The making of male victimhood in South African Female-perpetrated Sexual Abuse

Abstract

Most research on sexual abuse examines the role of men in the perpetration of abuse against women and children. Few studies have explored victims’ accounts of Female-perpetrated Sexual Abuse (FSA), and even fewer have focused on male FSA victims. However, the limited research available demonstrates that there are particular conditions that make it possible for men to identify as FSA victims. This is the first study of its kind that explores the possibilities for such self-identification by investigating how male victims negotiate masculinity and victimhood in the context of FSA in the Global South. As part of a larger study on FSA, we conducted semi-structured interviews with five culturally diverse South African men who self-identified as experiencing sexual abuse as children or adolescents by women, and analysed the data using a critical discourse analysis. We demonstrate precisely how contemporary constructions of gender and sexuality both produce and constrain possibilities for men who report childhood or adolescent FSA to identify as victims. These constructions are anchored in accounts that emphasise hierarchies of vulnerability, body betrayal, emasculation, preconceptions of ‘normal’ sexuality, the eroticisation of the female offender and ‘triumphant’ variants of masculinity. Such accounts present just how male victimhood becomes possible to ‘detect’ and challenge contemporary constructions of sexual violence, in turn suggesting new possibilities for understanding the conditions under which normative gender roles implicated in violence are sustained or disrupted.

Keywords:

• Critical discourse analysis
• female-perpetrated sexual abuse
• male victims
• South Africa
• violence

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the participants for sharing your stories, without which this research would not have been possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Table 1. Participants’ reported relationships to perpetrators, ages and nature of abuse at time of victimisation.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the National Research Foundation Free-Standing Doctoral Grant (Grant Number 797770), University of the Witwatersrand Postgraduate Merit Award, and Wits Faculty of Humanities PhD Completion Grant.