The Society Must Be Reeducated About Male Victimization

The long-term effects of sexual child abuse are disruptive, disorienting, and often devastating to adults. The disruption of stable family life, the disorientation of emotional patterns of trust and knowledge of healthy sexuality, and the devastation this causes for the individual to form and sustain healthy, functional, and stable personal interactions, due to distrust of intimacy and often accompanied by rampant feelings of betrayal and fears of concurrent physical, emotional, and (further) sexual abuse, forms a pattern of disquieting social interactions that often predicates a life of intense frustration and equally intense depression.

The adult whose value in the world, as a child, was predicated upon his availability as a sexual object subject to molestation, fondling, oral, anal and genital rape, and other forms of inappropriate sexualization has a difficult journey upward from this hell-hole of abuse. What victimized children experience is the perversion of childhood. What they [have] lost was every child’s right to a normal childhood - loving, protective, and nurturing. The abusive childhood hasn’t been lost at all. It remains with the survivor every minute of his adult life (Lew, 1990). Their basic sense of worthiness, their foundational sense of self-esteem, their perception of clear and functional sexual and gender role distinctions and what their own position is in that system, and, even more fundamentally, their sense of sufficient human value to have a stake in this world, to have value enough to be alive, are all issues that must be surmounted if they are to eventually be functional members of society.

However, while dissociation protects the child from trauma that would be too overt to allow for continued functioning, in the long run it begins to hurt, as it destroys relationships and continually subverts the individual’s self- concept. For men, remembering the abuse can take some time. There are solid reasons why most survivors don’t begin to deal with their sexual abuse until they are in their thirties, forties, or fifties. Men in their teens and twenties are still too locked in denial and confusion to take much action on their recovery (Lew, 1990). Only when they have either fulfilled some of the basic cultural expectations, or failed disastrously at such ventures, are they wiling (and able) to face the issues surrounding their feelings of inadequacy; and those efforts require a definite investment of chronology before the manifestations reveal themselves.

While this paper cannot possibly deal with all issues concerning male survivors of sexual child abuse, it is my opinion that this population has been generally ignored in the popular and professional mental health literature concerning sexual abuse. Further, given the societal prejudice that chooses to see men as independent, self-sufficient, primary breadwinners, initiators of sexual and social interaction, and, most importantly, perpetrators rather than victims, male sexual abuse survivors are placed in a bind of double jeopardy. On one hand, they are trained as males in a sexist society to be dominant and self-sufficient, to be the protectors of women and children and to ignore their own feelings of pain and personal trauma. On the other hand, their personal experience is one of incredible trauma and emotional disorientation, and given the above  delineated social prerogatives, it is expected that they will sublimate these anguished feelings and ignore their own personal trauma in the interests of supporting and validating the needs and interests of women and children.

That this places them in an untenable position is often ignored; and when they have the audacity to complain and take note of their own pain and to being working though their own issue of victimizations, the validity of their manhood is called into question. This is especially painful and further traumatizing to adult males, since far more than women in this culture, their sense of manhood is inherently tenuous. (Does there exist, for women, an equally pejorative sensibility such as being less than a woman?) Many men are challenged, by both other men and by women, to fulfill an ideal of manhood that is debilitating and undermining of the ability to be fully human and the ability to experience the full range of human emotions. Most men “have tried very hard to embody abstract manhood, zealously believing that the ideal can be embodied, inwardly fearful that not to seem a real-enough man is to risk being deemed a worthless nobody” (Stoltenberg, 1993). Yet it should not surprise us greatly to find that the cultural definitions of masculinity and femininity are not in harmony with the inner needs of the people who must live them out (Rubin, 1983)

As noted in the first section concerning men’s minimal awareness of their own victimization, prime on the list is the society’s inability to allow the possibility that male children can be seen as victims. We live in such a profoundly patriarchal society, that has such a strong ‘manly’ bias, that we are unwilling to allow that men. even as infants, were unable to defend themselves and take care of their own needs, and therefore were subject to the whims and sexual dysfunctionalities of their parents and other adults. The partners of these men, whether female or other males, in their avoidance or ignorance of the possibility that males can be the survivors of incest, rape and/or sexual abuse, and that those events can and do negatively effect an intimate relationship in quite dysfunctional ways, minimize the possibility of working through potential intimate land mines. These dysfunctional patterns occur at least in part because the sexual abuse predisposes may male survivors to confusion about their sexual identity and their value as human beings for any reason other than sex.

Given that male survivors aren’t supposed to be victims, because they are men, they are faced with a paradox of unassailable proportions: even if their victimization occurred in infancy, when they -- like their female counterparts -- were defenseless, or in early childhood, when they were at the behest of their parents and other adults, there is the inferred supposition that they should have been able to defend themselves, simply because of their being males. And admitting that they were in fact victimized, in spite of their maleness (or because of it), places them in a contradictory outcast position: either admit their victimization and then be emotionally victimized as adults for being unable to defend themselves as children, or keep quiet about their victimization and not have the advantage of facing an issue that will, in many ways, add further obstacles to their lives. Even if male survivors have the courage to confront this societal paradox and still admit their victimization, they have the additional problem of being able to find sufficient resources to adequately confront their trauma and its aftermath.

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Mariposa Men’s Wellness Institute was founded in 2001

to help men become emotionally healthy.