To Raise a Boy

Classrooms, Locker Rooms, Bedrooms, and the Hidden Struggles of American Boyhood

Emma Brown

• Publisher: Atria/One Signal Publishers
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781982128098
• eBook ISBN: 9781982128104
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Public Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

"Brown…engages intellectually with thorny issues involving language, school culture, and the more troublesome aspects of today's parent universe."? — The Washington Post " To Raise a Boy is a clear-eyed and sometimes shocking view of the world that we have created for boys, and a call for change." —Peg Tyre, author of the New York Times bestseller The Trouble with Boys A journalist's searing investigation into how we teach boys to be men—and how we can do better. How will I raise my son to be different? This question gripped Washington Post investigative reporter Emma Brown, who was at home nursing her six-week-old son when the #MeToo movement erupted. In search of an answer, Brown traveled around the country, through towns urban and rural, affluent and distressed. In the course of her reporting, she interviewed hundreds of people—educators, parents, coaches, researchers, men, and boys—to understand the challenges boys face and how to address them. What Brown uncovered was shocking: 23 percent of boys believe men should use violence to get respect; 22 percent of an incoming college freshman class said they had already committed sexual violence; 58 percent of young adults said they've never had a conversation with their parents about respect and care in sexual relationships. Men are four times more likely than women to die by suicide. Nearly 4 million men experience sexual violence each year. From the reporter who brought Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's story to light, To Raise a Boy combines assiduous reporting, cutting-edge scientific research, and boys' powerful testimonials to expose the crisis in young men's emotional and physical health. Emma Brown connects the dots between educators, researchers, policy makers, and mental health professionals in this tour de force that upends everything we thought we knew about boys. Johns Hopkins chair of the Department of Population, Family, and Reproductive Health Robert Blum says, "The story of boys has yet to be told, and I think it's a really important story." Urgent and revelatory, To Raise a Boy begins to tell that story.

CHAPTER ONE What We Don’t See

The Invisible Epidemic of Sexual Assault Against Boys

The first I heard of brooming was in one of those interstitial moments, a busy day on pause, waiting for my car to be repaired at an auto shop before racing to work. It was pouring outside, so I huddled along with a half-dozen other harried customers in a small room where a television blared a local news show. Five boys, football players at a high school just outside D.C., had been arrested for allegedly raping and attempting to rape their teammates with the end of a wooden broomstick.

Not only had I never heard of such a thing, but I had never even imagined it. Raped with a broomstick? Long after I left, I was still trying to wrap my head around it, and as details emerged in the following days and weeks, I could not look away.

It had happened on the last day of October, Halloween, at Damascus High, a diverse public school with a powerhouse football program in Montgomery County, Maryland. My colleagues at the Washington Post reported the wrenching details of the attack. Freshmen on the junior varsity team had been changing in a locker room after school when suddenly the lights went out, and they could hear the sound of someone banging a broomstick against the wall. The sophomores had arrived. “It’s time,” one of them said. They went from freshman to freshman, grabbing four of them, pushing them to the ground, punching, stomping. They pulled the younger boys’ pants down and stabbed the broom at their buttocks, trying—and at least once succeeding—to shove the handle inside their rectums. The victims pleaded for help, the attackers laughed at them, and a crowd of other boys looked on, watching the horror unspool.

Whenever I learn of something unconscionable, I find myself looking for clues that it could never happen to me or the people I love. That’s human nature, I guess. But like any other kind of sexual assault, brooming is not a phenomenon confined to this one high school, or to any particular type of school or community. It cuts across racial and socioeconomic lines, shows up in elite private boys’ academies and coed public schools, in big cities and rural villages and small towns that dot the heartland.

Gatlinburg, Tennessee, 2015: Three members of a visiting varsity basketball team were arrested after ramming a pool cue into their teammate’s rectum, perforating both his colon and his bladder. La Vernia, Texas, 2017: Thirteen boys were arrested for allegedly penetrating their teammates’ anuses with objects including a Gatorade bottle, the cardboard tube from a coat hanger, and a flashlight. Bixby, Oklahoma, 2018: Four boys were arrested for raping their teammate, again with a pool cue.

What do you think you know about boys and sexual violence? I thought I knew that boys are victims only rarely, and I automatically equated “child sexual abuse” with adults preying on kids. But I was wrong on both counts.

Many boys are molested by adults, that’s true. But there are strong signs that children are even more likely to be sexually abused or sexually assaulted by other children. In one study of thirteen thousand children aged seventeen and under, three-quarters of the boys who reported being sexually victimized said the person who violated them was another child. In a little more than half those assaults, the violator was a girl. Most boys who had been aassaulted had never told an adult.

Though sexual violence mostly affects girls and women, it is still astonishingly common for males to be victims. I was shocked to learn that as many as one in six boys is sexually abused during childhood. About one in four men is a victim of some kind of sexual violence over the course of his lifetime, from unwanted contact to coercion to rape. LGBTQ men are at greater risk than heterosexual men: more than 40 percent of gay men and 47 percent of bisexual men say they have been sexually victimized, compared to 21 percent of straight men.

In 2015, a national survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that nearly 4 million men (and 5.6 million women) had been victims of sexual violence just in the previous year. More than 2 million of those men were subjected to unwanted sexual contact, and more than 800,000 said they were “made to penetrate” another person—an awkward term that doesn’t show up much in the media or in public debate. It means that a man was either too inebriated to consent or was coerced or threatened into oral, vaginal, or anal sex.

Just as with girls and women, violation of men and boys can involve physical force or emotional coercion. Just as with girls and women, boys and men sometimes have sexual experiences to which they cannot consent because they are underage or blackout drunk—experiences that we might reflexively call sex but that we should really understand as assault. And though the perpetrators in those cases can be other boys and men, they can also be girls and women. The overwhelming majority of male rape victims say that the person who violated them was another male, but most male victims of other kinds of sexual violence—such as sexual coercion, unwanted sexual contact, and being made to penetrate another person—say they were violated by a female.

Boys and men who survive sexual violence can experience serious psychological and emotional fallout, including post-traumatic stress, symptoms of depression and anxiety, suicidal thoughts, substance abuse problems, and sexual dysfunction. A boy’s body can respond to unwanted stimulation—that is, he can get an erection when he’s being abused—an experience that may leave him feeling guilty and ashamed, or utterly confused about his sexual orientation and his masculinity.

We rarely hear about any of this on the news. We hardly ever talk about it. Stories of sexual misconduct are everywhere, but the tellers of those stories are mostly girls and women. The stories of men and boys still remain mostly hidden, unacknowledged and undiscussed.

The default in discussions about sexual violence is to think of boys and men as perpetrators and women as victims. But that is an oversimplification that is built on a damaging stereotype about male invulnerability, and it obscures the truth: boys can be victims, and boys can need help. We’ve just built a world that makes it hard for them to admit it—and for the rest of us to acknowledge it. If we want to raise boys differently, we must start believing that they are equally capable of feeling pain and doing violence.

In Gunnison, Utah, in a valley of farms rimmed by steep mountains, a sixteen-year-old boy—a high school football player, baseball player, and wrestler—admitted in January 2019 that he had sexually abused eight of his teammates.

The following month, his victims spoke through tears as they stood up in court to tell the judge what had happened to them, and how it had hurt. He had crushed their testicles. Some said he had penetrated them, shoving his thumb up into their anus. He had laughed as they screamed for him to stop. After the attacks, they had suffered in silence, humiliated and too afraid to talk about it. They had been haunted by shame.

“The worst of it all is when he squoze and twisted my testicles hard enough to pop them. I’ve never felt so much pain in my life,” said the first boy who testified. “I didn’t tell my parents, but they knew something was wrong when I couldn’t get out of bed and was peeing blood. The pain was unbearable in my stomach. They took me to the hospital, and I was scared. The doctor at Primary Children’s asked me if I had any trauma to my testicles, but I told him no. I knew I needed help but was too scared to admit what really happened.”

At the hospital, scans showed swelling of his internal organs, he said. The doctors, stumped, prescribed medicine and sent him home. Eventually the pain dissipated. The same boy had attacked him two other times, he said, but he had never told anyone what happened. Instead, he tried to avoid his tormentor. He didn’t want to go to wrestling practice anymore, even though he loved it and was good at it. He tried to quit football, but his parents urged him to keep playing. Though he’d always excelled at school, now he didn’t want to go.

“We had no idea what was going on,” the boy’s mother said in court that day. “As his parents, we felt helpless.”

Twisted testicles. Peeing blood. Foreign objects shoved into anuses. Sickening harm. Why am I starting here, with wrenching details of sexual violence against boys?

The simple answer is that I have found no clearer window into the pressures and violence of American boyhood, and no more visceral way to understand my own misapprehensions about what it means to be a boy. I dove into research for this book asking why boys hurt other people; now I know that I was missing something vital. Boys can be victims, too, and we won’t be able to make headway for our daughters—or for our sons—until we see that full picture.

Why Boys Don’t Ask for Help (or, “Don’t Be a Pussy!”)

When I first began learning about locker room assaults, I wanted to know what motivated a boy to hurt another boy in this way. But along the way, I became even more puzzled—and troubled—by the victims’ experiences. They had so much difficulty identifying what had happened to them as sexual assault, and felt too much shame to admit they were hurting.

One boy was so distressed about the prospect of being attacked by his basketball teammates during a tournament trip that he called his mother, intending to ask her for help. As frightened as he was, when it came down to it, he couldn’t bring himself to tell her what was going on. “I was going to tell her when I first got on the phone with her, but I ended up not saying nothing,” he later said. “I was going to tell her, but I didn’t know how to say that.”

I’ll call him Martin. He was a freshman on the varsity team at Ooltewah High School, near Chattanooga, Tennessee. In December 2015, he and his teammates drove two and a half hours from their homes to a Christmas tournament in Gatlinburg, in the Great Smoky Mountains. They stayed in a two-story cabin called JJ’s Hideaway, where there was a pool table downstairs in the boys’ quarters. The coaches stayed upstairs.

By their fourth day at JJ’s Hideaway, Martin knew the upperclassmen were coming for him. They had already gone after the other three freshmen; every evening, he had seen the brandishing of a pool cue and he had heard the screaming. He knew he was next; that’s when he called his mother. And yet he didn’t know how to ask for help without embarrassing himself and violating an unwritten code of silence. He just couldn’t get the words out.

Girls who are victimized face their own horrors. Boys contend with the stories they have heard about what it means to be a man, strong and invulnerable and in control. And boys don’t get the benefit of stories that they have never heard, about the sacredness of their bodies, and the privacy and personal autonomy they deserve.

Soon after the phone call with his mother, three of Martin’s teammates grabbed him and pulled him into a bedroom, onto a bed. One of them rammed a pool cue into Martin’s anus, tearing a hole in his pants, his underwear, his rectum, and his bladder.

“Don’t be a pussy!” the same boy had yelled while attacking one of Martin’s teammates. “Take it like a man!”

Martin tried to “take it like a man.” Even after the attack—which ultimately landed him in the hospital with a monthslong recovery ahead of him—he did not immediately tell the truth about what had been done to him. He told his coach that he and his attackers had been “wrestling,” and he insisted he was fine—until he peed blood, then collapsed and had to go to the emergency room. It was only because of his extreme injury that the truth came to light.

Later, during a sworn deposition, Martin was asked why he thought the older boy had penetrated him. The lawyer wanted to know if it had to do with sexual orientation. Was the older boy gay? No, Martin said. It wasn’t that at all. “I feel like he tried to make me—belittle me,” he said. “Tried to make me feel like less than a man, less than him.”

The freshman intuitively understood and endorsed the argument that scholars make in academic circles: this kind of sexual assault has nothing to do with sex. It’s about power. It’s about older boys establishing their place at the top, putting younger players in their place, humiliating them in a raw and fundamental way. It’s about older boys using sodomy to simultaneously prove their own manhood and emasculate their teammates.

This particular way of flexing power depends on the cluelessness or tacit acceptance of the adults who are paid to keep boys safe. It also depends on the silence of victims, who—like most teenagers—want desperately to belong, which means bearing pain, handling it and definitely not snitching. But it’s dangerous and unfair to expect boys to bear the responsibility for protecting themselves, Monica Beck, one of the attorneys who represented Martin in a civil lawsuit against the school system, told me. Boys, like girls, deserve the protection and help of their coaches, their teachers, their parents, and their principals.

After Martin collapsed and underwent surgery, he spent six days in the hospital and nine months recovering, including relearning how to walk. One of the attackers was convicted of aggravated rape, the other two of aggravated assault.

Even with these horrifying facts, not everyone agreed that what happened to Martin should actually be considered sexual violence. The police officer who investigated the crime filed charges of aggravated rape, a crime that in Tennessee does not require sexual motivation. But he suggested in state court that what happened was not in fact a sexual assault. It was instead, he said, “something stupid that kids do” that “just happened” to meet the definition of aggravated rape.

“To me it was an assault. It wasn’t sexual really in nature. His pants weren’t pulled down. They weren’t doing it for sexual gratification. This was something stupid that kids do that shouldn’t have been done,” Gatlinburg detective Rodney Burns said. “There was no rape or torture, no screams of anguish.… What this case actually is, is much smaller than what it’s been blown up to be.”

Later, Martin sued Hamilton County Schools for failing to protect his civil rights. As the trial approached, lawyers representing the school board asked the judge to prohibit Martin’s legal team from using certain terms in front of a jury: rape, aggravated rape, sexual battery, sexual assault.

The judge never had to decide, because the school district’s insurance carrier settled with Martin for $750,000, avoiding a trial. But it’s notable that this was even a potential issue of debate. Imagine that a girl was attacked as Martin was, violently penetrated and seriously injured. Would anyone doubt that it qualified as a sexual assault?

The Culture of Sport

For me, sports were always a refuge. I played soccer growing up—a lot of soccer—and my teammates were my friends and my support network, girls who valued strength and skill and who reminded me to appreciate my body for what it could do instead of worrying so much about what it looked like.

I’m not alone. Sports is a refuge for so many children, and an engine for so much good. Kids can learn to communicate and depend on each other. They can learn to push and surpass their own athletic limits. They can learn to win, and to lose, with humility and grace. Kids who play organized sports tend to do better in school than kids who don’t, have stronger social skills and higher self-esteem, and are healthier physically and mentally, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.

But as anyone who has spent much time on the sidelines of a youth soccer or basketball or football game can tell you, sports can also be destructive. Coaches and parents can be verbally abusive, teaching kids that winning is more important than integrity and that disrespect is part of the game. Kids can learn to prize the use of force and violence. And in especially sports-crazed communities they can learn that, if they don’t make the team, they don’t much matter.

It’s this darker side of sports that turns it into a breeding ground for hazing, initiation rituals that older players use to belittle and humiliate junior teammates. For boys who find themselves on teams with such a poisonous cul...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Prologue
• Chapter One: What We Don’t See: The Invisible Epidemic of Sexual Assault Against Boys
• Chapter Two: Boys Will Be Men: Nature, Nurture, and Rethinking Boyhood
• Chapter Three: The Sex Ed Crisis: Why Silence About Sex Is Dangerous for Kids
• Chapter Four: Shaping Young Minds: How Schools Are Failing Young Children
• Chapter Five: The Problem with “Consent”: Lessons from Grace, Aziz Ansari’s Accuser
• Chapter Six: Racism, Violence, Trauma: How Close Relationships Can Help Boys Cope
• Chapter Seven: Why Harry Needs Sally: How All-Boys Schools Are Trying to Stay Relevant
• Chapter Eight: Boy-Friends: The Power of Male Friendship to Create a New Culture
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Endnotes
• Index
• Copyright