This assumption, to use another example, plays out in different but equally devastating ways in Cambodia.
When I visited First Step Cambodia, an NGO in Phnom Penh that works to rescue and heal boys who have been victims of sexual abuse, I learned about a phrase that translates as “boys are pure gold.” It’s tempting to think this first means “valuable” but that definition is secondary. What the phrase truly means is that boys can be burned, beaten and smashed and yet still be gold. The meaning here is that they’re tough, they don’t complain, they grow to be men where they enter into another phase, one that translates as “man with 5 hat chest.” A hat is a measurement term in Cambodia that equals about ½ meter. A “man with 5 hat chest” can be likened to our version of the macho man, the tough guy. While the body undergoes dramatic changes when going from boy to man, the masculine psyche merely congeals. This culturally-rooted idea can then be applied in sweeping layers when a boy finds the courage to tell an adult that he was raped. Because it’s believed that he can endure great punishment and yet still be “pure gold,” often there are times when no action will be taken (either against the perpetrator or to support the healing of the boy) until that boy can show the damage done or, to put it bluntly, until there’s blood.
The Disposability of Boys
The Good Men Project | February 17, 2014
The UN’s recent reports on the treatment of
children in Syria and in the Roman Catholic Church revealed some of the
despicable acts committed against boys that are part of a disturbing and
hidden global trend.
—
They are the forgotten many. The afterthought. The tacked-on
obligatory mention at the end of a sentence, if that. Some university
classes on human trafficking fail to mention them alongside “girls and
women” in their syllabi. But there they are being used as soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo and as slaves in the cotton fields of Uzbekistan, the shipbreaking yards of Bangladesh, the farmlands of Florida and the fishing villages of Ghana. And there they are, as detailed in recent reports from the UN, being used as human shields in Syria and as sex slaves in the Roman Catholic Church. Can we talk about this now? Is it okay to talk about this?
Preface: Addressing the disposability of boys is not
ignoring or in any way minimizing the appalling situations many of our
world’s girls and women are enduring right now. Addressing the
disposability of boys is addressing the disposability of boys. There is
often hostility when this topic is brought up because there’s the
assumption that the speaker is choosing sides. This isn’t a game and
there are no sides.
***
On February 4, 2014 the UN released its first detailed findings
on the treatment of children in Syria. The “Report of the
Secretary-General on children and armed conflict in the Syrian Arab
Republic” contained text perhaps even more damning due to its
comprehensive details than the alleged torture photographs that were released weeks ago and that a team of war crimes prosecutors and forensic experts
deemed “direct evidence” of the “systematic torture and killing” by the
Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad’s regime. One excerpt on page 4
stated:
“Boys aged 12 to 17 years were trained, armed and used as combatants or to man checkpoints.”
“Why are some young boys more aggressive than girls? We don’t know for sure. We think that boys are predisposed to higher activity levels as a result of androgens (male hormones) inutero. However, it is not, as many people believe, a result of testosterone in the blood, because before puberty, boys and girls have the same level. What we know is that boys in all cultures around the world wrestle more, mock fight more, and are drawn to themes of power and domination, but that’s not the same as hurting someone, so it’s not necessarily a cause for worry.”
Dr. Thompson’s statement about “boys in all cultures of the world”
aligns with what I learned about human trafficking during my two and a
half years living in and traveling throughout Asia. Whether it was Nepal
or the Philippines, Sri Lanka or Myanmar, it was simply more acceptable
for boys to perform the most grueling forms of physical labor,
especially when it was the kind of labor that may lead to disease or
permanent disfigurement.
Some posit that this acceptance is a direct result of how cultures
have been socially conditioned to see gender roles due to the way
religious attitudes and/or patriarchal cultures have demarcated them.
While this influence certainly can carry over into secular societies, it
seems there’s a more pervasive form of social conditioning at work; one
that views boys, regardless of age, as young men; one that views their
more physical behavior as the seed of manhood—a time when, at least
conceptually, they’ll no longer be seen as vulnerable and will instead
be capable of preying on those who are truly vulnerable. The result?
Boys who will be men are judged as though they are men.
This is harmful both for boys and for the men who then live under the
socially conditioned false narrative that believes they are
invulnerable.
Nowhere was this more apparent to me than in the shipbreaking yards
of Chittagong, Bangladesh. Security guards dressed in blue leaf
camouflage pointed their semi-automatic machine guns directly at me
(after making sure I didn’t have a camera, notebook or phone), and I
watched in horror as one tiny boy after another dragged their feet
through toxic shoreline sludge in order to lift with their bare hands
the rusted anchor chains. The black plumed skies lit up red as other
boys took turns using the blowtorch. I have no idea if there’s hell in
the afterlife but that scene showed me for damn sure that there’s hell
in this life.
Workers carrying a piece of anchor chain to the shipbreaking backyards / Pierre Torset
“Boys don’t grow up into men revered for their beauty,” one villager
who lives just outside the yards told me through a translator. This was
his response upon my asking where the girls and women were. Rather than
say where they were he seemed to take my question as a point of
contention, as a matter of pride. My translator later told me that
although these men hate their jobs, have seen friends die because of it
and know they themselves are dying because of it, they take an
incredible amount of pride in it because they see themselves as entirely
“expendable,” sacrificing their own life for that of their wife and
kids.
ex·pend·a·ble: of little significance when compared to an overall purpose, and therefore able to be abandoned, designed to be used only once and then destroyed, e.g. unstaffed and expendable launch vehicles
Through asking the villager additional questions I learned that the
girls and women either stayed home to prepare food for the shipbreakers
or, if they were employed, worked as seamstresses, sometimes in Dhaka, a
6-hour bus ride away. These seamstress jobs are essentially slavery as
well, but due to international news coverage about collapsing factories
(locals wonder if this ever would have made the news had it not been
for the fact that these factories produce goods for world-renowned
brands) and because more members of the community rallied around the
rights of these girls and women, some positive changes were made and others are in progress.
But few rally behind the boys and men. In fact, what I saw at the yards didn’t seem any different from what Gary Cohn and Will Englund described in their 1998 Pulitzer Prize winning series of articles titled The Shipbreakers.
The boys and men are expected either to suck it up and find solace in
their disposability or rally for themselves which, when they have, often
seems to coincide with the time when, as Muhammad Ali Shahin, Program Manager for Advocacy at Young Power in Social Action, told me:
“Dead and non-identified workers…get thrown out to sea, leaving a widow and children with no news and no income.”
Speaking particularly of boys he told me, “They are considered machines; if one dies another will replace him.”
When I told Muhammad what the villager told me about boys growing up, he said:
“That’s right. Men are revered when they are physically strong leaders. And the yard owners pretend this is what they are ‘making’ the boys into. Truth is, they aren’t making them into anything. They are breaking them into pieces.”
dis·pos·a·ble: intended to be used once, or until no longer useful, and then thrown away, e.g. disposable razors. Also: financial assets readily available for the owner’s use
The Syria report also stated that “many boys felt it was their duty”
to take up arms. Might some part of this feeling of duty, this
willingness to protect, be an intrinsic part of boyhood? Many believe
so. In Absent, a documentary about the impact of fatherlessness, John Eldredge, author of the controversial Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man’s Soul, says:
“Earlier cultures understood that there’s a warrior in the heart of a boy… Boys are wired for adventure, and boys are wired for aggression.”
It was clear that in this context Eldredge was referring to “wiring”
of the genetic type. But while every boy is of course an individual and
while such generalized statements can certainly be debated, one can make
a stronger case by stating that it is perhaps a combination of male
genetics and the socially constructed roles we’ve played for
thousands of years that have reinforced the male expression of certain
aggressive characteristics.
A modern-day application of these ideas shows us that here we are in
the 21st century C.E., a time of desk jobs where those qualities of
physicality and aggression that have found necessary and healthy outlets
for thousands of years have been replaced with sitting all day, an act
which men seem particularly maladjusted; a time when even roughhousing with dad is seen as unproductive; a time when boys are increasingly penalized for not being able to sit still throughout an entire school day (and are substantially more often misdiagnosed with ADHD); a time when 43% of children grow up without their father and therefore often without a male role model who they can look up to and say, “Yes, that’s how to channel what I’m feeling.”
Note: No, Hanna Rosin, this doesn’t mean The End of Men; it means The End of Putting Men in a Box and Pretending That What Happens Beyond the Box Doesn’t Effect Them.
–Photo: AP
A 10-year-old fixes a car in an automobile workshop. / AP
“And aggression is good. I mean, you want a boy to stand up as a man to apartheid, right? You want him to stand up to injustice, then he has to have something in him that’s learned that there are good forms of aggression.”
However, perhaps more telling is the “nurture” side of why the boys
in Syria “felt it was their duty.” They look around, see the dominating
and abusive men in power, see the way girls and women are treated,
and all the while they are being groomed and encouraged to grow up and
be like those dominating and abusive men in power. If there’s something
innate within them, so too is there a cultural influence channeling the
“warrior in the heart” in destructive ways.
We’ve known of the influences that shape adolescent aggression since the 1970’s, when Albert Bandura’s Social Learning Theory
took root. Now considered essential study in most academic departments
of criminology around the world, Bandura’s theory put forth the notion
that violent tendencies are modeled, and that children in particular
learn aggression from observing others. “Virtually all learning
experiences resulting from direct experiences,” Bandura wrote in 1976,
“can occur on a vicarious basis through observation of other people’s
behavior and its consequences for the observer,” (See PDF).
Might this difference in natural and experiential physicality and
aggression be why boys, according to most reports on modern slavery, are
used more often as disposable “hard” labor slaves, such as in cocoa fields, whereas girls are more often subjected to domestic work slavery?
In circling back to the word “trained,” as used in the UN report on
children in Syria, I think instead of the term “brainwashing” and
particularly of a child’s vulnerability to both the short-term and
long-term effects of it. According to Harvard University’s Center on the Developing Child:
“Adverse conditions such as abuse, neglect, community violence, and persistent poverty can disrupt brain architecture and place children at a disadvantage with regard to the development of their executive function skills.”
With all of this in mind a twofold purpose for “training” surfaces:
(1) To use boys until they can’t be used anymore (i.e. until
death, injury, disease, prosecution, the job is done). Some mistakenly
believe their culture can flourish even when boys are expendable because
even in death the labor garnered from their expendability leaves behind
development (e.g. railroad tracks, tools built from the steel of
dismantled ships, homes paid for with cotton harvest money, etc.). As a
refugee aid worker once told me, “When girls are only valued for their
future ability to give birth, and boys only for the sweat of their
labor…we’re in a bad place.”
(2) To instill within the boy slaves the attitudes and
behaviors that will make of them physically strong leaders. There’s the
assumption that if boys don’t become disabled, diseased or die from the
work that the work will make them into “real” men—the definition of
which is at once represented by and habitually manipulated by those in power for the sake of exploiting those who are not.
This assumption, to use another example, plays out in different but equally devastating ways in Cambodia.
When I visited First Step Cambodia,
an NGO in Phnom Penh that works to rescue and heal boys who have been
victims of sexual abuse, I learned about a phrase that translates as
“boys are pure gold.” It’s tempting to think this first means “valuable”
but that definition is secondary. What the phrase truly means is that
boys can be burned, beaten and smashed and yet still be gold. The
meaning here is that they’re tough, they don’t complain, they grow to be
men where they enter into another phase, one that translates as “man
with 5 hat chest.” A hat is a measurement term in Cambodia that
equals about ½ meter. A “man with 5 hat chest” can be likened to our
version of the macho man, the tough guy. While the body undergoes
dramatic changes when going from boy to man, the masculine psyche merely
congeals. This culturally-rooted idea can then be applied in sweeping
layers when a boy finds the courage to tell an adult that he was raped.
Because it’s believed that he can endure great punishment and yet still
be “pure gold,” often there are times when no action will be taken
(either against the perpetrator or to support the healing of the boy)
until that boy can show the damage done or, to put it bluntly, until there’s blood.
This assumption is by no means merely the problem of “other”
countries. Let’s take a look at just one aspect of our own. The United
States has defined itself
as perhaps the world’s greatest believer in the myth that subjecting
its boys and men to “punishment,” i.e., incarceration, will somehow
magically resolve the underlying problems that brought them to be
incarcerated in the first place. We don’t see our young boys in the
juvenile justice system, for example, as pure gold; rather, we see them
as the specks of dirt within their gold. We see them as the sum of their
crime.
I once taught poetry in an all-female juvenile detention center, even wrote a book
about the experience, so I’m fully aware of the lack of services and
resources that girls receive in this regard. However, in working with
boys who have been in and out of the juvenile justice system I can’t
even count how many of their conversations or essays or poems were about
how members of their family and staff members within the system
regarded them—their full human selves—as nothing more than their crimes
(a vast majority of which were petty theft). They were often “treated
like a monster.”
The go-to method for helping them get back on track wasn’t through
understanding and attempting to address issues within their family
(often broken homes), their environment or their mental health, but
through attempting to “scare them straight”
by combating their release of often frustrated and confused expression
of aggression with, you guessed it, bigger and badder forms of
aggression (you know, huge, muscular men with deep voices who can get in
their faces and yell).
Additional research into the justice system revealed the brutal result that the school-to-prison pipeline has on boys, especially African-American boys. Here’s how the ACLU defines the school-to-prison pipeline:
“A disturbing national trend wherein children are funneled out of public schools and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. Many of these children have learning disabilities or histories of poverty, abuse or neglect, and would benefit from additional educational and counseling services. Instead, they are isolated, punished and pushed out. ‘Zero-tolerance’ policies criminalize minor infractions of school rules, while cops in school lead to students being criminalized for behavior that should be handled inside the school.”
Essentially we are punishing the boys in schools, pumping them into
the juvenile justice system where we can punish them some more…
Note: The term restorative justice
is still unfortunately likened to a curse word in many parts of the US.
The reason? Because it’s viewed as challenging the prevalent and macho “tough on crime”
school of thought. I once saw a renowned criminologist in my hometown
booed for bringing it up when he was asked at a town hall meeting how
he’d handle crime. Can we get over this already?
…and once they turn 18 we can funnel them directly into the overcrowded prison system.
Sure, the problem is partly our obsessive belief-despite-the-facts in
the “punishment works with boys” myth. But considering how much money
we spend on our justice system and how little of that goes towards
efforts to address the roots of the offenses committed, it’s clear that
we just undoubtedly hide our justice system absurdities better than the
other countries to whom we ridicule when we hear, for example, how they cut off the fingers
of their thieves. In some countries a serial thief has a finger cut off
but can return back to society. Is enduring years of incarceration for
similar offenses—in prisons where half of sexual abuse claims involve guards and where black offenders receive 10% longer sentences than whites for the same crime—really that much more civilized?
In his article titled Storming the American Bastille,
Wilhelm Cortez opens with a question: “There is not a crisis of crime
that fills our prisons; it is unjust conviction and sentencing. Can we
re-envision the prison system?”
He then goes on to provide a common sense answer that simply isn’t
being taken into account in the current model of our justice system:
“If a crime is committed it should be a social red flag that indicates an individual has somehow slipped through a social gap. The response should not be incarcerate, enslave and exploit. Instead, sentencing practices should take the role of finding the social problems at the root of the crime.”
For an additional read on the US penal system, check out Solitary in Iran Nearly Broke Me. Then I Went Inside America’s Prisons.
Joe Paterno / AP
“I never heard of, of, rape and a man.”
–Joe Paterno, 1/14/2012
Remember back to 2011. News of Jerry Sandusky,
Penn State’s assistant football coach, dominated the headlines. He was
arrested and charged with 52 counts of “sexual abuse” of young boys over
a 15-year period of time. Now remember Joe Paterno’s infamous quote
about how he “…never heard of, of, rape and a man.”
The naiveté of Paterno’s comment was difficult for many of us to fathom, and it sparked articles like this one: How could any Roman Catholic such as Joe Paterno not have heard of ‘rape and a man’?
Making the large assumption that, in fact, Joe Paterno was telling his truth, why might he never have heard of such a thing? The UN’s recent “lambasting” of the Roman Catholic Church could provide a few insights as to why.
First, it was rape and a boy. Many boys. But let’s start with “rape.”
A quick Google search of these Vatican crimes will find seemingly
infinite use of the terms “child abuse” and “sex abuse” to describe what in reality was the Vatican “systematically” adopting policies that allowed priests to rape and molest perhaps tens of thousands of children
(many of whom were boys). Some of these children were allegedly held
against their will and repeatedly raped over the course of years. Many
of these cases not only should be described as rape; they should be
described as a form of sexual slavery.
But few international news sources have referred to it as such, in
part, because we have a serious problem, a major discomfort, with using
such terms to describe what happens when a man rapes a young boy. We’re
far more comfortable calling it “child abuse” or “molestation” or, if we
absolutely must, “sex abuse.”
According to Dr. Warren Blumenfeld of UMass Amherst’s College of Education, one reason for this discomfort is because,
“When a man is raped it presents a narcissistic injury to all men who are socialized to perform as the aggressor, the inserter, the ‘active’ sexual partner, the one whose ‘gaze’ is projected outward onto a sexual object. The thought of this ‘gaze’ breaking through and infiltrating the shield around his body, when he becomes the object of another’s gaze, or worse, when his body is penetrated by another, when he is sexually violated, all that he had been socialized to believe, to act upon, to understand, is also violated. Rather than believe this could happen, he and the society in which he resides rejects it, denies it, discounts it, disowns awareness and acknowledgement of it, or if the facts are indisputable, simply views it as an aberration.”
I mistakenly thought that the Sandusky case would tear down some
walls we have about using the true terms to talk about the rape of boys,
but in many ways it seems we’re back to where we started.
Let’s move on to “boys.” Although we’re able to talk about men raping each other, so much so that we make rape jokes
about prisoners, I’ve noticed in my years of studying the crime of sex
trafficking that we are still reluctant to call it rape when it involves
a man and a boy, and even more so when it involves a woman and a boy.
If a “Roman Catholic such as Joe Paterno” truly never heard of such an
act, one reason why is undoubtedly because we as a society have been too
uncomfortable? scared? ignorant? to call it what it really is.
Note: I’ve met hundreds of leaders from various churches
and they seem to have no problem using the terms “rape” and “sex
slavery” when (1) it’s used in the context of one of their campaigns
trying to end the scourge of it and (2) it involves a man and a girl or a
man and a woman.
As the natural/cultural physicality of boys is exploited, so too are
the bodies of girls enslaved for the natural/cultural use of their body
parts. According to most reports, girls seem to be used more often as
sex slaves than boys. However, this greatly depends on place. While the
vast majority of raids discover and rescue girls, in Afghanistan and
coastal Sri Lanka boys are more likely than girls to be forced into prostitution. According to Project Futures, an NGO based in Sydney, Australia that works to raise awareness and funding for anti-slavery programs, although the International Labour Organization states that 98% of sex trafficking victims are female:
“…boys are amongst the most stigmatised victims of sex trafficking, further obfuscating any opportunities for identification and assistance. The hidden nature of male prostitution, alongside gendered stereotypes that denote males as physically and sexually incapable of being victims of sexual exploitation limits the scope of trafficking victim identification to only target potential female victims.
“Moreover, rescued male victims of sex trafficking are less likely to encounter suitable resources for support and reintegration services. Often at risk of being treated as illegal migrants rather than victims of sexual exploitation, male trafficking victims can face deportation or criminal charges for acts directly related to being trafficked. Inadequate legal systems – for example, if trafficking laws only stipulate crimes committed against female victims – also contribute to the discrimination faced by male victims of trafficking.”
While the public sphere often hears the stories of girls and women forced to work in their master’s fields or being trafficked from Indonesia to work as maids in Los Angeles,
it’s rare that we hear about the many stories whereby boys were bought
and sold for sex. One reason posited for this discrepancy is “comfort.”
An anti-slavery NGO staff member told me that the “mass of a population
is far more comfortable hearing the story of a girl being used as a sex
slave” than as a boy being used as a sex slave. “It’s man-to-girl,” one
anti-slavery activist told me, “…and in the minds of many this is a far
more natural leap of imagination than is man-to-boy. It’s as though we
can’t talk about this issue properly because we don’t yet have the
language to do so. But we do have the language. We’re just terrible at
using it in this context.”
It’s this difference in body parts between boys and girls, and our
“comfort” in avoiding talk about any discomforting alternatives, that
often leaves boys forgotten as sex slaves. As one public health
researcher put it:
“Girls, no matter how young, have vaginas, and as men are mostly the leaders of sex trafficking rings and also the users of sex slaves, we’ve created this story that immediately and without questioning associates forced sexual acts, in this context, as that only between a man and a girl.”
Peter Pollard, Communications/Professional Relations Director for 1in6 and coordinator for SNAP
(Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests) wrote an article along
with Dr. David Lisak, Board Chair of 1in6, in which they said:
“Most conversations about sexual violence relegate men to one of two roles:
(1) Bystander: with the potential either to ignore or to disrupt a witnessed sexual violation
(2) Perpetrator: the one who commits the violation
A new White House Task Force, formed to confront historically-inadequate responses to sexual assault on college campuses, could help educate the nation about a third role men often have:
(3) Survivor: the one who has experienced sexual trauma.”
Although incredible organizations like 1in6.org—a group working to help men who have had unwanted or abusive sexual experiences in childhood live healthier, happier lives—and MaleSurvivor.org—a
group that provides critical resources to male survivors of sexual
trauma and all their partners in recovery by building communities of
hope, healing, & support—have significantly increased the level of
awareness on this issue, I still see how in commercial after commercial,
conference after conference, television show after television show
(most recently on Katie Couric’s latest episode titled “Sex Trafficking & Sporting Events), the sex slavery of boys is simply not mentioned.
A child soldier wearing a teddy bear backpack points his gun at the photographer in a street of Monrovia, Liberia / AP
At times, surely, this is based on ignorance. Many of the loudest
voices in the anti-slavery movement have only recently jumped on the
bandwagon and are without a deep understanding of the complexities of
this crime. But there’s something else at play here. When people who
have been working in the anti-slavery sector for years still don’t
mention this issue it seems because they’re uncomfortable doing so. Why
might this be? I asked this question to a documentary filmmaker who
happened to be in the final stages of producing a feature film about sex
trafficking. Here’s how he responded:
“Society can barely stomach the raping of young girls. I feared they couldn’t handle it if my film was about the sex trafficking of young boys. How comfortable would people be with telling others to check out the work? In one sense they could just say it involves rape and most people would assume it meant of a girl or woman. But if it were about a boy or a man could they just say rape and let it stand without adding any extra details? I’m not sure, but I felt that’s where discomfort would come in and I didn’t want to chance it. Great works involve some level of discomfort, but maybe that would be too much.”
So if staying comfortable in our talk of slavery is resulting in the
exclusion of boys from the conversation then I think it’s time to dip
into discomfort. Here’s an invitation for those of you reading this who
are talking heads in the anti-slavery movement. I want you at some point
to look directly into the camera and say the following:
“Young boys are used as sex slaves all around the world.”
Do not speak for fifteen minutes on girls and women and then, as if
culling up a seemingly insignificant memory, say “Oh yeah, and boys
too.” We need to talk about disposable children everywhere, regardless
of gender, and unfortunately that’s just not happening.
In fact, this “And boys too” line has become such a clichéd response
as it relates to speaking about the commercial sexual exploitation of
boys that ECPAT-USA actually used it as the title to their landmark discussion paper (see PDF here) on the lack of recognition that boys receive in this regard.
The report states that:
“The little attention paid to boys has focused on them as exploiters, pimps and buyers of sexual services or as active participants in sex work—not as victims or survivors. Most service providers who were interviewed for this report in 2010-11, acknowledge the existence of CSEB [Commercially Sexually Exploited Boys) yet only provide services to CSEG or are unwilling or unable to help boys.”
These are common themes that run through nearly all papers on this
subject. The question then is why, if the service providers “acknowledge
the existence of CSEB” are boys still not getting identified or served?
Here are the reasons put forward by the report:
-- The unwillingness of boys to self-identify as
sexually exploited due to shame and stigma about being gay or being
perceived as gay by family and community.
-- A lack of screening and intake by law enforcement
and social services agencies rooted in the belief that boys are not
victims of commercial sexual exploitation.
-- Limited outreach by anti-trafficking organizations to areas, venues and tracks known for male prostitution.
-- Oversimplification of the reality that boys are not generally pimped hides the needs and misinforms potential services.
Lastly, the And Boys Too report considers its findings to be “modest but clear” as it offers the following three responses to the current problems:
(1) The scope of CSEB is vastly under reported and
much more needs to be done to identify sexually exploited boys as young
people in need of protection.
(2) To raise awareness about the impact of CSEB.
(3) To provide specialized services to CSEB.
These findings, in my opinion, illustrate the intersections between
CSEB and many other social issues going on in the world. To name one
such issue, consider that many of these boys were unwilling to
self-identify because of the “stigma about being gay” or even as “being
perceived as being gay.” We are able to educate and train our law
enforcement and social services agencies, we are able to increase our
outreach efforts by anti-trafficking organizations and we are able to
use awareness and educational campaigns to decrease the
“oversimplification of the reality,” but we are not able to address the
stigma these boys feel about being or being perceived as gay until we
remove the stigmas about being gay.
Let me make this clear: If you are one of the millions of
people in this world who vocalize or otherwise spread your belief that
being gay is “bad” or “sinful” you are directly and actively
contributing to the trauma of boys who have been sexually exploited.
Note: For an informative read on this subject please see the classic 1992 anthology titled Homophobia: How We All Pay the Price.
It’s not enough to rescue boys and provide them shelter; it’s not
enough to acknowledge that the problem exists; it’s not enough to
provide comprehensive and specialized services to the survivors; we are
only going to truly crush this crime when we are doing all of these plus
living mindful lives that take into account the way our seemingly
unrelated actions can have devastating, albeit indirect, consequences.
Although Kevin Bales, co-founder of Free The Slaves and author of Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy,
was speaking in regards to slave labor, this passage from his book
provides an unforgettable insight into the indirect and global nature of
all forms of exploitation:
“Slaves touch your life indirectly as well. They made the bricks for the factory that made the TV you watch. In Brazil slaves made the charcoal that tempered the steel that made the springs in your car and the blade on your lawnmower. Slaves grew the rice that fed the woman that wove the lovely cloth you’ve put up as curtains. Your investment portfolio and your mutual fund pension own stock in companies using slave labor in the developing world. Slaves keep your costs low and returns on your investments high.”
While it’s increasingly important to publicly address our failures, as social worker Steven Procopio did in his CNN article titled Exploited boys are too often failed, so too must we take action, while light is shining on the issue, to collaborate.
In a piece I wrote last year for The Guardian titled, Anti-slavery: collaboration begins to come of age, Dave Batstone, co-founder and president of the global anti-slavery organization Not For Sale, said something that will forever stick with me:
“Strategic alliances win important social landmarks; lone rangers win logos and egos.”
My
final plea, for those now ready and wanting to get involved, is that
you fully absorb and then apply the essence of this passage from Cecil
Murphey’s article titled Dialogue Between the Adult Survivor and the Inner Wounded Child:
“I’m Cec and you’re little Cecil. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to take care of you in childhood, but I’m here now.”
Little Cecil was a toddler and sitting in a high chair. I stroked his cheek and said:
“I couldn’t help you then, but I’m here now.”
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