Mental Health Providers Must Be Encouraged to Provide Services for Male Sexual Abuse Survivors

Although it is difficult to quantify this observation, many male survivors who have come to terms with their childhood sexual abuse issues have found it difficult to find an appropriate mental health therapist who is familiar with their issues. There are a number of mental health professionals who have knowledge of female sexual abuse issues, but it is a rare therapist who is able to adequately treat the trauma issues faced by male survivors. Many mental health therapists are simply unaware of the frequency of incestuous abuse of male children, assuming that “everyone knows” that little boys are rarely abused (Lew, 1990).

In part, this is due to a much greater paucity of studies about male sexual abuse. When one looks in a bookstore for texts on incest issues, for instance, there are quite a number of books concerning female survivors of father-daughter incest, but it is a rare book indeed that concerns father-son incest and only a sprinkling of books that cover the issue of mother-son -- or mother-daughter -- incest though these have been recent additions to the genre (see Elliott, 1993). There simply is not, as noted in several of the proceeding sections of this paper, widespread appreciation among mental health professionals about the extent of the sexual abuse of male children, nor an understanding of the long-term consequences of that trauma on males.

Schools of social work, whose raison d’etre is in part the training of professional mental health workers, fail in this task as well. If the George Warren Brown of Social Work (Washington University, St. Louis, MO) curriculum is evidence of a larger trend among schools of social work nationally (and there is the suspicion by this author that it is), while there is an emphasis on the mental health issues of women and children, there is very little, if any, focus upon the long-term problems faced by male survivors of sexual abuse, incest, and rape. This is indeed objectively odd, given the prevalence of sexual abuse of males in our culture, but subjectively it makes at least ‘social policy sense’: schools of social work wallow in the same kind of blindness that afflicts the larger culture, that of seeing men as perpetrators, not as victims, of sexual abuse.

That this perspective needs a timely change is obvious. We, as a culture, can no longer afford to avoid the loss of the productive edge, both emotionally and economically, that a massive cohort of sexually traumatized men has upon our society. Very few of the men who have been sexually abused later become perpetrators (though the numbers are still quite disturbing), but their inability to form productive relationships with either sexual partners or co-workers negatively affect the whole of the society. We have for at least the last decade been aware of these devastating effects upon female survivors of sexual abuse, and sizable funding -- though still insufficient -- has been devoted to resolution of these outcomes in females. It is high time that we begin to take note of and face up to the necessity of resolving similar issues for male survivors.

There should be some encouragement on the part of schools that train mental health professionals to focus, at least in part, on the issues faced by male survivors. The problem, though, is that schools are not going to train mental health practitioners for jobs that currently do not exist in the larger mental health field. As such, it is critical that service providers begin to offer services to male victims of sexual abuse and to widely advertise this change in policy. In this manner, employment opportunities will exist for students who wish to study issues affecting male sexual abuse survivors, and the target populations of male survivors will finally have a constituency within the mental health field, who will be only too willing to address their issues, hopefully with effective psychotherapy intervention.

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Mariposa Men’s Wellness Institute was founded in 2001

to help men become emotionally healthy.