Still a Boy

There is a sentence almost every Indian boy hears before he is ten. Mard ban. Be a man. It is said to a boy who is crying, or afraid, or hurt, and it means a single thing: a real boy does not let these happen to him, and if they do, he does not show it. We say it in love. We are trying to give him armour for a hard world.

But the sentence carries a second meaning that we never say aloud and the boy never misses. If being hurt is the thing a man does not allow, then a boy who was hurt has already failed at being one. He has lost the only test that mattered. So when something is done to him that he did not choose and could not stop, he learns there is no version of the truth he can tell that leaves him still a boy.

This essay is about that trap, and about the children we lose inside it.

The one time we counted

Ask most people in this country whether boys are sexually abused, and you will get a pause, then a guess that it is rare. The number we carry in our heads is close to zero.

The one time India actually checked, the number was not close to zero. It was more than half.

In 2007 the Ministry of Women and Child Development ran the largest study of child abuse this country has ever attempted. It surveyed over twelve thousand children across thirteen states, and instead of waiting for complaints, it asked the children directly. It was not built to measure the whole country. It reached children in schools and homes, and also in institutions, on the street, and at work, so its numbers describe the children it spoke to rather than a national average. Even so, among those children, of the ones who said they had been sexually abused, 52.94 percent were boys. In the most severe forms of abuse, the kind that includes assault, boys were again the majority. Nine of the thirteen states reported higher rates among boys than girls.

Now set that beside the cases the country actually registers under its own child protection law. Year after year, in the records of the National Crime Records Bureau, boys come to two or three in every hundred victims, no more. They have sat at that floor for as long as the data has been split by sex.

More than half when we ask the children. Two in a hundred when we wait for a complaint. Both numbers cannot be describing the same country. What separates them is not how often boys are hurt. It is how rarely a boy can bring himself to say so, and how rarely anyone thinks to ask.

Why a boy cannot say it

The silence is not an accident. We build it, one ordinary instruction at a time.

A girl who is hurt in India is failed in a hundred ways. She is blamed, hushed, weighed against the family’s name and her own marriage. But there is at least a word for what was done to her, and a small space, however cramped, in which she is recognised as someone it happened to. A boy is given no such word and no such space. This is not a greater silence and a lesser one. They are two different silences, and the boy’s is the one this country has not yet admitted exists. The same culture that tells him to be a man has quietly ruled that victims are not men. So the boy who is abused does not carry one wound. He carries two: the thing that was done to him, and the loss of his standing as male if he ever names the first.

The men who have finally spoken to Indian researchers describe the same walls, again and again. Shame. The fear that what happened has marked them as no longer fully a man. Where the person who harmed him was a man, a second fear gets planted: that being abused says something about whether he is gay. It says nothing. That is a lie the culture uses to hold him quiet, not a real question about a child. Where the person who harmed him was a woman, an aunt, an older girl in the house, someone the family employed, the lie simply runs the other way: that a boy is lucky, that it cannot be abuse if a woman did it. It can. And beneath all of it sits the lie this culture leans on hardest, that none of it was abuse at all, only a rite of passage, the older cousin or the hostel senior doing what boys are supposedly toughened by. We rename the harm done to boys as the making of them, and a harm with a flattering name is one nobody has to count.

There is one more lock, and it is the one a boy can least put into words. A body can respond to touch on its own, with none of the child’s wanting in it. A boy whose body reacted that way often grows up certain the reaction was a kind of agreement, that some part of him consented. It was not, and he did not. The response is automatic, and it means nothing about wanting. The people who harm children know this, and they use it, telling the boy that his own body proves he is to blame. It is the cruelest of the silencers, because he carries what feels like the evidence inside him. Saying it plainly is how the weapon is taken away: a body that responded did not betray him, and nothing it did made any of this his fault.

In one Indian survey of 160 men, 71 percent said they had been sexually abused as children. Nearly 85 percent had never told a single person. Not a parent, not a friend, not a partner. They had carried it alone, most of them for decades, because every script they were handed for being a man required them to.

This is not only India. Internationally, the share of men who report being sexually abused as boys runs from around one in thirteen in careful global studies to as high as one in six in others, and the researchers agree on one thing across all of it: whatever the true figure, men disclose least of all, so every number is a floor. The boy grows into the man who still cannot say it. The silence does not lift with age. It hardens. It can surface much later as depression, as distance from the people he loves, as a quiet certainty that he is unlovable. And here a warning, because the culture keeps a frightening story ready to explain such men: that a boy who was abused becomes a man who abuses. It is not true. The great majority of survivors never harm anyone, and repeating the myth only loads a child who was already failed once with the fear that he is dangerous.

Picture the ordinary version, because it is almost never dramatic.

A boy goes quiet around a particular uncle, or pulls his hand back from an older cousin everyone adores, or stops wanting to go to the tuition he used to like. He cannot explain it, and when he tries, in the only words a child has, an adult who loves him tells him not to be soft. He is your own. Don’t make a face. Be a man about it. The boy hears, correctly, that his discomfort is the problem, and that a real boy would not have it. So he swallows it. He has just been taught that the feeling warning him is the very thing that makes him less of a boy.

Or he gets further. He actually says something. The room turns to him with a question that shuts the door harder than any slap could: Are you sure? You’re a boy. How? The disbelief is rarely cruel. It is what comes out of people who were taught, exactly as he was, that this does not happen to boys. The boy reads it in a second. Nothing he can say will be both believed and survivable, and so the silence closes over him the way it was built to. His standing is left intact. The truth is what goes under.

That is what two percent is made of. Not boys who were spared. Boys who learned, before they had the words for it, that being hurt and being a boy could not both be true in this house, and were left holding the only one the people they loved could bear.

The law already counts him

One fact here should change everything. It changes nothing, because we will not let it.

The law is not the problem. The POCSO Act defines a child as any person under the age of eighteen, with no mention of whether that child is a girl or a boy. In the eyes of the statute, a boy who is sexually abused is exactly as much a victim, owed exactly the same protection and belief and recourse as a girl. India did the hard part in 2012. It wrote a law that counts him.

We are the ones who do not. The gap between more than half and two percent does not live in the legislation. It lives in the uncle who says be a man, in the room that asks are you sure, in the word initiation doing the work of a cover-up, in every adult who has simply never once pictured a boy as someone this happens to. It lives, too, in a system that wrote him into the law and then built the medical rooms and the help desks and the support services around girls, so that the rare boy who does reach it often finds it was not expecting him. The boy is already protected on paper. He is still waiting for the people around him, and the offices around him, to catch up to their own law.

What strength actually is

Back to mard ban, then. I am not going to argue against it. The wish underneath it is a good one. We want our sons strong, and in a country this hard on the weak, that is no foolish thing to want for a child you love.

We are not wrong to want our sons strong. We are wrong about what strength is.

We taught a boy that strength means nothing can touch him, that to be hurt is to fail, that a man meets pain by feeling none of it. Whatever that produces, it is not strength. It leaves a boy alone with everything that happens to him, forbidden from naming the worst of it, set to guard his own silence for life. We did not armour him. We sealed him.

Real strength runs the other way. It looks like a boy who can say a hard, true thing, and an adult who can take it without flinching. The bravest thing a man does is to sit still while a frightened child tells him the truth, and stay, and believe it. That is the strength worth raising a son into: not the kind that feels nothing, but the kind that can be told.

And being hurt never decided whether he was a boy. He was a boy before it, during it, and after. Nothing done to a child subtracts from the child. The abuse did not unmake him. Our refusal to believe him does that, every time, picking up right where the abuse left off. Turn mard ban to face the right way and it stops locking his silence and starts setting him loose. A boy who is believed is not made whole. He is a whole child, protected. A boy who is not believed is not made less. He is a whole child, failed. The wholeness was never ours to grant or take back. It was his the entire time.

This is one of the quietest truths there is. A whole half of the country’s abused children, hidden behind a number we keep telling ourselves is rare, kept there by a sentence we say to boys out of love. We can keep the love and lose the lie.

This essay has stayed with boys, because the silence around them has its own particular shape. They are not the only children the count forgets. A child who does not fit the box of boy or girl is hurt too, and seen even less. That silence is real, and it is not this essay’s to hold, only to refuse to pass over without a word.

You are the adult in some boy’s life. His parent, his uncle, his teacher, his older sibling, the grown-up he would come to first if he ever came to anyone. You do not need training for this, and you do not need to wait for anything to go wrong.

Find a boy in your life this week and tell him, in plain words, that nothing anyone ever does to him can make him any less of a boy, or any less yours. Tell him that if anyone ever hurts him, in any way, he can come to you, and you will believe him, and it will not change how you see him by a single degree. Say it before there is any reason to. Then, if the day ever comes that he tests it, mean every word. If a boy does tell you, believe him first and sort out everything else after, and call Childline on 1098, and do not leave him alone with it.

And if you are reading this as the boy it describes, grown now and still holding it, hear the one thing the room never told you. It was not your fault. Your body did not betray you. Nothing that was done to you took away what you are. You were a whole child then, and you are whole now, whether or not anyone ever stood by you.

He was a whole boy before any of this, and he is one still. He does not need to be made whole. He needs to be seen as what he already is, and believed when he says he was hurt. Be the one who sees him. Be the one who believes him.

If a child is in danger or has been harmed, call Childline on 1098. It is free and open 24x7, in many Indian languages. If you are an adult still carrying something from your own childhood, iCALL offers free, confidential counselling at 9152987821. This is a hard subject. If it is close to you, you do not have to carry it alone.