AsiaLIFE

Myths about masculinity keep the issue in the shadows, but advocates maintain as many as one in six boys experience sexual abuse and exploitation in Cambodia. Words by Nora Lindstrom.

“The man asked me to take a shower and then get in bed naked,” reads one boy’s account. “I later tried to avoid him and the other boys who persuaded me to do this.”

Quoted in I Thought it Could Never Happen to Boys, a study about the sexual abuse and exploitation of boys in Cambodia, the boy’s story is fairly typical. Yet stories like his are seldom heard.

“There’s hardly been any research on the issue,” says Glenn Miles, director of prevention at Love 146, an organisation working to end child sex slavery and exploitation.

Prior to the publication of the explorative study in 2008, no research focusing on the issue had been conducted in Cambodia, although tangential studies indicated there was a problem.

Miles’s own research on Cambodian children’s experiences and their understanding of violence and abuse had produced some revealing statistics.

“I found that boys consistently experience a higher level of violence than girls in all areas of violence,” he says. In particular, significantly more boys reported genital touching by an adult after nine years old.

Written by Alastair Hilton, I Thought it Could Never Happen to Boys sheds more light on the issue.

“One in six is a conservative estimate of the prevalence of abuse of boys in Cambodia,” says Hilton. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it was one in four or five.”

Cambodian socio-cultural views and expectations contribute to keeping the issue hidden by discouraging boys from disclosing abuse.

“In Khmer culture men must be strong and not ask for support,” says Yaim Chamroeun, project coordinator of First Step, a non-profit co-founded by Hilton to address the issue. “Our belief is that you should bleed rather than cry.”

Other misconceptions, including that it simply doesn’t happen to boys, that if it does happen it is “not so serious” and that boys can “get over it” quickly, further skew the debate.

“Boys are an invisible population,” says Hilton, adding that another commonly held belief is that the abuse of boys is “not part of Cambodian culture” and that perpetrators are largely foreigners.

The media fuels this image.

“It’s frustrating,” says Hilton. “The media tends to focus on foreign abusers of boys, which hides the reality that boys are abused in any setting.”

It’s not only the media that strengthens misconceptions. Both Miles and Hilton argue many organisations and institutions working on child abuse and exploitation also contribute to hiding the issue.

“Their agendas are driven by women and feminists, and as a result men are seen as perpetrators while women and girls are victims,” says Miles. “What we are seeing is the feminisation of victimisation.”

Assumptions that it is predominantly women and girls who experience sexual abuse can even prevent child abuse specialists from looking into the issue, to the extent that studies on the sexual exploitation of children don’t include boys.

“Are boys not children? Are boys not vulnerable?” asks Hilton. “When we talk about the abuse and exploitation of children, let’s really talk about children.”

Through First Step, Hilton hopes to bring the problem out of the shadows and provide much needed help to survivors of abuse. “If we understand more about the abuse of boys, we can understand more about abuse generally,” he says.

Still, his is not a popular cause. Finding funding for First Step was initially a struggle. “There are lots of donors who won’t touch this issue with a bargepole,” says Hilton, explaining how funding ostensibly for “children” often only means girls.

Cambodia is not the only country where sexual abuse of boys remains an unspoken subject. Yet things are slowly changing. One manifestation of this was the first ever international day for Male Survivors of Sexual Abuse that took place in mid-September.

Also celebrated in Cambodia, it was marked by a concert and arts event in Sihanoukville. A first step towards a more holistic view of, and response to, the sexual abuse and exploitation of children in Cambodia? We will see.

To find out more about First Step, visit: www.first-step-cambodia.org