The images on the screen silenced the crowd - men hitting women with chairs, stripping them of their clothes, grabbing them by the hair and kissing them forcibly, putting them in sexual or degrading positions. The video clips were taken from professional wrestling programs broadcast mostly on network or cable television, not from pornography. And they represent how men and boys are socialized to use violence against women, Jackson Katz said.

"It gets worse from there," he said as the lights came back on.

Katz, an educator, author, filmmaker and activist on gender issues, was the closing keynote speaker at the three-day Unity Month Conference, put on by the North Dakota Council on Abused Women's Services and the Coalition Against Sexual Assault in North Dakota. His nearly two-hour talk, entitled "More Than a Few Good Men," focused on how men should take a stand against gender violence.

The conference, which took place Wednesday, Thursday and Friday at Bismarck's Doublewood Inn, featured a variety of speakers and workshops for advocates, prosecutors, law enforcement and others involved in domestic and sexual violence prevention.

Katz, a Boston native who now lives in Los Angeles, co-founded Mentors in Violence Prevention Program at Northeastern University's Center for the Study of Sport in Society in 1993. The program works with high school, college and professional athletes in preventing men's violence against women. He also is founder of MVP Strategies, which distributes gender violence prevention training and materials to colleges, high schools, law enforcement agencies, the U.S. military services, community organizations and businesses.

He began his talk Friday by pointing out that another conference going on at the hotel had caused a line at the men's bathroom for the first time during the conference, using the anecdote as a segue into discussions about how few men are involved in "gender issues."

"That's a sad thing, and it's something we need to change," he said.

The vast majority of conference participants were women, but the men in the audience nodded in agreement with Katz. He went on to say men often don't feel the need to get involved in domestic and sexual violence prevention, since those areas often are labeled "women's issues."

"It gives men an excuse not to pay attention," he said.

Since men are the perpetrators of more than 99 percent of sexual assaults and the majority of domestic violence, men need to become more involved in preventing violence, he said, calling the issues "gender-violence issues."

"Most men are not rapists, but most rapes are perpetrated by men," he said.

Some guys think they're "good guys" because they don't abuse women and they're not rapists, Katz said. But that's not enough.

"I think we need to raise the bar a little higher on what it means to be a good guy," he said. "It's not anti-male to speak out against violence by other males."

Katz spoke about focusing violence prevention programs on keeping men from committing violent acts against women along with teaching women to reduce their risks of becoming victims, how men's violence against women effects other men and boys, and how men are most often behind violent acts, such as school shootings, serial killings and genocide.

Katz used the professional wrestling clips to show how men abusing women is condoned in society and even turned into a source of entertainment. Boys learn to see that sort of treatment of women as a turn-on, partly because of the use of scantily clad women in the wrestling skits, he explained. The absence of sex education in many schools leads such quasi-pornographic programs to be seen as the norm by many adolescents, he said. Wrestling and other violent programs don't cause violence, but they make it seem normal, Katz said.

Changing socialization to make men's violence against women an abomination rather than a norm will be important in violence prevention, he said.

"It's a hugely uphill battle, but it's doable," Katz said.

Deb Fischer, a sexual assault nurse examiner from Jamestown, and Kali Henke, the coordinator of the sexual assault response team and sexual assault nurse examiner program in Jamestown, said they plan to take back the information they learned in the conference, including Katz's speech, to use in educational efforts.

"He's definitely got the concept for where we need to go for the future," Fischer said.

"The conference, overall, was wonderful," Henke said.

After his talk, Katz said he hopes the crowd learned ideas and inspirations for engaging more men in the work of preventing gender violence.

"We need more men with the guts and the courage to stand up," he said.

(Reach reporter Jenny Michael at 250-8225 or jenny.michael@;bismarcktribune.com.)