[4][14] MVP has been implemented by college athletic programs, professional teams (including the New England Patriots and Boston Red Sox), NASCAR, and the United States Marine Corps.
[23][24] Katz currently is a paid consultant to the U.S. Air Force bystander intervention training and also acts as director of the first global gender violence prevention program in the U.S. Marine Corps.
[26] Instead of focusing on women as victims and men as perpetrators of harassment, abuse or violence, the bystander approach concentrates on the role of peers in schools, groups, teams, workplaces and other social units.
"[26] Katz and his colleagues developed one of the first bystander initiatives, the mixed-gender Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP) program, in 1993 at Northeastern University's Center for the Study of Sport in Society.
One study found that after the Sioux City School District in Iowa implemented the MVP program, the number of freshman boys who said they could help prevent violence against women and girls increased by 50 percent.
[26] The bystander programs that have proliferated in recent years on college and high school campuses and in the U.S. military involve both sexes and draw from various violence prevention theories and educational practices.
[27][29] The MVP bystander approach frames men's abuse of women as a societal problem whose roots lie in the institutional structures and cultural practices of a male-dominated society.
[35] Katz's model generally revolves around simulation and role-playing, as well as large discussion-based group meetings both consisting same-sex and different-sex students.
A fourth session is scheduled for those student-athletes who wish to be trained further for work with younger students in middle and high school.” [36] These workshops are designed to provide spaces for boys to discuss with each other the concept of masculinity and its definition, as well as its relation to gender abuse and violence.
Since, the MVP model has expanded its target audience and educational group to “boys and girls, men and women, working together and in single-sex formats…by the mid-1990s MVP had moved from a near-exclusive focus on the athletic world to general populations of high school and college students, and other institutional settings.” [34] This expansion means that the dialogue around gender abuse and gender binaries is spreading throughout schools across the nation.
In his writings, public lectures, and films, Katz argues that gendered understandings and behavior in every arena from interpersonal relationships to the workplace and even politics are influenced by media and popular culture.
"[45] Katz further maintains that in spite of variability due to such categories as class, race and ethnicity, "violence in America is overwhelmingly a gendered phenomenon," shaped by "cultural codes and ideals of masculinity and manhood.
How does paid political advertising on television – by far the biggest expenditure of funds in presidential campaigns – shape voters' perceptions of the relative 'manliness' of candidates?
What are the similarities and differences between how women and men ascertain whether male political figures measure up to the 'masculine ideal' that is circulating in media culture at a given historical moment?
"[48] "Campaigns for the U.S. presidency in the era of mass media," he wrote, "always turn on the personality and style of candidates, their skills at televisual performance, their race and gender, and how all of these interact with questions of national identity at a given historical moment.
They were inevitably – and invariably – white and a man.”[49] For Katz, violence also plays an important role in shaping political discourse and in the voters' choice of whom to support for president.
"But there is no doubt that for several decades violence—both our individual and collective vulnerability to it, and questions about when and how to use the violent power of the state to protect the 'national interest' — has been an ominous and omnipresent factor in numerous foreign policy and domestic political issues (e.g. the Cold War, Vietnam, the 'War on Terror,' and the invasion of Iraq, as well as gun control, and executive, legislative and judicial responses to violent crime).
He writes, "One of 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin's most-quoted lines on the campaign trail in the fall of 2008 was 'The heels are on, the gloves are off,' which she typically delivered to wild cheers of approval.