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.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Monday, May 10, 2010
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.
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.
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
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.
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.
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