“The Right Video at the Right Time”
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In an angry outburst during yesterday’s Congressional hearings, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham declared that embattled Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh “came to the wrong town at the wrong time” for a fair hearing of the sexual assault charges leveled against him.
As this story continues to unfold and shine a light on the epidemic of sexual violence, MEF is set to release what we consider to be the right video at the right time.
The Bystander Moment: Transforming Rape Culture at its Roots, featuring pioneering anti-violence educator Jackson Katz, is due out in October and available for pre-order now.
The Bystander Moment zeroes in on how gender norms, especially normative ideas about manhood, have fed a culture of silence in the face of sexual harassment and abuse and other forms of gender violence.
In a riveting analysis that draws on news and entertainment media, Katz, one of the early architects of the bystander approach to gender violence prevention, brings us face to face with the peer culture dynamics – especially male peer culture dynamics – that help to normalize sexism and misogyny while silencing other men in the face of abuse. At the same time, Katz lays out the crucial importance of appealing to people not as potential perpetrators or passive spectators, but as active bystanders and potential leaders who have a positive role to play in challenging and changing the sexist cultural norms that too often lead to gender violence.
The result is an indispensable educational tool in the ongoing struggle to prevent sexism and misogyny and promote gender equality.
The Bystander Moment is slated for release in October. Don’t miss this timely and important new film.
Jackson Katz, Ph.D., is internationally renowned for his pioneering scholarship and activism on issues of gender, race and violence. He has long been a major figure and thought leader in the growing global movement of men working to promote gender equality and prevent gender violence. He is co-founder of Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP), one of the longest-running and most widely influential gender violence prevention programs in North America, and the first major program of its kind in the sports culture and the military. Katz was one of the key architects of the now broadly popular “bystander” approach that MVP introduced to the sexual assault and relationship abuse fields. Since 1997 he has run MVP Strategies, which provides sexual harassment and gender violence prevention/leadership training to institutions in the public and private sectors in U.S. and around the world.
