Why Do You Want To Tell Your Story? To show that male sexual abuse is complicated and can have lasting impacts
Tell Us Your Story Technically, this isn’t my story but this abuse has impacted our entire family in more ways than people can probably ever imagine. When my uncle turned 13, his mum’s partner (I’ll call him Paul) said she should leave the house for a few hours so that he could talk to my uncle about ‘becoming a man’. This made sense to her as my uncle’s dad had passed away years before and she would worry about my uncle needing time with a positive male role model and being able to have that much needed father-son time.
When she left, Paul touched my uncle and gave him a blow job even though he said no. Paul told my then 13 year old uncle that this was an important part of becoming a man, that this was an important part of his education. The worst thing about this abuse was that my uncle ended up enjoying it. He orgasmed, and he felt guilty that he’d liked it, he felt dirty and ashamed and it took him a few weeks to tell my nana (his mum). When he did tell her, she immediately kicked Paul out of the house and broke up with him but the damage was done. Because my uncle had orgasmed in that situation, he felt like something was wrong with him, like maybe it wasn’t abuse.
I wish I could tell my uncle that he has nothing to be ashamed of. He had just become a teenager, having his first sexual encounter and his body had a natural, uncontrollable, biological reaction. He said no. He was uncomfortable. He was still a child, and Paul was an adult abusing his position of trust. I can’t say any of this to him though because no one in our family talks about it and the only people my uncle told were his mum and sister. No one else is supposed to know.
It’s hard to know what happened to my uncle and the impacts it’s had on him. He ended up having a lot of problems in school and drunk a lot. As he got older, he got into drugs and there’s been so many times when he’s rung my mum (his sister) saying goodbye. My mum has spent hours on the phone with him trying to talk him out of committing suicide, trying to do her best to support him when she has her own past of sexual abuse to deal with.