I read a shocking article, headlined “‘Grave Sexual Abuse’: When the Word Rape Doesn’t Apply To Boys” [by Zahara Dawoodbhoy, 21 Sep 2020], about a South Asian nation/culture in which men have been raping boys with impunity.
There, girls’ vaginal virginity is traditionally/normally verified before an arranged marriage takes place. The ‘virginity’ of boys, however, is never even questioned, and therefore they cannot be sexually ‘spoiled’ or considered raped.
The following relevant segment is taken from the extensive article:
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…. According to the Penal Code of Sri Lanka, the word ‘rape’ is defined as a man having sex with a woman, under specific circumstances that lack consent. The rape of boys — and men — therefore, do not fall under this official legal definition, and the crime instead gets tried as ‘grave sexual abuse’. Although the punishment for the two offences is the same, the euphemism used to describe rape when it occurs to boys points to larger social attitudes of who we consider can be victims.
“I think there is a myth that it only happens to female children, and that has to do with the cultural aspect of people feeling that rape is a female-related issue,” Sonali Gunasekera, Senior Director of Advocacy at the Family Planning Association (FPA) told Roar Media. “That is probably why this archaic law is still in place — because that’s how it was seen from afar.”
Despite this myth, the fact remains that instances where young boys are raped in Sri Lanka are surprisingly frequent. Director of the Child Protection Force, Milani Salpitikorala, says that 90% of her current cases involve young boys, and the idea that the boy child is somehow less susceptible to sexual abuse and rape in this country is completely false.
“Our mindsets are set in a culture of ‘Don’t worry about your child if he is a boy,’ but the boy child is as unsafe in the hands of perpetrators as much as the girl child is, if not more,” she said.
In 1997, a community study was conducted on university students in Sri Lanka, where a questionnaire was administered to two sets of undergraduates — one that had heard a lecture on child abuse prior to completing the survey, and one that had not. In both groups, the percentage of boys that admitted to being sexually abused during their childhood was higher.
Despite these findings, little research has been conducted looking into the demographics of child rape, and prevalent social attitudes around gender continue to erase boys from the demographic of people considered to be rape victims.
Even when the abuse does come to light, it is shrugged off by the idea that ‘ships don’t leave tracks on water’, which is a phrase used to imply that because there is no physical virginity to be lost, no harm has been done.
“In many cases I have seen, families and peers of young boys who are being sexually abused don’t take it seriously because the ‘issue’ of virginity doesn’t come into play,” Thushara Manoj, Senior Manager for advocacy at the FPA told Roar Media.
“When a girl gets raped, this is seen as an issue because it is believed her virginity has been compromised, and she also has the capacity to become pregnant from it. This means that her marriage prospects will suffer, and there is a risk of her abuse becoming apparent.”
But with boys, Manoj explains that this fear does not exist, and as a result, families are unlikely to intervene, especially if the perpetrator is a member of the family or community at large. ….
Even here in the West, male victims of sexual harassment, abuse and/or assault are still more hesitant or unlikely than female victims to report their offenders. They refuse to open up and/or ask for help for fear of being perceived by peers and others as weak or non-masculine.
Men can take care of themselves, and boys are basically little men. One might see some of that mentality reflected in, for example, a New York Times feature story (“She Was a Big Hit on TikTok. Then a Fan Showed Up With a Gun”, February 19, 2022).
Written by Times reporter Elizabeth Williamson, the piece at one point states that “Instagram, owned by Meta, formerly known as Facebook, has … been accused of causing mental and emotional health problems among teenage female users.” A couple paragraphs down, it is also stated that, “Teen girls have been repeatedly targeted by child predators.”
Why write this when she must have known that teen boys are also targeted by such predators? And if mainstream news-media fail to fully realize this fact in their journalism, why/how would the rest of society?
It could also be the same mindset that may explain why the author of Childhood Disrupted included only one male among her six interviewed subjects, there likely having been such a small pool of ACE-traumatized males willing to formally tell his own story of traumatic childhood adversity, especially that of a sexual nature.
To get anywhere, males need to have the same strong mainstream-media (news, social and entertainment) support that females have had for decades, and still do. Males have instead observed thus known that for the most part they haven’t been taken seriously, at least not on this front. If anything, the media are generally cynical toward their cause.
It might be yet more evidence of a continuing yet subtle societal take-it-like-a-man attitude, one in which so many men will choose to abstain from ‘complaining’ about their torturous youth, as that is what ‘real men’ do.
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