I don’t know that I fully agree with April when she has a hunch that boys are sexually abused as much as girls. The statistics do not bear that out; however, I think we all know that boys are unlikely ever to tell anyone they were abused, which makes all of the statistics comparing the two incomplete, at best.
Yes, there are also plenty of girls who don’t tell anyone either. The one thing we can all agree on is that there are more sexual abuse victims than the ones we know about. Possibly a lot more.
However, when we consider how many boys are really sexually abused, this question is a valid one:
Why is the myth that Childhood Sexual Abuse (CSA) is a female problem persisted?
https://traumatostrength.substack.com/p/little-boys-are-sexually-abused-as
The reality is that childhood sexual abuse is rampant and, in many ways, we are clueless. We don’t know how often it happens. We don’t know how many adults are out there drowning, what happened to them instead of healing, and we don’t know who the perpetrators are. What makes this worse is that we think we know. Everyone has their favorite conspiracy theory, their “type” of abuser, and almost all of those are incomplete at best, if not totally wrong.
We want it to be a simple problem that we can quickly solve, so we can return to not having to think about it. That’s why we often dismiss the very idea that boys could be sexually abused, especially if another child or an adult female abused them. That doesn’t fit our pre-defined scenario for how sexual abuse happens. It’s always a socially awkward man in middle age, perhaps with a van. Those are the people we need to put in jail, and then we go back to ignoring the issue. As if.
I, for one, was sexually abused by an older boy. Not a stranger. Someone in my family. Many other men I know were abused by a family member, a member of the clergy, a coach, or some other trusted person known to their parents. I also went into my 20s planning to never tell anyone. I know many men go through most of their lives never planning to tell anyone. I was lucky to find other men who did talk about it, and helped me realize first that what happened to me was abuse and that someone would believe me if I spoke up.
I would argue that most men have never had that. Thus, they don’t show up in any statistics about sexual abuse. The sexual abuse of all minors is chronically underreported and is likely to get worse as society continues to push victims to “move on” instead of speaking out. We need more spaces to discuss CSA, not fewer.