What Research Says About Male Sexual Abuse — and What It Looked Like in My Family

An essay about male sexual abuse, migration, masculinity and the long shadow of trauma.

Every Thursday after work I drove to my mother’s house and took her shopping. She was a bipolar sufferer and had stopped driving ten years earlier. My stepfather, Izet, was her primary carer, but he hadn’t been feeling well so I changed our regular weekly visits to outings.

At the shopping centre, I walked with my mother to her favourite clothes shop and then to the food court where she sat, the arthritis in her hips and legs limiting mobility, while I ordered a coffee for her and a hot chocolate for me. We talked about our week and Mum brought me up to speed with gossip in the Bosnian community.

On this day, our conversation was different.

‘I have something to tell you.’ My mother blinked. A tear seeped from her eye, smudging her mascara. She always took pains with her appearance on these outings, her makeup immaculate with black eyeliner highlighting her green eyes, her light brown hair styled, her jewellery coordinated to match her clothes. ‘Izet told me he was sexually abused as a child by his older brother.’

When he finally told my mother, he was 63. Researcher Scott Easton calls this pattern self-silencing — men who carry childhood sexual abuse for decades, burying it beneath shame, stigma and self-blame. Many never disclose at all. Those who do often wait until late adulthood, when the cost of silence begins to outweigh the fear of exposure.

Izet didn’t remember how old he was when the abuse began and ended. My mother asked a few questions, but she didn’t wish to stir up his trauma further. Easton notes that for many boys the abuse begins around eight or nine — and often ends only when the child is physically strong enough to resist. That detail lodged in me. It mirrored Izet’s story too closely.

‘Did he ever tell his parents?’ I asked.

‘You know what they were like.’

Izet’s mother suffered from depression and never left the house. His father was the breadwinner and caregiver. He worked a lowly job as a porter at a hotel in Bosanska Gradiška. The family was dirt-poor. Izet and his four siblings were raised in a one-bedroom shack with earthen floors and ramshackle walls.

‘Do you think his brother abused the other siblings?’ I asked.

‘He didn’t say.’

Izet’s siblings had emigrated to other European countries. Only my stepfather and his brother remained at home, a common occurrence in Bosnia due to economic hardship. Izet was 32 when he married my mother and emigrated to Australia.

I imagined my stepfather spending most of his adult life sharing a house with his abuser, the two of them sleeping under the same roof, and shuddered with revulsion.

Izet married my mother when I was 10. My mother was advised not to have any more children due to her bipolar condition. When she told my stepfather, he said he did not want his own biological children. He told her my brother, and I were his children, and that was how he treated us.

While I called him by his first name and noted his relationship as my stepfather, out of respect to my biological father who passed away when I was four, to all intents and purposes Izet was the father who raised me. Growing up, he ferried me wherever I needed to go. When I was 13 and was beaten up while buying bread at the milk bar, he was the one who tracked down the girl’s home address and visited their parents, using his anger and rage to ensure they kept clear. When I went to a nightclub and didn’t want to accept a ride home from a drunk friend, Izet collected me. He was always there, devoted and utterly loving.

My mother was completely dependent on my stepfather, and he was attentive to her. He completed all household chores—grocery shopping, paying bills, doing the clothes washing and hanging it out, and vacuuming. My mother only cooked. When she was diagnosed with agoraphobia and couldn’t leave the house, she and Izet developed an intense co-dependent relationship. Their respective mental health issues intensified as they retreated from the world and became more inward-looking. Sometimes it seemed they hurt each other as much as they helped each other.

While being a carer for my mother took a heavy toll on Izet, I gain comfort knowing it also helped him. Before my mother married Izet, our lives were plagued by loss and trauma. My mother struggled under the burden of being a sole parent, and she was frequently hospitalised after suffering breakdowns. My stepfather provided much-needed stability.

Throughout his life, Izet was obsessed with maintaining his physical strength, training with weights and taking supplements. He was 182 centimetres tall and had a robust, intimidating physique. Now I know this ensured he was never again vulnerable to abuse. He was 56 when he had a heart attack that required a quadruple bypass. Izet didn’t smoke or drink alcohol, was fit, and his cholesterol was in the healthy range. But he did suffer from depression and frequently isolated himself from people. Depression is one of the most consistent long-term outcomes in male survivors of childhood sexual abuse. In small clinical studies, nearly all participants met the criteria. Decades later, the trauma does not evaporate. It migrates — into the body, into anger, into isolation.

After his heart-attack Izet’s strength was greatly diminished and his rage grew proportionate to his physical weakness. He became overbearing and difficult to be around; his anger and bitterness coated every interaction.

Living with him was fraught. He was paranoid and fearful. He spent nights staring out the living room window. If he thought he was being somehow wronged, he threatened to beat people up. These occurrences could be as innocuous as the boy at K-Mart who couldn’t tell him where the weights section was, or the server at Dunkin’ Donuts who assumed Izet was a senior citizen by asking for his card. These incidents set off what Easton calls ‘hyper-masculine persona’, which is another defence mechanism. Trauma researchers describe this as complex trauma — experiences that interrupt childhood development and reappear later as despair, unexplained physical symptoms and anger that feels bigger than the present moment.

When my mother told me Izet’s secret, I finally understood the reasons for some of his baffling behaviour.

In the early 1980s, a Victorian study found Yugoslav migrants were being diagnosed with schizophrenia at more than double the rate of Australian-born patients. When fifty cases were reassessed in the patients’ native language, nearly three-quarters were no longer considered schizophrenic. The researchers pointed to language and cultural misunderstanding — clinicians mistaking culturally patterned expression for pathology.

The one that struck me most was ‘the clinician’s unfamiliarity with the patient’s culture leading to the attribution of psychopathological behavior to culturally appropriate responses.’

The Bosnian language is full of hyperbole and allusions to violence. When we see a child sleeping peacefully, we say ‘Spava ko zaklan’ which roughly translates as, ‘The child is sleeping as if its throat is cut.’ When we joke we say, ‘Da bog da crko’, which means ‘I hope you die.’ When it is a windy day we say, ‘Ubiće te vjetar’, ‘The wind will kill you.’ There is much use of ‘I’m going to kill myself’, or ‘I’m going to kill someone else.’

Izet’s language was peppered with this kind of talk. When he said as much to my mother’s psychologist, he wanted to place Izet on a mental health plan. My stepfather violently refused.

He believed the medication prescribed after his heart attack was responsible for his declining physical health and had caused body myositis, a progressive muscle disorder characterised by muscle inflammation, weakness, and atrophy that usually develops after the age of 50. He was a man possessed by self-diagnosis. In the year before he died, he attended over 20 doctors at 18 different clinics. Tests included a CT of his chest, abdomen and pelvis, an ultrasound of his abdomen, an MRI of his brain, ECG monitoring of stress, and Doppler ultrasounds to check blood flow in his legs and arteries.

When the medical profession didn’t confirm Izet’s suspicions, he undertook his own online research. He copied out various natural remedies and supplements on scraps of paper. Notes like, ‘apple cider vinegar, two spoons per day.’ Or ‘one piece of ginger (grated), one garlic clove (grated), 2 tablespoons of lemon juice, 1 tablespoon of apple cider vinegar, 2 tablespoons of honey.’ Another read, ‘for arteries hemp seed’ and ‘white vinegar dilute 1:3 water distilled at night.’ One day he was nauseous and could barely stand without vomiting. My mother found his Vitamin C bottle nearly empty. Izet had taken nearly 20 tablets a day, based on something he read on the internet.

One night he had pains in his chest and my mother called an ambulance. The doctors found no issues with his heart. Believing that his struggle to breathe was a sign of an anxiety attack, he was referred to a psychiatrist. My husband went to pick up Izet and found him waiting for the psychiatrist to clear him for release.

While they waited, Izet became agitated and ranted to other patients and nurses about the terrible hospital treatment he was receiving. Some of the nurses ignored him; others attempted to engage and pacify him. He treated both with rude disregard. Embarrassed by my stepfather’s behavior, my husband placated him by being jocular. This worked for a short while, but as the waiting time stretched on, Izet began to talk about how he would commit suicide.

When the psychiatrist arrived, Izet told him that he would kill himself with a rifle he was going to buy online and named the website he had researched. The psychiatrist said that he couldn’t release him if there was the possibility he would harm himself. Izet shouted that the hospital couldn’t detain him and walked out of the room. The psychiatrist called security. My husband intervened, asking the security guards to allow him to reason with my stepfather. He managed to calm Izet, who remained in hospital for the night under 24-hour guard to ensure he wouldn’t harm himself. Before being released, the psychiatrist referred Izet to counselling and prescribed antidepressants. Izet threw the referral and the prescription in the bin.

Izet believed his malaise and physical weakness had a medical cause. Yet Easton found male sexual abuse victims experience harmful outcomes four to five decades after the fact. These findings are consistent with complex trauma theory, which suggests that traumatic experiences disrupt key developmental milestones in childhood and adolescence, leading to difficulties in later life, ‘such as feelings of despair and hopelessness, unexplained physical complaints, and anger dysregulation.’

When I dream about my stepfather, I am on the phone with him, calling out his name, begging him to speak, to say goodbye. All I hear is him gasping for breath before he hangs up. When I wake up in the morning, my chest feels tight, and I travel back to the house I grew up in and the bungalow behind it.

As an adolescent, I used to climb onto the bungalow roof via the mulberry tree whose large branches rose above it. In summer, I’d lie on a blanket and read, or slather myself in baby oil and tan. It was where I went with girlfriends to gossip, hidden from view.

The day Izet died, I was at the hairdresser with my daughter. She was getting pink tips for her tenth birthday present when my husband called to say my mother had arrived at our house in a taxi. Izet had driven her to the swimming pool, but he hadn’t picked her up at the agreed time. He wasn’t answering the home phone or his mobile.

My husband drove my mother to the house. Izet wasn’t there. They thought they’d check the bungalow in case he was working out the back. As they walked there, my mother worried aloud that he had harmed himself in some way. Her words rang in my husband’s ears as he pushed in front of her and opened the bungalow door. Peering inside, he saw a shape behind some wood. It was Izet. He had hanged himself from the rafter beams.

They called the police. On the dining table was a note. ‘Dear wife, thank you for the golden years. I am sorry. I wish you good health and love. I will love you forever.’ Izet had drawn three hearts under his note, one for my mother, one for my brother, and one for me.

When we received the coronial investigation report, I read that he carried a framed photograph of my brother and me on his person. I gain comfort knowing we were with him in the end.

A version of this essay was previously published on Kalliope online journal.

Amra Pajalic is an award-winning author of memoir Things Nobody Knows But Me about her mother’s battle with bipolar.

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