Mentors in Violence Prevention
program enlists athletes to combat
violence against women

BY JEFF KANTROWITZ

n a slate-gray Tuesday in Roxbury, a steady drizzle is pelting Madison Park High School. David Kay, a twenty-something envoy from Northeastern's Center for the Study of Sport in Society, passes through the school's blue metal detectors and heads for a windowless fourth-floor classroom. There, eight freshmen, most of them African American, slouch at their desks beneath posters advocating sexual abstinence, racial tolerance, and violence prevention. One poster declares: "OUR TOLERANCE FOR VIOLENCE IS ZERO OR LESS!"

Dressed in a rugby shirt and slacks, Kay, a former Clark University basketball player, asks the students to close their eyes and imagine a woman they care about being raped or battered. Then he tells them to picture a person who could have stopped the violence but did nothing. The students open their eyes. "I felt like I wanted to kill him," one says softly. "I can't advocate that," Kay replies, "because we're a violence prevention organization."

The key to stopping such abuse, Kay says, is to challenge negative stereotypes about women and make violence socially unacceptable. To reinforce these points, Kay, an outreach worker in Sport in Society's Mentors in Violence Prevention program, turns to a scenario in an MVP "playbook": A teenage couple is arguing in a school hallway, and the young man slams his girlfriend into a locker. Kay asks the students to mull options short of physically intervening-talking to the man or woman, now or later, or reporting the incident. Two of the students say they would seek out school officials. Kay asks if they wouldn't fear being called snitches. "Snitches get stitches," says one.

"Think about this stuff when you're out in the real world," Kay urges. "It's time men take action on this." The teenagers straggle out, some stopping to shake Kay's hand, others leaving in silence. "Spread the word," Kay says, optimistically, to one of them. "Yeah," comes the reply. "Spread the word."

But outside the classroom, will the lessons take? In halls patrolled by security guards, on streets where guns often settle arguments? Will the teens challenge one another's-and their own-treatment of women? Kay hopes the students will at least choose some response besides inaction. "We want [them] to do something," he says.

Athletes taking a stand on battering and rape isn't standard locker-room banter. That's one of the things the Mentors in Violence Prevention program is determined to change. Formed in 1993 with the idea of convincing young men to take responsibility for violence against women, MVP enlists former student-athletes to spread the word among college and high school students-athletes and nonathletes alike. Kay and his cohorts try to be role models to the students they counsel, telling them that abusing women does not prove manliness and is not worthy of respect. As former athletes, these ambassadors have status among young men and credibility among student-athletes, program directors say.

In four years, MVP has reached more than 14,000 college and high school students in Massachusetts and around the country. Though the program has recently expanded to include female counselors talking to young women, MVP's message remains the same: battering, rape, and sexual harassment are not women's problems. "This is a men's issue," says Jackson Katz, cocreator of MVP along with Byron Hurt, AS'93, a former Northeastern quarterback. "When it comes to men, let's not kid ourselves: there's a tiny fraction of men who have engaged these issues."

It's an uphill battle. The problem is getting worse, not better. Between two million and four million women in America, of every region, race, and socioeconomic status, are battered each year by their male partners, according to federal statistics. An average of four women are murdered every day by their husbands, "lovers," or exes. And the surgeon general has called battering the single leading cause of injury to women.

It's statistics like these that led Sport in Society director Richard Lapchick to create MVP. Funded in part by a $350,000 start-up grant from the U.S. Department of Education and $200,000 from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, the program initially focused on antiviolence campaigns at four Massachusetts universities, including Northeastern. From the start, MVP's target audience included not only athletes but fraternity members and residential students. Since then, the program's scope has expanded to high schools, other universities, and even the National Basketball Association. In conjunction with the College Football Association and the Liz Claiborne company, MVP developed a series of public-service announcements that were broadcast hundreds of times on television stations and stadium video screens last fall. Sport in Society used to rely more on star athletes like former Red Sox pitcher Luis Tiant and gold medal­winning Olympian Holly Metcalf. Now, MVP organizers enlist even middling former athletes, claiming that grassroots leadership-not star power-is key to the program's success.

Last fall, the University of Nebraska summoned MVP field workers to campus to counsel the school's football team, which has become notorious in recent years for a flurry of alleged misdeeds. In one case, Lawrence Phillips, the Cornhuskers' Heisman Trophy candidate, pleaded no contest to dragging a former girlfriend down a staircase and banging her head, for which he was convicted of misdemeanor assault and trespassing and sentenced to probation in 1995. Though especially egregious, the assault was far from the only example of male athletes abusing women. Regular incidents of alleged gender violence by high-profile collegiate and professional athletes have sparked intense media coverage and a feisty debate about whether athletes are more prone to violence than the general student population. If this is so, as some contend, the question arises whether it is appropriate to rely on athletes-even pacific ones-as moral teachers and exemplars.

MVP leaders respond that the transgressions of a few athletes shouldn't tarnish the reputations of all. Program director Don McPherson, himself formerly a star quarterback at Syracuse University who later played in the National Football League and Canadian Football League, says, "In any subculture and in any group, you're going to find people who are less than noble and not worthy of admiration." But that doesn't preclude other athletes from being true role models, he says.

Sport in Society views the violence of Phillips and other athletes not as an indictment of college athletics or sport in general, but as one part of a much larger societal epidemic. Center director Lapchick points to data indicating that the total number of reported violent incidents by athletes is relatively small. A landmark 1995 report by the Los Angeles Times documented 252 police incidents in one year involving 345 North American athletes; these included 77 allegations of violence against women. That's a small percentage of the total number of athletes in collegiate and professional sports and a smaller portion still of national statistics on gender violence. "It's a huge men's problem in this country," Lapchick says. Violence by athletes is singled out because athletes are so high-profile in American society, McPherson says. That prominence cuts both ways; it's what makes athletes good spokesmen for antiviolence efforts like MVP. "We try to put it in perspective and say athletes can be part of the solution rather than the problem," he says.

But not everyone agrees. Jeffrey Benedict, former research coordinator at Sport in Society, praises MVP for good intentions, but argues that holding up athletes as heroic role models for youth is based on a flawed premise: trying to make rich men who play sports and market sneakers for a living into moral leaders. "They live a lifestyle that is so foreign to most people, particularly youth," he says. Reports of drug use, sexual assault, and other crimes by athletes only compound their image problem. "The whole notion of using athletes as role models is suspect," he says.

Benedict, who is writing a book on athletes and sexual violence (Public Heroes, Private Felons: Athletes and Crimes Against Women, to be published by Northeastern University Press in October), also takes issue with statistics that make athletes' violence seem insignificant. He coauthored a study that found athletes disproportionately accused of sexual violence on American campuses. At ten Division I colleges and universities surveyed, male athletes represented 3.3 percent of student populations, yet were responsible for 19 percent of all sexual assault complaints before disciplinary boards. Benedict acknowledges that his sample size was small (sixty-nine cases in three years), but notes that his findings have been peer-reviewed. "I don't like to get caught up in arguing statistics," says Benedict, who left Sport in Society in 1996 and is working on a law degree at New England School of Law. "The center has repeatedly denied that there is any relevancy or importance to the research that we have done."

Lapchick, who holds a doctorate in international race relations, cautions that it is a "racially loaded leap" to use Benedict's limited Division I data to link athletes and gender violence. Many top basketball and football players are African American, and it would be easy to misconstrue a few high-profile offenders as evidence of a trend, observes Lapchick, formerly a civil rights and antiapartheid activist whose father brought the first black player into the NBA. Nevertheless, the perception that athletes are more violent remains widespread, he says. Journalists from across the country call him weekly seeking confirmation. "Athletes themselves believe it," Lapchick says.

Athletes aren't necessarily more violent than their peers, argues gender violence prevention expert Alan Berkowitz, a counseling center psychologist and psychology professor at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. But he believes athletes are at greater risk of committing violence because they get so much public attention and because their access to "opportunistic sex" with groupies can lead to coercion. Berkowitz adds that coaches often instill sexist attitudes by demeaning male players with feminine terms. Still, he believes programs like MVP have the potential to be effective because culturally similar peer educators-athletes addressing other athletes, for example, and men of color counseling fellow men of color-can convincingly deflate abusive male attitudes.

New York Times columnist Robert Lipsyte casts the Benedict/Lapchick debate in generational terms: the older Lapchick viewing sports as a forum for moral leadership and racial integration; the younger Benedict seeing sports as much more morally murky. Lipsyte praises Sport in Society as a "reformist group within sports" but, like Benedict, finds its reliance on athletes as role models problematic in the face of frequent, flagrant transgressions: "It's then hard to go the other way and say, 'Let's not point our fingers.' That's really the flaw in the center's argument." It isn't easy finding an alternative to idolizing or demonizing star athletes, Lipsyte says. "I don't know what a middle ground would be. In a better world, we would treat them for what they are: spectacular performers with [a] great work ethic."

Few would dispute the deification of star athletes in American popular culture. Yet athletes themselves chafe at the notion of a higher standard for behavior, Benedict says. Many of the players he has interviewed for his forthcoming book feel they are wrongly held up as role models. They're paid-albeit handsomely-to play ball and pitch products, not to be antiviolence spokesmen.

At Northeastern, athletes should be held to a high standard of integrity because they represent the university, says football coach Barry Gallup, the outgoing athletics director. No N.U. athletes have faced charges of gender violence during his four-year tenure as director. Still, "When you have four to five hundred student-athletes, you're occasionally going to have a problem," he says, adding that "if an athlete has a problem, it becomes a team issue."

At Northeastern and many other American universities, an athlete guilty of gender violence faces uncertain penalties, because punishment is meted out on a case-by-case basis. The National Collegiate Athletic Association has no established policies for dealing with athletes who batter, assault, or rape-its 900 member institutions prefer to retain autonomy in responding to athletes' infractions.

In practice, this means some players get punished for gender violence, while others quickly return to competition. For example, Lamont Riley, a basketball star at California State University, San Bernardino, rejoined his team a day after pleading guilty to a 1995 misdemeanor assault on his girlfriend, an attack the woman said fractured her skull and separated her shoulder. The National Consortium for Academics and Sports, an offshoot of the Sport in Society center, passed a nonbinding resolution last November calling on schools to ban from competition for at least a year athletes convicted of gender violence-either in the courts or in campus judicial proceedings.

The NCAA has taken a page from MVP's book-literally-and launched an educational program at 165 member campuses to promote educational, social, and sexual responsibility. About fifty campuses are added to the program yearly. In gender violence prevention workshops, modeled in part on MVP methods and equally laden with sports metaphors, student-athletes ponder sexist language and what constitutes consent to sex.

The Bridgewater state college basketball team has just returned from a tournament victory in San Diego. A dozen or so fresh-faced players, clad in athletic shirts and savoring a 7­3 record for the season thus far, are gathered around a conference table of the Bridgewater, Massachusetts, campus for a kind of pep talk many have not heard before. McPherson, the MVP director, asks the team to imagine a woman-"somebody's mother, somebody's sister, somebody's daughter"-being whistled at, an action he compares to singling out a person because of her race. "I don't care what any woman tells you," he says. "No one likes to be gawked at and yelled at when they're walking down the street."

McPherson tells the players they can use their status as campus leaders to their advantage: if they speak out against gender violence, sexism, and racism, people will take their message seriously. "Understand this," he says. "If you do nothing, you're almost encouraging the behavior."

Down the hall from McPherson's group, MVP outreach educator Tom Penichter, a former Tufts University hockey player, is discussing gender sensitivity with a circle of burly wrestlers. He asks them to analyze the language men use to demean women. If a man sleeps around, one student replies, he's called a stud; if a woman does this, she's called a slut.

But before they can hope to make antiviolence spokesmen out of these rank-and-file athletes, Penichter and McPherson must convince them of their leadership potential. One student says he doubts his classmates know he plays basketball. To this McPherson replies that athletes always stand out. "You walk like an athlete," he exclaims, smiling broadly at the skeptical student. "You talk like an athlete." The question is: Will they walk the path of nonviolence and talk the gospel of responsibility?

Jeff Kantrowitz is a free-lance journalist based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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