05/21/2026
The Good Samaritan did not stand by silent. He did something. Jesus did not stand by silent. He did something. Don’t stand by silent. Do something.
A professor walked into a room full of college coaches, administrators, and student leaders.
They were waiting for the usual talk.
Respect women. Be good guys. Support the cause.
What they got instead was a marker and a whiteboard.
He wrote five sentences. Just five.
And by the time he finished, the room had gone completely silent—because something impossible had just happened in plain sight.
The first sentence was straightforward:
John beat Mary.
Clear. Direct. You know exactly who did what to whom.
Then he wrote the second:
Mary was beaten by John.
"Notice," he said quietly, "what just happened. We moved to passive voice. The focus shifted from John to Mary. John is drifting toward the edge of the sentence."
Third sentence:
Mary was beaten.
"John is gone."
Fourth:
Mary was battered.
"We've swapped in the word we've used for a generation. Still no John."
Then the fifth—and final—sentence:
Mary is a battered woman.
He stepped back from the board.
"Mary's entire identity is now defined by what John did to her in the first sentence. And the man who committed the violence? He has disappeared completely—from the sentence, and from our thinking."
The room didn't move.
Because they'd all used these sentences. Written them. Said them. Read them in newspapers. Never once noticing what was quietly being erased each time.
That professor was Dr. Jackson Katz—former college football player, philosophy graduate from the University of Massachusetts, and the man who would spend the next thirty years asking one question nobody else was asking:
Why do we keep talking about this as a women's issue?
The vast majority of violence against women is committed by men.
Yet men had been written out of the conversation—not through conspiracy, but through something far more ordinary: the slow drift of language from active to passive voice.
"How many women were r***d last year?"—not "How many men r***d women?"
"Why do women stay?"—not "Why do men choose to abuse?"
"She's a battered woman."—not "He batters his partner."
Every passive sentence quietly handed the subject of the story from the person who acted to the person who suffered.
And once that happened, the response naturally became: What do we do about these women?
When the real question was always: What do we do about these men?
Katz didn't respond by lecturing men on what not to do.
He tried something different.
He asked what the other men in the room would do.
Not the perpetrators. The bystanders.
The friends, teammates, and colleagues who heard the joke, saw the behavior, sensed something was wrong—and said nothing.
"Isn't your silence a form of consent?" he asked.
That question changed things.
Because it gave every person in the room a role—not as a villain, but as someone who could either reinforce a culture or interrupt it.
One conversation at a time.
One moment at a time.
He called it leadership training. Not sensitivity training.
"If you make degrading comments about women," he said, "you are failing as a leader—full stop."
In 1993, Katz co-founded the Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP) program at Northeastern University's Center for the Study of Sport in Society.
MVP introduced the "bystander intervention" approach to the gender violence prevention field—focusing not on potential perpetrators or potential victims, but on the community of people who witness concerning behavior and have the power to intervene.
The program started in college athletics.
Then it spread.
Nine NFL teams adopted it.
Major League Baseball teams implemented it.
Every major branch of the U.S. military—the Marines, Air Force, Navy, and Army—brought Katz in to train thousands of service members.
In 1997, Katz created and directed the first worldwide gender violence prevention program in the history of the U.S. Marine Corps.
High schools and middle schools across the country began using MVP.
His 2012 TED Talk, "Violence Against Women—It's a Men's Issue," has been watched over 2 million times and translated into dozens of languages.
In 2013, when Congress reauthorized the Violence Against Women Act, they included a requirement: every college receiving federal funding must provide bystander intervention training to new students.
Katz's work had gone from one university to federal law in twenty years.
But his most powerful tool never changed.
Five sentences on a whiteboard.
A man who disappears by the fifth line.
And the simple, radical act of writing him back in—in active voice, accountable, visible, impossible to ignore.
John beat Mary.
Not "Mary was beaten."
Not "Mary is a battered woman."
John beat Mary.
And what are the other people in John's life going to do about that?
What are his friends going to say when he makes a degrading joke about women?
What are his teammates going to do when they see him treating his girlfriend disrespectfully?
What are his colleagues going to do when they witness controlling behavior?
That's the question that changes everything.
Because here's what Katz understood that most people missed:
The problem isn't just the Johns of the world—the small percentage of men who commit violence.
The problem is the culture of silence that protects them.
The guys who laugh at the joke.
The teammates who look the other way.
The colleagues who decide it's "not their business."
The friends who say, "That's just how he is."
Every person who stays silent is, in effect, saying: This behavior is acceptable here.
And every person who speaks up is saying: No, it's not.
That's leadership.
Not being a hero. Not making a dramatic intervention.
Just refusing to be silent when silence serves as consent.
Katz's work recognizes something profound about how culture changes:
It doesn't change through top-down mandates or public service announcements.
It changes through millions of small moments where someone decides to speak up instead of staying quiet.
To challenge the joke instead of laughing along.
To check in with the person being mistreated instead of pretending not to notice.
To say, clearly and directly: That's not okay here.
The five-sentence exercise reveals how language shapes thought.
But the bystander intervention work reveals how thought shapes action—and how action, repeated across thousands of moments and millions of people, shapes culture.
Language isn't just how we describe the world.
It's how we decide who is responsible for it—and who gets to disappear.
For decades, we described gender violence in passive voice, and men disappeared from the conversation.
We asked questions about women's choices, and men's choices became invisible.
We turned abuse into a women's issue, and men became bystanders to a problem they were creating.
Jackson Katz spent thirty years writing men back into the sentence.
Not to blame them all.
But to give them all a role.
Because every man who isn't committing violence has a choice:
Reinforce the culture that enables it—or interrupt it.
Laugh at the joke—or challenge it.
Look away—or speak up.
Stay silent—or lead.
John beat Mary.
That's the sentence.
And the question isn't just for John anymore.
It's for everyone who knows John.
Everyone who heard what he said.
Everyone who saw what he did.
Everyone who stayed silent.
Isn't your silence a form of consent?
