Reading Jimmy Carter’s 2014 book A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power makes it clear that the least of what domestic violence is is a domestic issue. In fact what happens in our homes, in our dorm rooms, and in other personal—sometimes hidden— spaces has implications for everyone as human beings. Domestic violence is a global issue. As Carter’s book maintains, “the world’s discrimination against women and girls is the most serious pervasive, and ignored violation of basic human rights.”

Carter begins his analysis of this global human rights issue by talking about what he learned growing up in the racist, and, paradoxically very religious, South. It was here that he saw that racism was created out of a certain “culture of violence,” a culture that was dogmatic, patriarchal, insular, and exploitative. Moreover, this “culture of violence” doesn’t only operate around race but also around gender. On our college campus, this “culture of violence” can be seen in the language, in the music, in the sports, and in the movies and television shows that people love to talk about in personal and class room conversations The question for our students and even for faculty and staff on campus is how can we intervene in the problems of sexual harassment including street harassment or catcalling, date rape, sexual intimidation, and physical abuse when it is a global problem that may be bigger than us?

In our English 102 Class: Re-imagining Black Masculinity: Ending Sexual Violence our goal is to make an actual difference in the larger struggle by engaging service learning. What we have discovered is there is no way to pick up Carter’s call to action without first changing the way that we speak and write about women, even if it is only here on the local level. Producing students who are global leaders begins with helping them understand how they access language and culture in their daily lives. We want the students to be better writers certainly, but our hope is that they also become better human beings. So it is a success in that class for us if students can look at the culture that surrounds them critically. It is a success if they think twice about calling a woman anything other than her name. It is a success if they don’t assume that they have a right to someone’s time and attention and can catalog her body parts (Zora Neale Hurston calls this “talking up under someone’s clothes”) if she happens to be walking down the street. And, of course, it is a success if not one person hits or punches or rapes someone to assert what they mistakingly think of as manhood. Finally, we hope to instill in our students that they have a personal responsibility to fight for the human rights of “everyone” despite ways that the culture tells them differently.

Our role as a college in this fight for human rights must be a very personal one. Domestic violence doesn’t just hurt domestically, it hurts us globally. Our president, John Wilson, was very clear in September when he said that Morehouse Men do not engage in violence against women and children and that they need to model this behavior to others in the outside world. The real impact of this work will come when men from all parts of the world understand the importance of protecting and standing up for all women.