Rape for the Women, Hazing for the Boys: America's failure to recognize the growing trend of male sexual abuse

A good friend of mine asked me only a little over a month ago if I thought blogging about male sexual abuse should be talked about openly because of its sensitive nature. At that time, I assured her that I was just as adamant about speaking up for male victims as I was about helping and supporting female victims who had had their lives devastated by this hideous crime. There's absolutely no difference in the way the abuse psychologically impairs men and women although the way they might try to cope with the incident may vary.

Unknown to the both of us at the time of my first blog on this subject was that our state (the great state of Indiana) would gain national attention for an sexual assault incident involving a 14 year old boy and four varsity basketball players from Carmel High school in Carmel Indiana.

The Carmel incident has been describe as hazing gone bad. What! One woman, referring to the offenders, said, "these are not 40 year old hardened career criminals we're talking about..." She's absolutely right! These were 18 and 19 year old boys who were involved in this sexual assault. And what's even more alarming is the apparent lack of victim empathy on the part of a couple of the boys.

For now, it appears that the word 'hazing' can now include anal penetration and this should alarm all of us. Of course, I'm just a little emotional about all this because we shouldn't have to wait until these boys are 40 years old to make their punishment fit the crime. But enough about this for now. I want to get back to talking about recovery for male victims of sexual abuse.

All recovery is painful and coming to grips with your own feelings about what happened to you will be no different. Since this blog is for helping those of you who may have never shared your experience with anyone, lets take things slowly, very slowly. Lao Tsu, the author of the Tao Te Ching, wrote,” The journey of a thousand miles began with one step.” Reading this book may be the first step in your journey toward recovery. Since the process of recovery is like a thousand mile journey don’t get in a rush to get through this material or you’ll miss something that could help you.

As an adult male, you already have some insight on why you haven’t told anyone about your abuse and why you’ve been reluctant to seek out professional help. Your reasons are the same as those shared by many others who have been molested, sexually abused, or raped. You feel humiliated, ashamed, disgraced and have perhaps even blamed yourself for what happened, and, to top it all off, you’re a man.

And that’s the problem isn’t it? You’re a man. In this rare instance in American society your gender has worked against you. Culture, social stigma, and social conditioning have reduced you to a second class emotional citizen who should be able to handle everything that comes your way no matter how traumatic it is. You’re supposed to be strong, courageous and unflinching in the face of all adversity that comes your way. You’re a man!

By now you realize that you can no longer live the myth. Your inner turmoil, your problems with sustaining truly intimate and close relationships with those you love, and the inability to let go of all the debilitating feelings associated with your abuse has brought you to the realization that you are much more than a man; you’re human.

You should know right now that you are not alone. Although females garner, statistically speaking, the most reported incidents of childhood, adolescent or adult sexual abuse and sexual assaults, the percentages of sexually abused boys are no doubt higher than anyone can ever imagine. It’s very likely that 30 to 50 percent of all sexually abused children may now be boys. No one knows for sure because males, generally, and historically, are reluctant to speak out because of the many fears they harbor.

What were your reasons for not coming forward? Were you afraid someone would call you a fag? Did the thought of being labeled homosexual further cement in your mind the need to masquerade your feelings behind a macho image? Did the perpetrator threaten you with retaliation? Or, was it because the perpetrator was a family member and you knew that telling someone would hurt a lot of people and possibly break up your family.

One thing is for certain; you have not been okay since it happened and only you know to what extent the event has affected you. It is my guess that some of you have been suicidal at times, battle depression, and have had difficulty bonding with your significant other or your children and have became increasingly homophobic over the years. Needless to say, your personal life has probably been in shambles because you’ve been carrying around this emotional baggage for most of your life. What happened then has helped create your now. How would you like to create your own now from now on?

Since your identity been has been fractured you have probably formed distorted perceptions about yourself. You have also formed distorted perceptions about other people to protect yourself. No doubt you are extremely distrustful and may have resigned yourself to living the life of recluse with only a few friends and family members which act as your primary support system. But not even a good family support system can save you if you go on trying to hide or deny the problem, or if you continue to neglect the real source of your pain.

We will pick up here in the next blog. All new readers are encouraged to start this blog from the beginning so that you can follow along more smoothly.

Getting down to the nitty-gritty: How to come to grips with what happened to you

Presumably, you were either sexually assaulted or raped when you were a child or are you would not be reading this blog. Those of you who are victims of rape became a victim when the perpetrator threatened or forced you into a sexual act against your will. And to make matters worst, if you were rape, the rape took place when you were a child. This also makes you the victim of a statutory rape; a rape which occurs to a person who has not reached an age where he can understand the acts of sexual intercourse enough to give his consent. The age of consent may fall between the ages of 14 or 18 depending upon your state laws but as far as you are concerned none of this matters because someone took something from you that didn’t belong to them and right now you would do anything in the world to go back in time and stop it from ever happening.

In the same way, some of you have been sexually assaulted. You were fondled, molested or forced to touch your perpetrator against your will or raped. Rape has been defined as a kind of sexual assault which falls within three categories; forcible, (non-consenting sexual intercourse through threat of force) soft rape, (where the victim is coerced into compliance by physical pressure or psychological intimidation,) and statutory rape. But categories’ mean absolutely nothing to you right now because statistical data won’t help you deal with what you’re going through. The fact of the matter is that you have been violated. And after everything has been said and done you still want to know what you can do to stop feeling the way you do.

Also, to make matters worst, you may have thought that you could bury your pain deep enough so that nobody would ever know how you truly feel about yourself and your manhood. By now you have found out that you were wrong because it really doesn’t matter if anyone else knows about what happened to you--you know what happened to you and that’s all that matters. In order to move forward let’s answer some questions you may have about what happened to you and what you can do about it now.

Now is a very important word. I want you to become very familiar with it because it is the key to your future. We’re going to talk about what happen then only to get to the now. And living in the now will be the only thing that matters by the time you’re finished reading this blog.


The hardest thing in the world is to relive, intentionally or unintentionally, a traumatic event over and over again in your mind. All recovery is painful and coming to grips with your own feelings about what happened to you will be no different. Since this blog is for helping those of you who may have never shared your experience with anyone, lets take things slowly, very slowly.

We will continue this in the next blog.

The Boys Next Door: How Young Predators Fool the Media

To be sure, my previous experience with this population granted me access into the personal lives of the offenders, and, in an indirect way, with their victims. Looking back on my experience with working with adolescent sexual offenders I only shudder to think of all the victims we’ll see in the future. The television episodes you see on sexual predators are not even the tip of the iceberg as to what is really happening in America.
For example, the television shows only depict adult male predators, but what you don’t see are the children, the teenagers, the boys next door, who are out there looking for an opportunity to sexually assault the unsuspecting and innocent. And no matter what excuse or reason we give for these children behavior, whether they are victims who are only repeating the behavior done to them, or whether their undeveloped minds were contaminated by the insidious and pervasive trends in America culture, the fact remains that the offender, for the most part, is responsible for his own behavior.
For example, we can blame mom or dad for not blocking internet porn sites on their computers. We can blame the record companies for bombarding our children with continual doses of sexually and lyrically explicit music videos, which at one time would have been considered soft porn. Or we can blame the perpetrator for creating and establishing in the mind of the victim a pattern of sexual abuse which will play out in his or hers own life.
The bottom line is this:the adolescent sexual offender’s behavior is criminal. He may only be twelve or thirteen or perhaps younger, but the courts will order that he be place in treatment because he has committed a felony. He’ll be read his rights, and probably have to submit to taking a polygraph, and he’ll have to be locked up until he complies with treatment.
In addition, the state- or shall I say you and I-will have to foot the bill because the offender’s parents can’t afford the $400-$500 daily rate( this was the going rate over 5 years ago. I'm sure that we could tac on another hundred or so today.)that many of these facilities charge for his room and board, and his therapies.
If it sounds like I’m bitter about this let me assure you that I’m not. I would much rather have my tax dollars going for treating our children than to fund a dome stadium for a football team. However, I will make this point; it is a travesty to pay for the offender’s treatment for six months to a year or more and leave the victims and their family, who lives, are forever changed, to fend for their selves by using their own insurance to pay for what little counseling they can afford.
On the whole, the long termed dynamics and consequences of a person who is sexual abused, molested or raped, will be seen in every relationship the victims enters into. And this brings us to the purpose of the book (which you are reading as a blog), which has really has nothing to do with treating adolescent or adult male sexual offenders. This is a blog is about you, the sexually abused boy who became the emotionally abused man and the sexually abused boy who looking to make sense of the world and himself.

How does the boy who became a man deal with something he has never told anyone? How does the boy who has been sexually abused deal with something he is just now coming to grips with? Or, to put it another way, how can the man who was sexually abused as a child finally come out the closet, so to speak, and began his journey toward recovery? And what kinds of tools can the sexually abused male use to help him on his road to recovery.
In searching for the answers I will defer to those professionals who specialize in working with the victims of sexual abuse. However, to remain true to intent of the blog so that it will not be bogged down by what the professionals have to say, I want a male victim to tell his own story. I want a victim to tell other victims who are reading this blog how they are working through this issue. It is one thing for someone to write a book about how men feel about being victimized as a child and it is quite another to let to let them speak for themselves. With that in mind, throughout the course of this blog, I will often act as merely as an interpreter or transcriber of a story, a story which is beginning to come to the attention of mainstream society.
Also, this blog will be divided into to two sections. In the first section I will be speaking to men. The information contained in this section can not be understood by victims who have not reached adulthood. The second section is written for boys and adolescents who have been sexually abused. We will begin in the next blog.

Why We Need to Talk Openly About Male Sexual Abuse: (from the book Real Men Do Talk)

As I was saying in the last blog, I knew the Universal Mind had led me back to working with children and adolescents for a specific purpose. That purpose was revealed to me on a cold morning in early December, 2006.

I was sitting out in the day-room one morning monitoring a group of adolescent boys who were preparing for breakfast. As I sat, a young man came over and plopped himself down in the chair next to me. We had already established a good rapport with each other in the two months I had been there and he apparently felt very comfortable talking to me. He leaned over and said, “You write books, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Well, what types of books do you write,” he asked.
“I primarily write self-help books for African American men,” I answered.
“Have you ever thought about writing books for boys?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Well you should.”
“Why?”
He leaned a little closer and said, “There are a lot of boys in here who have the same problems I have. I was sexually abused by my stepfather and we need some books to read that will help us.” He paused for a moment. “My mother called me to ask me if I would still love her if she stayed with my stepfather.”
“What did you tell her?” I asked.
“I told her I would.”
“Um.”
“He was locked up for two days,” he continued. “She had to get some money to bail him out of jail. Now, she’s in counseling, he’s in counseling and I’m in here.”
He got up and went back talking to his friends and I sat there thinking about what he said.

Later on that day I went to visit a co-worker on my lunch break. I told her about the conversation I had and she began to tell me about her son. “My son was sexually abused when he was thirteen,” she said. “And he’s just beginning to talk about it.The funny thing is--he didn’t go into counseling to talk about that. It was for something entirely different.”
“Okay,” I thought. Maybe this is a confirmation of the direction I’m supposed to take for my next book.”

I had never considered writing a book for males who had been sexually abused. I wrote The Black Man’s Little Book of Success Secrets because I wanted to encourage and motivate black men to be proactive in creating their own financial destinies. I wrote How to Stop Hatin Yo Baby’s Momma for non-custodial fathers because I wanted to help men work through their negative feelings about the mother of their children so that they could have the best possible relationship with their kids.
However, the book, Real Men Do Talk, would be much more difficult to write because I couldn’t draw upon any personal experiences with the subject as I did in the previous two books.

Sure, I had worked with adolescent sexual offenders before. I knew something about the stages of an offender’s cycles, what constituted grooming behaviors and so on. Yes, I had worked closely with boys who were victims themselves, and I had personal first hand knowledge of many of their stories. I knew kids who had manipulated other kids for their own sexual pleasure and I knew others kids who were coerced or threatened into deviant sexual acts with their baby sister while dad snapped digital pictures or filmed these perverted scenes with a hand held recorder.

For six years I had close contact with these kids, some of which had more than twenty victims--plus animals-- on their time line. But even then I only had an external awareness or knowledge of sexual abuse, but I had never been through the kind of trauma inflicted on these kids or the kind of trauma these kids inflicted on their victims.

Nevertheless, as I look back over those agonizing years, I could see the Universal Mind at work. My working with this population would have never crossed my mind in a million years. I took a job working with sexual offenders, not because I wanted to, but because I simply needed a position to accommodate a personal crisis in my life. At that time, my wife had gotten ill and was hospitalized. Her hospitalization forced me to look for a job closer to home so that I could look after our six year old son. As fate (or the Universe) would have it, I happened to know a friend I had worked with from another mental health facility who had the ability to get me an interview with the CEO of the company he was worked for. I was hired on the spot to initially work on the units and run groups for the residents on the evening shift. Like many, in this relatively new field, I had no experience in working with sexual offenders so I had to learn everything on the spot by talking to therapist, psychologists, and attending groups and various in-services. And what was supposed to be a temporary job turned into six long years. But I know now it was for a reason. Those of you who are victims of abuse, or perhaps perpetrators of abuse will find something in this blog to aid your recovery. I will pick up here with the rest of the story in the next blog.

Why I'm writing this blog for males who have been sexually abused and why they should read it.

Why I'm writing this blog for males who have been sexually abused and why they should read it.

I'm writing this blog for the same reason I wrote the book Real Men Do Talk: Metaphysical Healing for Male Victims of Sexual Abuse. I'm writing it because I felt led to do so by a series of events that I could only describe as happening within the realm of synchronicity. I had just resigned from my position as a direct care worker for a private facility in the city of Indianapolis, which specialized in the treatment of adolescent male sexual offenders. The six years I spent working with this population was an experience in itself and it actually left a bad taste in my mouth.

By the time I left, the facility had began to get an influx of kids from the juvenile system and many of these kids brought their antisocial behaviors with them. There were more fights, more threats against staff and more sexually acting out. Many kids, heavily influence by the gangster rap culture, thug life, and glorified prison movies, brought their thug persona with them into treatment. Some of them talked about shankin staff and runnin things, like the facility was maximum-security penitentiary.

Needless to say, most of them were boys with conduct disorders who had also molested someone. Their victims were friends, brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, mothers, animals and so on. And the method of how they abused their victim was enough to make you sick to your stomach. It was hard for me to refrain from forming my own biases or opinions about them especially when they brought these same behaviors to the facility with them and showed no inclination of committing to treatment or experiencing any genuine empathy for any of their victims, not to mention their desire to act out sexually in a sexual treatment facility. (You’d be surprise of how inventive a male adolescent sexual offender can be. They are so cunning and manipulative they could act out sexually right under your nose and you may not ever know it, until one them came forward or the incident was reported by another kid to a staff member or his therapist.)

In short, not even the motion sensors this particular facility installed were even able to stop them at times. They’d simply stand on the ends their bed and place a piece of tape or other item over the sensor and plot how they were going to victimize another resident. But that doesn’t mean there weren’t kids who actually tried to work their treatment. I was happy to see a kid leave successfully after completing treatment, although we all knew the word 'successful' was an allusive term that would only be determined by their ability to never offend again. Nevertheless, as I stated earlier, my experience working at this facility and with this particular population made me want to take a break from working with people. I was tired and burned out and I simply wanted to take time away from helping other people to deal with my own mental health. I felt the change was long overdue.

I started working in mental health field in 1982 as a psychiatric technician with Indianapolis’s largest state hospital at that time. I went on from that time to work in various psychiatric settings in both the private and public sector. I’ve work with some of the finest psychologists, counselors, therapists, nurses and social workers that you’ll ever want to meet and I owe a great deal of whatever insight I have acquired over the years to them.

The other source of my insight comes directly from the patients themselves. Although I had no desire to go on working in the area of mental health and resigned myself to doing something different, (I actually went to work part time for the post office and had limited experience of the factory floor) I ended up back at another state hospital which focused on educating, training and teaching medical students. And wouldn’t you know it; I ended up working in children services with kids and adolescent boys. What is more interesting about this scenario is I had worked for this same facility nearly 20 years ago. Only the name of the kids had changed. And although I couldn’t figure out why I ended up back at same place, I knew it was for a specific purpose. That purpose was revealed to me one early morning in December 2006. We'll pick up here in the next blog.