Mhishi Sons and Others

On Loving Male Survivors
1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-1-912489-65-7
Verlag: 404 Ink
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, Band 11, 112 Seiten

Reihe: Inklings

In the UK, around one in six men will experience some form of sexual violence. Many of these men who experience sexual abuse are dismissed, only brought up as the butt of a joke, an exception to the rule or, perhaps at worst, are used as a rhetorical tool against female victims. Conversations on sexual violence have understandably focused on women's voices and experiences, with data indicating that women are still the majority of victims and not enough is being done to prevent this violence. As most perpetrators of this violence against women are men, it becomes almost easy to mistake that male survivors stories are exceptions or irrelevances. The fact is that we share a world and our experiences are closely interwoven. Sons and Others challenges misconceptions and misrepresentations of sexual violence against men across media and society and offers a new way of seeing and understanding these men in our lives, asking how the violence they experience affects us all.

Tanaka Mhishi is a writer, performer and storyteller. His works with issues surrounding masculinity and trauma have been produced on screen for BBC 3 and on stages nationwide. He is the author of This Is How It Happens, a play about male survivors of sexual violence, and Boys Don't . Tanaka is a trustee for SurvivorsUK, a charity supporting male and non-binary survivors of sexual violence across the UK.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mhishi, Tanaka

Leseproben

Chapter 1: Sons

A traumatic memory does not work like any other kind of memory. When I call them up, the process is graceless and spasmodic, as though I am wrenching diseased tissue away from my spine. You never know how deep the rot goes, it’s been part of you that long.

Here is what I remember.

I am in a hotel pool, kidney shaped, on the southwest coast of Sri Lanka. Our family have been coming here for years, watching it cycle through phases of dilapidation and regeneration as though they were seasons. I am maybe eight years old.

I’m not sure where my parents are, but as an only child I’m used to playing by myself. I have an expansive imaginative life, full of adventures and characters plucked from books. I can pretend to be a merman in the pool; I’m a good swimmer and I enjoy opening my eyes underwater and seeing the sunlight stretch its gentle columns through the pool.

As I surface, a spray of water hits me in the face. I look over, and a man is there. He is local – I don’t expect him to speak English and my Sinhalese is weak. But he has a playful look on his face so I splash him back.

He dodges. Smiles. Splashes me. I retaliate, mimicking his cupped hand so that the volume of water is greater. He answers with another volley, and I dodge to my right. He is silhouetted, so I can’t quite see him, just that he is dark skinned with a moustache and a neat haircut.

We go back and forth, and I’m pleased to realise that I am dodging his sprays of water more than he is dodging mine. I’m winning; he is over-favouring one hand. All I have to do is be prepared to dive further to my right.

We go back and forth for maybe three or four minutes. He advances on me, and I laugh in delight. This is what I’ve been waiting for. I flip onto my back and kick my legs, creating a shower of water that erupts over him at just the right moment. I see the sky, the blue water, the green of the plants, taste the chlorine and the triumph of outsmarting a grown up.

And that is the moment when I notice the open gate, which leads out to the beach. At the same time, I realise that I have been manoeuvred round so that he is between me and the hotel, and that the gate must be open because he came through it. That the splashing was calculated to push me away from wherever my parents might be.

I am in trouble. I am in big, big trouble.

A split second later, I feel a hand against my ankle. I turn around in the water and inhale, cough, drag myself upright. Another hand just barely grazes my calf. Then, with all the speed of a child with a gold swimming certificate and a healthy dose of adrenaline, I swim up to the nearest group of people, a family of German-speaking tourists who are round the corner. The three or four seconds it takes me to reach them are some of the most frightening of my life, but I make it, gasping and shivering.

Instinctively, I do not tell them what was happening, or look round to see if the man has followed me. When my mother comes to collect me from the pool, I do not tell her either.

In fact, I won’t tell anyone about this incident for nearly twenty years.

The abuse of any child is profoundly disturbing – not just for the victim, but for their family, and feelings of shame, guilt and blame are all but inevitable. Most often, this blame falls onto mothers, even though they are rarely the perpetrators of abuse.This idea that mothers hold the exclusive responsibility for safeguarding their children is a manifestation of sexist or traditional values. But where the abused child is a boy, it often goes further. The abuse of boys challenges the traditional conception of gender, and in response family systems often cleave closer to regressive ideas. The idea that their sons might venture outside traditional masculinity – by being gay, by being sexually submissive, or even by exhibiting traditionally ‘feminine’ traits like empathy, collaboration and tenderness – becomes tied to the experience of abuse itself, and so parents often default to modelling patriarchal values as a response. As one researcher writes: ‘While theories that blame mothers often focus on intrafamilial CSA [Child Sex Abuse], a number of them view mothers as liable for the abuse because maternal employment is seen as a hindrance to a woman’s ability to safe-guard her child from the abuser.’1

Many mothers will decrease or even end their participation in the workforce following the revelation of sexual abuse of their sons.

It’s important to remember that while mothers are often unfairly blamed for not noticing abuse, this blame is as likely to come from within themselves as it is from broader family systems. The fear and shame that mothers of sexually abused boys feel is a contributing factor in everyone’s silence.

I kept silent about my near miss at the hotel pool instinctively because I knew my mother would blame herself. I was aware, even as a child, that she faced significant scrutiny as a disabled mother, that there had been questions about her fitness and that it was important for me to present myself as a happy, polite and intelligent child. It sounds shockingly grown up for an eight year old to grasp, but I sensed that keeping silent about the incident was the safest thing for our family. If I told her – or anyone – then other people would start watching her more closely, berating her, blaming her. She would be less likely to allow me to go on adventures in pools, or with friends and relatives. As a boy, I felt pressured to protect her, as a child I wanted to stay free, and as a son I did not want her to be criticised or blamed.

I was lucky to avoid the abuse which I sensed approaching, but even if I hadn’t, it’s easy to understand why I might have kept silent about it. In a system which ascribes most of the blame to mothers for not safeguarding their sons.

What kind of system could we have instead? For a start, we know that families who take a more fluid, adaptive approach to gendered roles tend to be more successful in supporting boys who have been abused to overcome their trauma.2 A focus on understanding abused boys, rather than ‘fixing’ them helps rebuild a sense of safety and autonomy. Beyond that, the overwhelming burden of ensuring children’s safety needs to be moved beyond parents and guardians, and into the community. This can feel like a risk, especially since most abuse happens in community contexts. But counter-intuitive as it seems, the most effective response to abuse is not to withdraw trust in the outside world, but to repair it. This isn’t work for parents themselves to do, it’s about the broader community stepping up to support families in keeping their children safe. It’s the German family, whose presence and willingness to let me stay with them made it impossible for the man in the pool to keep up his attempts at abuse. We’re doing some of that work already, it’s the basis of much of our safeguarding policies but it also means funding services for male survivors of childhood sexual abuse. It means therapeutic support for mums of abused children, and abused boys specifically. It means other family members taking on regular, active, safe childcaring. All too often, that’s not happening.

Fathers, meanwhile, tended to withdraw from caring activities, like participating in family therapy or having conversations about their sons’ wellbeing where those activities that might lead to them engaging with the subject of their son’s abuse. In fact, when boys wanted to talk about these issues, many dads abscond from parenting activities altogether.3

Those activities which remain are often centred around reinforcing their sons masculinity and gender conformity. One scholar notes that ‘to “fix” what had happened, many fathers’ gendered strategic plans stressed the need to do more masculine activities with their sons. This included signing their sons up for sports teams, roughhousing, and consciously rewarding heterosexuality. These fathers hoped that these formulaic masculine activities would hinder their sons from becoming gay and (re)construct a masculine, heterosexual identity. The gender strategies of most men included condemning any same-sex affection and the blatant objectification of girls and women.’4

This last point is one of the hardest instincts to understand; the idea that fathers might enact neglect, homophobia and misogyny as a (misguided) form of care for their sons. On an objective level it is easy to see that not only does pushing their sons into these behaviours not only puts them at risk of further violence – boys who learn that asking for help will result in their being shut down are not likely to speak up again – it also builds habits which will inhibit their ability to exist in gender-diverse survivor spaces as adults.

But if we understand that these behaviours are motivated largely by fathers’ genuine desire to do what is best for their children then the way in which we challenge this behaviour becomes vitally important. For a parent who is devastated, angry and frightened about their child’s future, it’s easy to default to the traditional gendered behaviour which feels safe.

The fact that mothers are more likely than fathers to be survivors also means that additional support might be needed. When I was raped many of the mother figures in my life were not only shocked but disturbed by their own resurgent experiences of abuse. One even confessed that my rape made her question the way she was raising her son. ‘As a feminist I feel like there’s this huge pressure to make sure he...