Understanding the Visibility Challenges Faced by Male Victims of Sexual Abuse

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This article contains references to child abuse and suicide.

Digger (not his real name) remembers when he was six years old, being told by the other boys how to make his bed to ward off predators in the night.

He would tuck the sheets tightly under his small mattress to make a cocoon.

“We thought that was our safety net. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. I can still remember hearing boys scream as they were taken away,” Digger recalls.

“Sometimes they’d come in on Friday night and just take whoever they want and bring them back on Sunday night.”

Digger is an Indigenous man and a member of the Stolen Generation — his name has been changed to protect his privacy.

An illustrated image of a young boy pulling sheets over him while disembodied red hands reach out and try to pull them back. In the foreground is a small abstracted figure of an adult man.

Digger was just six years old when the abuse started. Source: SBS News / Karin Zhou-Zheng

Between the ages of six and 13, Digger endured childhood sexual abuse from multiple paedophiles while living at the government-run Glandore Boys’ Home and in foster care in South Australia.

He faced punishment when he spoke up about the abuse as a child. Now 53, Digger says the feelings of shame and alienation still remain decades later.

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse found men, on average, take longer to disclose abuse than women. (The average for females was 20.6 years and for males was 25.6 years.)

Some victims never disclose.

Digger believes one large barrier to disclosure is the lack of discussion and visibility of male victims in society.

“It’s not as spoken about that men can be abused. You know, men are meant to be strong,” he says.

When it comes to sexual assault, it was like we were just a minority and no one really believed you.

Limited support available

When a medical procedure triggered a nervous breakdown in his early 40s, Digger sought help through an Aboriginal organisation and was referred to an eight-week program run by the NSW-based organisation Survivor and Mates Support Network (SAMSN), which was being administered for the first time in South Australia.

Digger describes the experience of sitting in a room with 12 other male survivors of child sexual abuse and SAMSN facilitators as not only powerful but lifesaving.

“It saved me from going down what I felt was the only option left. Being amongst all the other fellas, realising you’re not the only one.”

Discovering SAMSN’s support group was life-changing for Digger. Source: SBS News / Karin Zhou-Zheng

SAMSN ran services in Adelaide between 2015 and 2021 on a trial basis, but ceased operations after the South Australian government’s funding came to an end.

The organisation was co-founded by CEO Craig Hughes-Cashmore in 2011 with four others after struggling to find peer-support networks for male survivors of childhood sexual abuse like himself. He says the organisation is still one of the only specialised services in Australia.

“The reality is that there’s not a lot out there. If you’re not in NSW and you’re a guy who discovers SAMSN, you’re currently in the wrong state. In 2025 — seven years after the royal commission wrapped up — that’s not good enough,” he says.

SAMSN receives funding from the NSW government and the federal government via its National Redress Scheme to offer support to male survivors of institutional child sexual abuse in NSW.

Hughes-Cashmore says they have applied for further Commonwealth funding to help roll out programs nationally and offer specialised peer-to-peer support.

“Male survivors want to talk to other male survivors,” he says, adding that there are big differences in what survivors may want to unpack in women-focused spaces.

“For men, there’s questions around their sexuality and identity … [For example], ‘Does this make me gay? Will this mean I’ll become an abuser myself?'”

A man in a blue blazer worn over a green jumper is smiling.

Craig Hughes-Cashmore co-founded SAMSN to bridge a gap in support services for male survivors of sexual abuse and domestic violence. Source: Supplied / Fiona and Bobby Photography

Hughes-Cashmore believes there is an imbalance when it comes to servicing male survivors, who often have male perpetrators themselves.

“We have such an entrenched view of women as victims and men as perpetrators. We’re really doing a huge disservice to the community when we think about gendered violence only in those very binary terms.”

Are male survivors being left behind?

Professor Patrick O’Leary from Griffith University is an expert in areas of gender-based violence and child sexual abuse. He says the imbalance is driven by complex factors that mean societal and institutional responses to men are lagging.

It’s the thinking that if we focus on men, we’ll be taking away focus on women — and we can have both.

O’Leary also believes part of the issue stems from the fear that investing in support services for male victims may minimise men’s responsibilities overall in these spaces.

“But we’re saying, ‘You’re not responsible for what happened to you, but you are responsible for what you do now in response’. That said, many men who experience trauma don’t go on to abuse others; they deserve that justice to live free from guilt and shame.”

According to UNICEF data, one in eight females globally experienced rape or sexual assault as a child. That statistic for males is around one in 11.

A Department of Social Services spokesperson noted that while states and territories have primary responsibility for frontline services, male survivors can access the national 1800RESPECT helpline, MensLine and the Find & Connect service for people who spent time in an Australian orphanage or children’s home between 1920 and 1990.

The spokesperson also noted the Commonwealth’s investment under the National Redress Scheme into SAMSN’s NSW operations, which has helped build capacity across other redress support services.

But O’Leary says: “SAMSN is filling a gap that the demand far out exceeds its ability to respond.”

He believes further investment is required beyond national helplines for those disclosing a history of childhood sexual abuse.

“They’re inadequate. We can’t have a one-size-fits-all sort of idea of helplines where you can ring up about pretty much any topic,” he says.

“We need specialist responses for men and women.”

While counselling is available for children who have disclosed abuse via dedicated services, such as Bravehearts, or via the National Redress Scheme for adult survivors of abuse, support that caters specifically to men is limited.

‘Extremely isolated’

When Jeffrey (not his real name) decided that after 47 years, he wanted to speak, his first call was to MensLine.

The man he spoke to was friendly, but Jeffrey, whose name has been changed, sensed the responder was out of his depth for child sexual abuse.

“He knew there was a more specialist group there, so he told me to ring SAMSN. Perhaps if it was drugs or alcohol or domestic abuse issues, he may have felt more confident,” he recalls.

Disclosure had unique challenges for Jeffrey, as his abuser was his mother.

An illustration depicting a young boy looking downcast. A faceless person with a red hand stands behind him and touches his shoulder while the figure of an adult man looks on.

It took Jeffrey* decades to come to terms with the abuse he endured at the hands of his mother. Source: SBS News / Karin Zhou-Zheng

The abuse began when Jeffrey was 10 years old after his parents’ divorce. On solo visits to see his mother during school holidays, she would groom him for sex.

“I felt like I was trained to basically be a performing monkey and a replacement for my father,” he says.

When the abuse was uncovered by Jeffrey’s father and stepmother three years later, it was called an “inappropriate” relationship by family members and never spoken about again.

This wording stuck with the then-13-year-old Jeffrey and lasted for decades, making him feel complicit in the incest. It wasn’t until reading about Grace Tame’s case in 2022 that he understood he had been groomed.

I felt so stained and dirty, damaged and wrong and like I was some sort of sexual predator myself. And yet I was actually a victim.

Even in adulthood, the responses Jeffrey received to his disclosures perpetuated the myth that as a male, he couldn’t be a victim.

“I confessed to my first wife who had the reaction that it was ‘gross’, and that ‘if you’re the bloke it’s your fault’. We divorced shortly after that,” he says.

“I was extremely isolated in this idea that women could not sexually assault because a male has to become erect.”

Through SAMSN, Jeffrey connected with a therapist specialising in male survivors of child sexual abuse and took part in one of the organisation’s eight-week support programs.

He remembers most of the other men he met had also kept silent for decades.

“That was just incredibly powerful, and beautifully facilitated by two trained professionals who knew how to guide the room,” he says.

Still, in the men’s group, Jeffrey found himself in the minority in having a female perpetrator, which made him feel isolated and question if they’d think his abuse didn’t count.

It wasn’t until a year later, on a call to SAMSN’s Peer Support Line, that he connected with another man who had a female abuser. Their discussions helped Jeffrey realise that his abuse was no less horrific.

Alongside SAMSN in NSW, the Canberra Rape Crisis Centre’s SAMSSA program also offers counselling and crisis support to male-identifying survivors of abuse. Source: SBS News / Karin Zhou-Zheng

Wait times with dire consequences

The trauma of childhood sexual abuse runs deep and, in some cases, can be fatal. Jeffrey and Digger know multiple men who have taken their lives.

It’s a reality Hughes-Cashmore thinks about a lot, particularly as his staff makes calls to those on the waiting list for SAMSN services.

In NSW, the wait time to access advanced peer support and counselling is two weeks, and the waitlist for SAMSN’s eight-week program is 132 men long.

“One of the guys was hard to contact; [we] left a few messages. Eventually, a woman picked up, his wife, who then told us that he had died by suicide in the intervening time while he was on this waitlist,” he says.

Hughes-Cashmore is hoping that alongside SAMSN’s push to expand nationally, the wider sector improves access for male survivors of child sexual abuse, including through training for medical staff on first-time disclosures.

Digger* says his experiences continue to affect him five decades on. Source: SBS News / Karin Zhou-Zheng

Digger says the decades-long shame he has endured has held him back as a husband and a father.

He has found it difficult to tuck his children in at night time or read them a bedtime story, only being able to enter their rooms in daylight.

“It was like a boundary of the night-time that I just couldn’t cross,” he says.

My children, in a lot of respects, missed out on a lot of things due to what happened.

He hopes Australians will learn to see beyond gender stereotypes to tackle unaddressed trauma and so future generations of survivors are empowered to speak up.

If you or someone you know is impacted by family and domestic violence, call 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732, text 0458 737 732, or visit 1800RESPECT.org.au. In an emergency, call 000.

The Men’s Referral Service, operated by No to Violence, can be contacted on 1300 766 491.

SAMSN can be reached between 9am – 5pm, Monday to Friday on 1800 472 676.

Readers seeking crisis support can contact Lifeline on 13 11 14, the Suicide Call Back Service on 1300 659 467 and Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800 (for young people aged up to 25). More information and support with mental health is available at and on 1300 22 4636.

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