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.