Child Protection Week: Boys are victims of sexual violence too

Sexual violence perpetuated against the boy child is not rare in South Africa, and like young girls, their needs must be prioritised equally.

This Child Protection Week (29 May to 5 June), the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) Dr Neziswa Titi from the Department of African Feminist Studies discusses her latest research project: “Young boys’ help-seeking and healing pathways from sexual violence: Towards decolonised African-centred child-centric psychological interventions”. The study spotlights this important and often overlooked topic and seeks to humanise boys and recognise them as vulnerable, complex and relational subjects.

Dr Titi’s study explores the experiences of young black boys between nine and 13 years old. Each participant lives in a black township in Cape Town; has a history of sexual violence; has disclosed it; and is currently receiving psychosocial support. Their individual contexts are shaped by poly-victimisation, where multiple forms of abuse overlap and access to mental health support services remains limited.

“What’s important to know is that this research does not isolate the individual child.”

“What’s important to know is that this research does not isolate the individual child. Instead, it situates the boys’ experiences within their everyday relational worlds – homes, peer groups, schools and communities, where violence is often cumulative and normalised,” she said.

Niémah Davids (ND): This research stemmed from your PhD. Tell me a bit about the gaps you identified at the time that led to this undertaking.

Neziswa Titi (NT): This study builds directly on my doctoral research, which developed an African-centred, child-centric, psychological conceptual tool to understand and respond to children’s experiences of sexual trauma. That work centred children as epistemic agents – foregrounding their voices, language and ways of making meaning. It challenged the Eurocentric, adult and expert-centric approaches in psychology. However, the empirical base of this work was deeply uneven. It included the experiences of 15 girls and only one boy.

The limitation in the doctoral work importantly foregrounded a key but often ignored reality: young boys are also victims of sexual violence and are abused not only by men and other boys (their peers), but by their mothers and other women. What this meant was that the decolonial, African-centred, child-focused psychological framework, developed in the PhD, was shaped by girls’ narratives and left boys’ experiences of trauma, disclosure and healing under-theorised.

ND: How does this study make boys’ experiences the focal point?

NT: We do this by directly centring their lived experiences and, while doing so, we expand on the conceptual tool to be gender responsive. Through this research, we critically examine how boys are silenced, misread and excluded from care.

ND: Please share some of the key findings of this work.

NT: Interestingly, building directly from the PhD, the study finds that boys seek significantly less help for sexual violence from formal institutions when compared to girls.

During discussions with boys, their narratives reveal that they can speak about trauma, especially in safe, one-on-one spaces. They demonstrate empathy, insight and relational awareness and experience vulnerability, confusion, and questioning, like girls. What this study does well is it reframes healing not just as clinical, but also relational, cultural, spiritual and community based.

ND: From your work and findings to date, would you say that more emphasis is placed on how to support girls as victims of sexual abuse?

NT: Yes, very strongly. Research, policy and intervention frameworks have historically focused more on girls as victims of sexual abuse. This is important, but it has also created many gaps. Therefore, and what we’ve observed through this work, is that girls are more likely to disclose and access support services. However, it appears that boys are far less likely to seek formal help, which has raised questions of their disclosure and reporting patterns, even when experiencing similar levels of harm.

“Research, policy and intervention frameworks have historically focused more on girls as victims of sexual abuse.”

As a result, and most unfortunately, boys remain underrepresented in research, and interventions are designed with girls in mind. So, boys’ experiences become invisible and unintelligible. All of this is compounded by dominant assumptions that boys are less vulnerable; sexual violence perpetuated against boys is rare; and perpetrators are primarily men. This study also highlights that boys are abused by various perpetrators, including women. The issue is not that boys are less affected by sexual abuse, but that their experiences are socially silenced and it is very difficult to recognise their vulnerability within dominant gender frameworks.

ND: Other similar studies have been carried out before. What sets this one apart?

NT: What sets this study apart is its theoretical intervention. While masculinity studies have made important contributions to understanding boys in relation to gender, much research still tends to interpret boys primarily through masculinity frameworks. This study resists reducing boys to masculinised constructs alone. Instead, it centres boys as children first—approaching them as rights-bearing individuals with voices, whose developmental, relational, and care needs must be prioritised. This does not mean that boys are understood outside of gender, but rather that their status as children are analytically foregrounded alongside gender, rather than being subsumed by it.

The study draws on an African-centred, child-centric, decolonial feminist framework to read boys’ experiences. Within this approach, masculinity is not dismissed, but is decentered and treated as one influence among many, rather than through the dominant interpretive lens. This shift is important because masculinity frameworks can, at times, overdetermine how boys are understood – privileging norms such as strength, silence, or dominance, and prematurely equating boys’ subjective experiences with those of adult men. By widening the analytical lens, the study seeks to offer a more expansive, contextually grounded understanding of boys’ lives.

ND: What’s the most important aspect of this work?

NT: An important aspect of this study is its explicit engagement with positionality and reflexivity, which are treated as core ethical epistemological commitments, and not merely methodological add-ons. Our research team recognises that we enter the field with our individual personalities – as adults, researchers, students and scholars located within particular institutional, socio-cultural, psycho-linguistic and historical contexts, and are therefore not neutral in the research process. These positions shape how boys experience us, what they choose to share or withhold and how we interpret their narratives.

ND: What does this work do for researchers?

“This work calls for us to humanise men and boys.”

NT: This work calls for us to humanise men and boys, rethink rigid constructions of gender and masculinities, and helps us to see boys not as future men, who are defined by power and patriarchal constructions, but as children navigating harm, care and survival.

ND: What is the next phase of this study?

NT: A key upcoming feature after the data collection is the child validation process, which will inform the adaption and redesign of the psychological conceptual tool for practice in both community and professional practice. The intention here includes producing an output catered towards children and designed by young people.