystander campaign. They’re challenging young men to speak out. Not just young men, but across the board, First Nations men, white men, and everybody in between. In terms of the racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic spectrum, everybody. They’ve done public service announcements that have been seen by tens of millions of people watching sports events.

They’ve done events in stadiums during major sports games. And this has been ongoing for 13 years. And some of the players who started, who my colleague and I trained in the first wave 13 years ago, are still doing the work today, and they’re now retired, but they’re doing the work today. And the EVA BC – BC Lions partnership is an exemplary initiative that people in Australia could look to. Go research it, go look it up and go contact the people at Eva BC and the BC Lions and ask them why has it been so successful? What have you been doing? How can we do what you’ve been doing?

 

6. Jackson’s final thoughts [23:02]

Tarik Bayrakli:

I’ll post a link to the BC Lions Be More Than a Bystander program in the show notes. Jackson, before we go, do you have any final thoughts?

Jackson Katz:

Women’s leadership has been incredible on all these matters for decades, even, some would say, for centuries. But it’s not fair to put the burden of leadership on women. It’s just not fair. They’re the ones who are dealing with. I mean, for example, women in the domestic and sexual violence field are dealing with just unbelievable amounts of daily trauma and tragedy. And it’s not fair that they should also have to be the leaders of prevention work and social change work. It’s just not, it’s not right. It’s not fair.

And men have an incredibly important role to play. And I think my experience is that an awful lot of men, when they hear this as a positive challenge, can rise to that challenge. I know that some men are defensive, I know that some men are closed down and closed off. But those aren’t the men who change the world, okay? Those aren’t the men’s who make history. Those aren’t the men ones who lead transformative change, the ones who are hunkered down and defensive, the ones who make change are the ones who look around and say, the status quo is not working. What can we do to do something different? And I’m convinced that there’s an awful lot of men who agree with a lot of what I’ve said. Maybe not everything, but a lot of what I’ve said.

I think it makes, at least to me, it makes perfect sense. I mean, to me, this isn’t even controversial, I don’t think. Why is it controversial that men should speak out about domestic and sexual violence, that athletics can play a constructive role, that men’s leadership has not met the moment yet, but it can. This, to me, is, that’s not… None of that’s controversial. It’s all basic. And I think when men hear it, especially from other men, I think a lot of men can be moved to do something about it.

And I think it’s on the shoulders of the men in Australia and elsewhere who are looking around the young men and others. You know, my generation, you know, again, I’m getting more senior in the sort of generational march, if you will. But a lot of young guys like yourself and a lot of young guys who are like, taking on increasing levels of influence. Some of us have set the table for you all to go the next level, and I think it’s time.

And my book Every Man, which is coming out early, 25, I mean, it’s 150 pages, deliberately short because the goal was to put something in men’s hands that they would actually read or that could be actually used in a constructive way because it has analysis in it, but it also has lots of action steps. Cause it’s like, okay, we can talk, we can think about these issues. We can think on a deep level, we can have graduate seminars. But you know what? What we really need is action. What we really need is institutional leadership, political leadership, cultural leadership. You know, let’s go. Let’s just go. And I hope you can take some of these ideas and run with them. And I hope when I come back to Australia, everything won’t just be prospective. Like, these are some good ideas that I’m sharing. It’ll be like, okay, we’re implementing this stuff. How do we evaluate it? How do we figure out how to fix the gaps that we’ve identified? In other words, get going and get on the ground and get going, and then figure out how to make things work better. And I hope some of this conversation, as well as your podcast more generally is a constructive part of the solution. So, thanks for inviting me to be part of it, Tarik.

 

Tarik Bayrakli:

I’ve been following your work for a while, Jackson. So, it was awesome to meet you in person in May and an honour to record this with you. I really believe men’s leadership can make a huge difference in violence prevention in this country. Hopefully, today’s episode is what some men needed to hear and can use their power at their clubs to really create a culture of respect. Jackson, good talk to you. Thank you for joining me on Smart Plays.

Jackson Katz:

It’s been good to talk to you as well. Thanks for everything.

 

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