Historical male survivors series
This series follows boys and men through the records left behind when they reported sexual violence.
Courts, police, doctors, researchers, and newspapers often had language for the case before they had language for the boy. Each part follows what that meant in practice.
Featured
Watch these first
The first clip contains a sentence that helps explain why this series exists. It begins talking about unidentified victims and defaults immediately to women.
“Every single woman is going to be pissed off by this victim blind item because the court doesn’t want to inadvertently out anyone...”
The series
Read by part
Part I begins with what happened when a male victim entered systems built around other assumptions. Part II goes further back. Part III follows the 1970s as institutions started changing the language without changing at the same speed. Part IV follows the 1980s through an exploited boy the record called a hustler. Part V enters the 1990s through the police call Sheldon Kennedy finally made.
When a Man Reported Rape
Konerak Sinthasomphone’s case opens a larger history of how male victims could be misread through law, policing, sexuality, and assumptions about consent.
Read Part I →What the Records Called the Boys
Before 1970, an abused boy could become a victim, witness, accomplice, psychiatric subject, or statistic depending on who was writing the record.
Read Part II →When the Language Started Changing
In the 1970s, the language around sexual abuse, runaways, homosexuality, and male victims began to change while boys were still moving through systems that understood them in very different ways.
Read Part III →When They Called the Boy a Hustler
David was seventeen when he told a Senate subcommittee how childhood abuse had been followed by running away, survival sex, arrests, and repeated confinement.
Read Part IV →The Call Sheldon Kennedy Finally Made
Kennedy had already reached the NHL when concern for younger players moved him to tell Calgary police what his former junior coach had done.
Read Part V →AGAPE: THE BOYS THEY SENT AWAY
Jason Britt spoke because boys were still inside. This updated investigation follows Agape Boarding School, the men who survived it, and what the federal court record now says about the case his mother carried forward.
Read the report →The point of Part II: boys were already reporting abuse and appearing in official records. The language surrounding them often changed what later readers could see.
Why the numbers matter
Boys and men are already in the data.
These figures are not separate from the stories in this series. They show why records about boys and male survivors cannot be treated as rare footnotes.
1 in 20boys experience child sexual abuse.
The CDC says at least one in twenty boys in the United States experience child sexual abuse, and that the figure is likely an underestimate because many cases are never reported.
Open CDC child sexual abuse data90%involves someone known and trusted.
The CDC reports that about ninety percent of child sexual abuse is perpetrated by someone known and trusted by the child or the child's family.
Open CDC prevention page1 in 6+men report contact sexual violence.
CDC sexual violence prevention materials report that more than one in six men have experienced some form of contact sexual violence in their lifetime.
Open CDC sexual violence data4 in 10male victims first made to penetrate were minors.
The CDC reports that about four in ten male victims who were made to penetrate someone first experienced that victimization before age eighteen.
Open CDC age-at-first-victimization dataNotes from the files
Records that need to be seen on their own.
These are shorter source notes, separate from the numbered historical series.
Share your story
Men and boys deserve a place to be heard.
If you survived sexual abuse, exploitation, trafficking, institutional abuse, or another form of sexual violence and want to talk about what happened, you can contact me here. You can ask about an interview, a future feature, or simply make contact before deciding what you want to share.
The long-term goal is to build What About the Boys? into a nonprofit that can support male survivors in more ways than publication alone. That organization does not exist yet, but listening to survivors is where the work begins.
Share your story or request an interview →Resources for male survivors
If you need support, you do not have to start with this project.
What About the Boys? is a reporting project, not a hotline or counseling service. I added a separate page with male-specific peer support, sexual-assault hotlines, child-abuse support, therapist directories, and crisis help.
Open survivor resources →Why this project exists
Male survivors did not suddenly appear when institutions developed better language for them. Earlier records show boys reporting abuse, appearing in courtrooms, being examined by doctors, and being counted in institutional data. This series follows those records at the level of the people inside them.
Support the work
Everything here stays free to read.
This reporting costs money to produce, including records, research tools, document retrieval, and maintaining the project. If you want to help me continue doing it, you can support the work through Buy Me a Coffee. There is never any obligation to donate.
Buy me a coffee