Boys Who Get Raped

PS: Trigger Warning

Have you ever asked the men around you if they’ve been sexually abused before? Of course it’s almost impossible to think so, so we barely start those conversations with boys.

I have two true stories from my DM.

One: A married man told me he has lived with sexual trauma since he was 12 after being raped repeatedly by their house help. He said he and his younger brother were numerously assaulted by the lady but they could not tell anyone. She’d touch their penises and rub them on her vagina, sometimes forcing them inside.

He admitted the trauma is affecting his intimacy with the wife, and his brother is equally struggling in his marriage. By the time he was writing to me, he couldn’t hold it in anymore.

Two: This man wrote to me via twitter. You’d pass him for a random Kenyan twitter user with his 200 followers. But what he told me was shocking. That he was robbed and raped by his friends. People he knew very well. After mugging him they took turns to assault him.

He was devastated. The rage and shame led him to hire goons that would later kill the rapists. And that’s what he said, “they’ll never do that to anyone else in their grave.”

So many men live with untold silence in this country, this continent. I haven’t spoken about the boys in the Central African Republic, Libya and DRC, battered and raped by the military for refusing to join rebel groups or belonging to a rival community or for no reason at all. Fighters have used sexual violence against men and boys as a tool to “humiliate, emasculate, and terrorize”.

In many ways we don’t tend to think of sexual assault as being something that can affect males. In some cases, as a report in Uganda highlighted, wives who discover their husbands have been raped decide to leave them. The men fear losing their families, their children, their perceived place in society and all their identity.

WE NEED TO TALK!