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Sexual Assault Against Boys Is a Crisis
Sexual Assault Against Boys Is a CrisisIts far more common than we think. Heres why we dont talk about it.
By Emma Brown
https://www.twitter.com/emmersbrown
FEBRUARY 22, 2021
{snip}
The first I heard of brooming was in one of those interstitial moments, a busy day on pause, waiting for my car to be repaired at an auto shop before racing to work. It was pouring outside, so I huddled along with a half-dozen other harried customers in a small room where a television blared a local news show. Five boys, football players at a high school just outside D.C., had been charged with rape and attempted rape in the alleged attacks of their teammates with the end of a wooden broomstick. ... Not only had I never heard of such a thing, but I had never even imagined it. Raped with a broomstick? Long after I left, I was still trying to wrap my head around it, and as details emerged in the following days and weeks, I could not look away.
It had happened on the last day of October, Halloween, at Damascus High, a diverse public school with a powerhouse football program in Montgomery County, Md. My colleagues at The Washington Post, where I work as an investigative reporter, reported the wrenching details of the attack. Freshmen on the junior varsity team had been changing in a locker room after school when suddenly the lights went out, and they could hear the sound of someone banging a broomstick against the wall. The sophomores had arrived. Its time, one of them said. They went from freshman to freshman, grabbing four of them, pushing them to the ground, punching, stomping. They pulled the younger boys pants down and stabbed the broom at their buttocks, trying and at least once succeeding to shove the handle inside their rectums. The victims pleaded for help, the attackers laughed at them, and a crowd of other boys looked on, watching the horror unspool.
Whenever I learn of something unconscionable, I find myself looking for clues that it could never happen to me or the people I love. Thats human nature, I guess. But like any other kind of sexual assault, brooming is not a phenomenon confined to this one high school, or to any particular type of school or community. It cuts across racial and socioeconomic lines, shows up in elite private boys academies and coed public schools, in big cities and rural villages and small towns that dot the heartland.
What do you think you know about boys and sexual violence? I thought I knew that boys are victims only rarely, and I automatically equated child sexual abuse with adults preying on kids. But I was wrong on both counts. ... Many boys are molested by adults, thats true. But there are strong signs that children are even more likely to be sexually abused or sexually assaulted by other children. In one study of 13,000 children age 17 and younger, three-quarters of the boys who reported being sexually victimized said the person who violated them was another child. In a little more than half those assaults, the violator was a girl. Most boys who had been assaulted had never told an adult.
{snip}
Emma Brown is an investigative reporter for The Washington Post. This article is adapted from her new book, To Raise a Boy, published by One Signal Publishers/Atria Books.
Design by Clare Ramirez.
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Sexual Assault Against Boys Is a Crisis (Original Post)
mahatmakanejeeves
Feb 2021
OP
Hugh_Lebowski
(33,643 posts)1. I was molested by a 6th grader when I was in 5th grade ...
He was already well into puberty by 6th grade, like full-on hairy armpits and everything else ... unlike myself in 5th.
So I know from personal experience this is very real.
Karadeniz
(22,283 posts)2. Heartbreaking... and we need to know. Forewarned is forearmed. Jeez...people!
Stuart G
(38,365 posts)3. Horrific. K and R