WHEN SEXUALLY ABUSED BOYS ARE INFECTED

In the photograph above this, I am going to assume you see a boy. I see a boy who presents with a black, maybe injured, eye. It isn’t too obvious. It never is. I have obfuscated the photograph. The kid has been besieged all his life by people who want a piece of him.

I am thankful for all the people who have responded with kindness.

What about abused boys and HIV. The real research is slim. Although most studies are involving around ten thousand kids (max per study), the public health ramifications are dramatic because the sexually abused child is rarely tested for HIV. I have screamed about this for years to no avail.

Kids who have been sexually exploited should be tested for HIV.

It’s considered too expensive.

Well, Barrus, what did you expect.

I expect that kids at-risk will not be bitchslapped. Silly me.

Even though a lifetime of treatment is even more expensive if HIV treatment itself is withheld long enough for CD4 figures to plummet, we still don’t test these kids. I would argue that one of the reasons we do not do this is because we do not really see children as being part of the bigger picture that is prostitution, addiction, poverty (it is a crime to be poor, and obviously a moral failure because we all know lowlives are lazy, right). The let’s save dollars POV makes no sense. But public health in a place like Appalachia is not what public health is like in places such as let us say, Seattle. There is no comparison.

Until there’s some kind of uniformity in terms of who gets tested, we’ll never design public health policy or systems that affect the sexually abused child with HIV, and I am here to tell you that that child is going to be a boy.

And it’s going to cost you.

The stereotypes of gender all break down.

We will always assume the numbers are lower than they really are.

I am commonly referred boys who have been abused in too many ways to count. What I see looking out of my window is not what most people see at all. The cultural surge of meth addiction has subsequently seen situations where when parents are IV drug users, they’re often shooting up the kid.

It’s a shared family experience. Not quite a vacation.

Consider: 1.) It’s a war against boys. Suicide among male children is four times that of female children. Females attempt it. Boys succeed at it. 2.) Addicted children with HIV and a history of sexual exploitation is just the tip of the iceberg’s double whammy. Heroin is now on a par with meth in terms of cost, and the price of heroin continues to plummet because the market is glutted with it. 3.) This means multiple addictions. Professionals do not agree with me on this, but my experience tells me that the sadomasochistic, meaning neurology, going on here, especially in the developing brain, will create an addiction to abuse itself. 4.) I see it every day in boys who involve themselves in relationships with other boys who keep the rush of the games in place. Even if no one is being physically abused, it is not uncommon for boys who have extremely low self-concepts to connect to boys who EXHIBIT dominant behaviors their peers assume are real.

When, in fact, the dominance can be for show and tell time. It’s a mask.

The submissive boy has less of a mask. He’s getting dosed on being sublimated.

All of this is anecdotal. 5.) It’s a complex picture that can be rendered more complex when the junkie parents are pimping out the boy for drugs. Such boys do not easily disclose.

Allow me to take one more step with this. No one is going to want to hear it. From 1950 to 1993 suicide among children quadrupled. The biggest increases did not occur in the turbulent sixties. They occured in the more complacent fifties. So much for the romanticism and yearning for the simple past. History is not always quite so simple. We do not see what we do not want to see. In 2015, 5,000 kids will kill themselves. Most will be boys, most will have histories of parental substance abuse, and a majority of them will have a history of belonging to the club of the two million children who are homeless. The numbers of boys who we define in this group as atypical, are, in fact, typical.

I have to tell you. When I hear bullshit around how our supposedly great culture cares deeply for children, I have to laugh. The reality is that we often treat children with extraordinary and murderous contempt.

And yet, I think drugs should be legalized. Why.

Because legalization would remove many of the masks everyone wears among those of us who are marginal. The less marginal these boys are, the better your chances are for keeping him alive.

We fail them.

Forget about school. These kids find no success there. I would argue that school kills a lot of them.

So the boys want to drag me back into an emotional place where they get to whip themselves as losers. This is the status quo. It is not unusual. They question every success they come close to. It’s when they OVERTLY STRUGGLE with this, that I know good things are going on. I do not believe placidity is real. How can it be with such boys. They are now articulating what they are afraid of. It is NOT a BAD thing, and it is not fitting to yell at them anything around WHAT DID YOU EXPECT.

The what did you expect approach — is totally inappropriate — did you expect to be loved. Stupid boys,

The message is you are dumb and no one loves you.

Actually, boys should expect to be loved.

The kid has told his story. He’s standing before us naked in that his defences have been stripped away.

And when we insinuate he should have no expectation to be cared for, and the answer is that he should just work harder and endure (and not be lazy), why don’t we just hand him the fucking gun.

This is why the boys I work with don’t go surfing on the Internet. You will not find them on sites I do not have access to.

I want the Internet to be a place where they can tell their stories. Because this goes a long way toward validating them. Regardless of the addiction. Regardless of his own sense of failure. Regardless of the meanness that comes his way.

Regardless of who wants a piece of him.

The whole YOU SHOULD HAVE KNOWN no one is going to love you takes MY breath away.

“What did you think…”

Actually, the kid has been thinking hard. And sometimes outside the box that has always served as his protective shell.

What we make and put on the Internet is all experimental. It’s a mixed media of stepping outside of the scary stuff and the telling of the story of the things they’ve seen.

I try not to get angry with the WHAT DID YOU EXPECT hatefulness.

Hatefulness is its own status quo. One I am attempting to help them escape.

Your history is something you can transcend. There are no statistics to back that up.

But I believe it. I believe it. I am NOT asking you to believe it. Believe whatever you want. I believe it because I am asking them, the boys, to believe it. It’s not about me. It’s about them. It is not about the hatefulness they have always lived with. It’s not about addiction. It’s not about exploitation. It’s not about incarceration. It’s not about suicide.

It’s about stepping forward to go forward. Even as the hatefulness of people who should know better is real and exists.

People are often unaware of the real messages they convey.

The boys already know that.

The WHAT DID YOU EXPECT approach removes hope like paint-stripper removes the paint from furniture you no longer use.

The underground message — WHAT DID YOU EXPECT, YOU MEAN YOU ACTUALLY EXPECTED TO SUCCEED, YOU STUPID PERSON YOU, DON’T YOU KNOW BY NOW THAT ALL OF US ARE FAILURES— bitchslaps the hell out of them, and I will not allow it to have an impact. I can and will counter that message. For one thing, I can recognize it. And it is saying more about the person who is articulating it than it is relevant to the kid in question. One thing I am really good at — this comes with success at it — is redirecting the kid.

I will not allow them to function with the illusion it is about me because it is not about me, it’s about them.

It’s not about you either.

That is why I question not the reality of the audience, but the worth and value of the audience.

The audience wants it to be about the audience. I cannot help you there.

I can only tell them over and over and over again that it IS about them. Nothing has ever been about that kid.

But not this time.

If he mashes a video, he did it for a reason. If he writes a poem, he did it for a reason. If he takes a photograph selfie where he’s holding a camera, he did it for a reason. If he connects his stuff to music that is meaningful to him, he does it for a reason, too. If he photographs physical conflict, he does so for a reason.

I want to take the whole WHAT DID YOU EXPECT violence, and it is a violence, and turn it around to ask: WHAT DID YOU EXPECT FROM HIM.

So what do I get from writing this piece.

One aha moment.

WHAT DID YOU EXPECT is denial. It denies the boy a fundamental dignity that says he, too, is a part of a greater whole. It is a cynicism that essentially attacks.

It just goes deeper.

I EXPECT that you can get it. And if you can’t, I seriously do not want to deal with you because chances are good you are not a child, but you are probably an adult who has no expectation that, you, too, are worthy of being loved. I EXPECT that there will always be a part of the boy who will flinch when anger and righteousness is pointed directly at him.

This is not the Disney version of what development is about. Deciding what SUCCESS IS is part and parcel of the process. It is, however, all too often the bottom line of a reality we can easily dismiss when we, ourselves, mistake ourselves as being what it’s all about.

We will continue to work on Just Before the Cure. Many thanks to all of the people who have supported it.

The way we love now. Has to be with 100% positive regard. There are no other options.

These are boys who have no idea what success is. Let alone with experience finding it. They are fragile. Even if boys are not supposed to be fragile. They’re fragile. It’s about him.

Not you. Not me.

Him.