Recently I have seen a trending hashtag on Twitter known as #WhenIWas. People are using this hashtag to share their stories of sexual abuse in childhood. Many people are opening up to share experiences they may have been ashamed or scared to talk about while it was happening. This made me curious about several different things, but what really caught my attention was the lack of male representation when sharing survivor stories via this hashtag.
When I googled the hashtag wanting to learn more and see the responses of those who used the hashtag in the first five pages of Google there were around 13 search results that did not specifically use the word "women." Teen Vogue released an article sharing "the most powerful #whenIwas tweets". 14 out of 15 tweets used as examples were written by women. The one tweet they included that was written by a man was not even a story about his experience with sexual assault, but rather addressing the normalization of spanking girls in high school. Huffington Post also put out an article addressing this hashtag. Their opening statement says that this hashtag is "a painful reminder about the realities of life as a woman." Aside from the fact it's extremely ignorant to assume that every woman has had the same experience just because they're the same gender, they completely ignore that for some men, sexual harassment/abuse in childhood (and adulthood) is a reality. There are many others, such as Daily Mail UK, Bustle and The Telegraph have published articles that continue to follow a similar narrative as the Huffington Post.
#WhenIwas is sponsored by the Everyday Sexism Project. This is project dedicated to promoting gender equality (while conveniently not addressing the problems men face in society-- yes, they exist). According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, one in six boys will be sexually abused before 18; one in four girls. Roughly 28% of men were under 10-years-old when they were first victims of sexual violence. The average age of child prostitutes are 12-14 for girls and 11-13 for boys. One in five women will be sexually assaulted at least once in their lives and men, one in 71. A study at West Virginia University reported that 46% of male rape victims have named women as their perpetrators.
We live in a culture that genders crime and minimizes the voice of anyone who subverts our expectations. When we picture parental abuse, the image that is drilled in to our heads are the "deadbeat dad" and alcoholic wife beater. When we picture rape victims, we picture women. When we picture sexual violence we picture women as the victims and men as the perpetrators. Rarely do we hear about the controlling, abusive mother. YouTuber, Blaire White, shares her experience with the trivialization of male victims of abuse in her video, Male Victims Are Funny?.
My hope is that eventually both genders' accounts of abuse will be taken equally serious. When we criminalize abuse, we tell women that lashing out at or sexually manipulating their partners is not abuse because they are women. And we teach men that their painful experiences are are not worth talking about or inferior to women's experiences. We put fathers under a microscope while giving mothers a free pass simply due to gender. The sooner we start understanding that abuse and cruelty has no gender, the sooner those who feel its not worth sharing will see that their story matters. #WhenIwas should be an invitation to be courageous and show support to victims, not deepen the gendering of abuse. The goal of this article is to not minimize the sexual abuse that women face, but help encourage both men and women to open up about their experiences. Cruelty and abuse is all around us. Please share your stories because the first step to ending abuse is raising awareness of it.
