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Key points
- Existing statistics fail to capture the true scope of male victimization.
- Male victims face significant barriers to disclosure.
- Every survivor of sexual abuse, regardless of gender, needs to feel validated in seeking help.
Sex trafficking, statistics show, predominantly victimizes females. But at least one male sex trafficking survivor believes that the statistics on percentages of females versus males who are trafficked are inaccurate. This misrepresentation matters because, in comparison to the support available for female survivors, the support available to males borders on nonexistent.
Sean Wheeler’s Experience
To explain why he’s certain that the number of males who are trafficked is under-reported, Sean Wheeler starts with his own experience as a trafficked child. He’s personally come up against the barriers that keep male victims from reporting, and over time, he has talked with hundreds of male survivors who also never reported their abuse.
In his case, the abuse began around age 4. However, he was primed for abuse even before that. “I believed that I was an accident, and relatives told me, ‘Your birth almost killed your mother.’” His parents’ marriage was disintegrating, and there was very little love left over for the young boy.
As he learned later from psychology tests, he’s an extrovert and a pleaser. “This kind of kid,” he explains, “will do anything to make others happy so he’ll be loved.” Unfortunately for Wheeler, “A trafficker knew my family and understood how vulnerable I was, and told his guys, ‘Get him started and bring him to me when he’s ready.’”
The trafficking ring had older teenage boys, and when Wheeler was 4, they made a point of being friendly to the lonely kid. Gradually, they began to teach him the mechanics of oral sex. “I didn’t know any better,” Wheeler explains. “I would just go away inside myself to a safe place and when things were finished, I’d come back.”
At age 5, the serious abuse began. “One of the older boys who had been friendly took me back to a loft, pulled me into a dark corner, took my clothes off from the waist down, did it to me, and then made me do it to him. The older boy then told me, ‘If you tell anyone, we will kill your dog and your family won’t want you.’”
The abuse got more serious. The next time, there were three boys present. They pulled little Sean into a stretched out, spread eagle position, and after the abuse that followed, “My spirit was broken. I gave up.”
Ready to Be Trafficked
He was now ready for the leader of the trafficking ring to sell him to clients. Wheeler points out that, “The head of the ring wasn’t a shady guy in a trench coat lurking in a public park. No, he was a guy with a shirt and tie and known to my family.”
For the next five years, the young boy was trafficked to both men and women. “Predators come in all stripes, male and female, all orientations. In the case of about 35% of the people I was handed over to, their turn-on was being sadistic. They’d beat me or penetrate me with foreign objects.”
Wheeler escaped the trafficking ring when his parents divorced, and he, his mother, and his siblings moved to a different state. He’s not sure his mother ever learned what he had gone through.
Why Didn’t He Report the Abuse?
In both his own case and in the case of many hundreds of others he’s talked with since, he knows why men are less likely to report their abuse:
• It may have started when they were so young, they didn’t know anything. “What 5-year-old knows what a police report is?” he points out.
• They may have been too terrified. “We’ll kill your dog, and your family won’t want you.”
• They may have been trained by their abuser to believe they deserved it.
• The male socialization is that they’re less of a guy if they complain.
• They try to report their abuse, but they don't get very far because the response is disbelief or hostility.
• The embarrassment and shame factor is too paralyzing.
Sean Wheeler's experience as a survivor of sex trafficking and his interactions with numerous other male victims reveals a significant disparity in the recognition and support for male trafficking victims. Wheeler's insights challenge the prevailing statistics and call for a broader understanding and support system for all victims of trafficking, regardless of gender.
“Until all victims have a voice in statistics, those numbers are just a snapshot in time of a select group," says Wheeler. "They don’t represent the whole picture. Doesn’t every victim deserve a voice?”
