Boys Can Be Victims Too: The Silence Around Male Sexual Abuse

When we hear the word abuse, many people picture a girl. Culturally, harm is often associated with her fear and her silence. But what happens when the victim is a boy — and no one knows how to see it? In this episode of The Shadow Sessions, Hiba Balfaqih speaks with Seth, a veteran, speaker, and advocate for male survivors who grew up in poverty surrounded by addiction, instability, and unspoken pain. This conversation challenges the idea that abuse is gendered. For many boys, silence becomes survival. Shame replaces language, and years pass before anyone hears their story — if they ever do. Rather than focusing on events, this episode explores the psychological aftermath: identity, trust, masculinity, and the difficulty of speaking about harm in a culture that rarely imagines boys as victims. Today, Seth works to break that silence, helping other men confront what they were taught to bury and showing that healing begins the moment someone is finally believed. This episode is about stigma, voice, and what becomes possible when the story a person carried alone is finally spoken.