Sexual trauma
Connie Clark
Walden University

Sexual trauma
It has been estimated that 1 out of 5 women and 1 out of 7 men “have been or are being sexually abused as children (Bass, Davis, 1994). With a national population of 200 million, of which 52% are females, this means that approximately 27 million females and 20 million males are victims of sexual abuse. It is, therefore, true that the number of female sexual abuse victims is larger than the number of male victims, but not substantially more. However, the cultural blindness that exists concerning the prevalence of male sexual abuse and the profound negative effects this abuse has on male victims’ ability to form healthy relationships displays the extent to which this society wishes to defend social notions of male prerogatives in the face of strong evidence that many males are unable and unwilling to fulfill those cultural demands due in part to their victimization as children.
In spite of the prevalence of this issue, though, while many mental health providers have services for female and male children, upon entering adulthood many of those services for male survivors disappear. As social workers, this should be an area of great concern for us. We devote a great deal of professional energy to sexual abuse issues faced by women and children, but often fail to adequately provide resources for those children when they reach adulthood. Additionally, we do not provide sufficient assistance to adult males who are sexually abused during their adulthood. Some services of this kind exist at rape crisis centers, but because many males are unaware of these services, they are reluctant to come forth with requests for assistance with working through their trauma.

Case of Tony
Tony is a single, attractive, heterosexual male, who has admitted that he is afraid of commitment and getting hurt. He acknowledges that he feels lonely. At first Tony denies ever being abused until later he discloses that he was molested by his aunt when he was a boy for three months before she moved away. Tony’s trauma history as well as his physical, emotional, and sexual functioning has affected him throughout his life.
Sexual abuse issues have certain uniformity for both females and males; sexual abuse is traumatic irrespective of the sex of the victim. However, male sexual abuse survivors have a different experience with the after effects of such trauma, due to the different expectations that our culture has of men and their ability to cope with their abuse. Since males simply aren’t allowed to be victims or at least not allowed to be seen as such, this cultural blindness creates immense issues of confusion for me (Lew, 1990). Males are often more damaged than females by society’s refusal or reluctance to accept their victimization, and by their resultant belief that they must “tough it out” in silence (M.A.L.E., 1998). Further, this blindness creates many issues for men when it comes to constructive mental health intervention. Very few mental health providers have services to address this issue for adult male survivors. In part, this is the case because male survivors, due to cultural messages which say that men are not supposed to be victims of sexual assault, do not come forth with a request for such services; and, as a result, few providers are motivated to provide such services. The result of this double-bind is that even if a male survivor has the courage to face his abuse or begins to have memories of it and chooses to work through those memories, he often finds that services for vulnerable populations of men who were sexually abused are minimal or often non-existent. It is also true, though, that few mental health professionals have been adequately trained to recognize and treat the traumatic outcomes for male survivors (Lew, 1990).
The whole issue of male sexual abuse is complex, to say the least. Many male survivors of sexual trauma either are not emotionally in touch with their trauma or choose to avoid facing it, at least in part because of the cultural bias toward seeing men as the stronger gender that doesn’t admit or discus their victimization. The larger cultural blindness about the prevalence of male sexual abuse allows it to continue without sufficient intervention, and encourages males who might otherwise be willing to face their damaged emotional lives to ‘shut up and tough it out.’ This attitude further traumatizes males, whose experience is already to have their pain ignored, and now undermines them through subtle and not so subtle messages that their abuse is neither worth investigation nor intervention.
It is not my intention to argue that the experience of sexual abuse, rape, and incest of males is worse than the experiences for females; no matter what the sex of the child, sexual child abuse is traumatic, physically and emotionally volatile, and highly disruptive of development into adulthood. Rather, my argument is that there are some cultural peculiarities that make sexual abuse for males different from the experience, in adulthood, of females; and that the culture, at large, has a greater tolerance for viewing women as victims than viewing men in a similar light. There are clearly insufficient mental health resources given the number of female survivors of sexual abuse; there are, however, almost no resources whatever for male survivors.
Male survivors have distinct problems when interacting with other men and women, but it is particularly devastating for them in intimate relationships with women, because in this culture men are raised to expect emotional sensitivity from women, and often male survivors receive very much of the opposite reaction. And men’s experience of themselves is equally disruptive: since this culture teaches them to be self-reliant, independent, etc. and their personal experience predicates a reality quite in contrast to the cultural expectation, their self-worth is traumatically undermined, which makes the manifestation of intimate relationships with traditionally acculturated females particularly traumatic and painful. This is not the fault of females, nor am I attempting to assess such blame; rather my point is that we are all impacted by a cultural imperative that dehumanizes men, and male survivors are further dehumanized and emasculated by their sexual abuse. Their interaction with other members of the society is often less than satisfying and in many ways constructive of a life of loneliness and suicidal ideation, though no fault of their own and often in distinct contrast to their Herculean efforts to overcome the effects of the sexual child abuse.
Strategies
Providing sufficient mental health services for male sexual abuse survivors is, indeed, a multi-leveled task and without it, men will not feel the safety to face issues which are having a widespread debilitating effect on the society (Friedman, 1998). Men who are survivors tend to act out their pathology through dysfunctional behaviors which negatively impact themselves, their female and male partners, their spouses, their children, the workplace, and the environment. All too often in our society, the only male sexual abuse survivors who get distinct attention are sexual perpetrators; and by then it is too late, since many in the society want to write off males who act out their trauma as sexual predators. The great majority of male sexual abuse survivors who never become perpetrators are simply forgotten and ignored. This author would argue that that attitude of cultural blindness does males a great disservice and, given that males continue to be in dominant positions of power in this culture, allows their traumatized experience to adversely affect their families, their workplaces, and the larger society. We can only change this situation by increasing the availability of mental health service provision to male sexual abuse survivors, which presently continues to be one of the most ignored and underserved populations of mental health clients. The key objective of counseling intervention with adult survivors of childhood sexual assault is to facilitate trauma resolution and foster healing and growth for the individual affected (Grubman-Black, 1990).

References
Bass, Ellen; Davis, Laura (1994). The Courage to Heal. Harper Perennial.
Friedman, Matthew J. [Ph.D.] (1998). Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: An Overview. National
Center for PTSD. www.dartmouth.edu/dms/ptsd/Overview.
Grubman-Black, Stephen D. (1990). “Captivitiy; “Child Abuse”. In Trauma and Recovery. Basic Books, pp. 74-95, 96-114.
Lew, Mike (1990). Victims No Longer: Men Recovering from Incest and Other Child Sexual Abuse. Harper Collins.
M.A.L.E. (1998). Myths about Male Sexual Abuse. Adapted from a presentation at the 5th

International Conference on Incest and Related Problems, Biel, Switzerland, August 14,
1991. www.geocities.com/HotSprings/2656/parentssurvivormal