Art & Sex: Maternal SexualAbuse of Males

Maternal Sexual

Abuse of Males

This article presents one aspect of the findings of a qualitative

research study which explored the impact of childhood sexual abuse

on the lives of a non-clinical sample of 25 adult males who responded

to advertisements for adult male survivors of childhood sexual abuse.

The author conducted in-depth interviews with the men to discover

how their experiences of childhood sexual abuse had in¯uenced their

psychosocial development. Thirteen of the 25 men were abused by

females. This article focuses on seven men who were abused by their

mothers and describes how de®nition, prevalence and outcomes of

maternal sexual abuse are aected by male socialization, creating

additional diculties for these men. The author describes some of the

psychological defence mechanisms used by this sample of men,

explores some of the reasons for maternal abuse and issues to be

considered by practitioners. *

c1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Child Abuse Review 6: 107±117, 1997

No. of Figures: 0 No. of Tables: 3 No. of References: 29

KEY WORDS:sexualabuse;mother±sonabuse

S

ocietal attitudes are slowly changing as the recognition

of male childhood sexual abuse makes its impact on

our knowledge and practice. Case studies reporting instances

of female perpetrators began to appear during the sixties and

seventies (Wahl, 1960; Lukianowicz, 1972), and in the

eighties researchers began to move towards systematic

descriptions of types of female perpetrators (Faller, 1987;

Knopp and Lackey, 1987; Matthews, Matthews and Spetz,

1990). Following from the recognition of females as abusers

came the emergence of literature concerning cases of

maternal abuse (Yates, 1982; Chasno, Burns, Schnoll,

Burns, Chisnum and Kylespore, 1986).

Beliefs about rigid gender and sex roles have held us back

while we were unable to connect the word `victim' with

`male' or `female' with `perpetrator' (Watkins and Bentovim,

1992). The word `victim' has been an anathema to the male

self-concept, which is usually more comfortably linked with

power and domination (Allen, 1990; Bolton, Morris and

CCC 0952± 9136/97/020107± 11$17.50 Accepted 31 October 1996

*

c1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Child Abuse Review Vol. 6: 107±117 (1997)

`Beliefs about

rigid gender and

sex roles have

held us back'

Kim Etherington

University of Bristol

Department for Continuing Education

Bristol

Address for correspondence: Dr K. Etherington, University of Bristol, Dept for

Continuing Education, 8± 10 Berkeley Square, Clifton, Bristol BS8 1HH U.K.

10 Etherington

MacEachron, 1989; Neilsen, 1983; Finkelhor, 1984; Law-

son, 1993). The socialization process on male children has

created a situation where the de®nition (and therefore the

reported prevalence) of male sexual abuse has blocked our

awareness and many men have reached adulthood without

ever having had the opportunity to receive the help they

might have needed to deal with the aftermath.

Definition

The problem of defining abuse is enhanced when the perpe-

trator is female. The word `perpetrator' or `abuser' is more

generally associated with `male' and children may have been

socialized into believing that females are only nurturing

and caring, thus exacerbating the confusion of a child who

is abused by a female and has no way to make sense of the

experience. When the abuser is their mother, the impos-

sibility of believing the experience to be `abuse' is com-

pounded further. Lawson (1993) has proposed one de®nition

of maternal sexual abuse which uses words such as `subtle,

seductive':

`Subtle abuse includes: behaviours that do not involve coercion;

may or may not involve genital contact; are not intended by the

mother to harm the child; may result from the mother's belief

that the child needs such special attention; or may be the result

of the mother's own unconscious need for sexual grati®cation.'

ART & SEX