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Alex Feis-Bryce was 18 when he was raped by a stranger at a party.
He had just declared himself gay and had moved from his small town to Manchester, England, to study.
“I think this was my second time going to a gay bar or pub. My friend and I met people who invited us to a house party,” he says.
“I was hopelessly naive and wanted to make friends and be open with people. I agreed, but my friend changed his mind at the last minute.”
Alex was taken to a property where do you think he was drugged.
“The owner of the house poured me a drink and I started to feel sleepy. He took me to a room and soon after he came over and raped me. the feeling of being bedridden. “
The next day, “the instinct for survival kicked in”.
Alex agreed to let the man take him back to college and tried to bury what had happened.
“I actually thought rape wasn’t something that happened to men, so maybe it wasn’t something that happened to me.”
“I was programmed to think about what happens to women, and that made it much more difficult to prosecute or report to the police because I didn’t think they would believe me,” he says.
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Alex is now CEO of Survivors UK, a charity that provides support to men, boys and non-binary people who have been raped, sexually assaulted or abused.
While victims of sexual violence are much more likely to be female, the England and Wales Crime Survey estimates that one in 100 men suffered any form of sexual assault or attempted assault during the year until March 2020.
Last year, Reynhard Sinaga, “the most prolific rapist in British legal history”, was convicted of luring 48 men outside of Manchester clubs to his apartment, not far from the bar where Alex was. approach.
Sinaga drugged and assaulted men, film the attacks.
Survivors UK study suggests gay and bisexual men are more likely to be sexually assaulted than the general male population.
In their survey of 505 gay and bisexual men, 47% said they had been sexually assaulted, and more than a third said they felt they couldn’t talk to anyone about what had happened.
It is important to recognize that most sexual assault “they occur in the sex life that we have”points out Alex.
“No queremos alimentar el estereotipo homofóbico de que los hombres homosexuales y bisexuales son más promiscuos o depredadores, pero queremos ser conscious de los espacios ‘queer’ donde las personas tienen sexo consensuado pero donde se traspasan los límites, bares gay drugs”.
“This is the difficult but important part of the research, (recording this) without stigmatizing specific sexual practices.”
All the victims
Only one in seven participants in the investigation, conducted last August, had reported an incident of sexual assault to police. Of those who did, approximately a quarter of a game he did not feel believed or felt that his complaint was not taken seriously.
“It’s a matter of consent. Sex with drugs, for example, or any other sex that is not heteronormative or conventional; sex with more than one partner (for example) can be extremely stigmatizing.” , explains Alex.
“So if someone experiences sexual violence in such circumstances, they will be less likely to speak to the police.”
The LGBT + abuse charity Galop also supports people who have suffered abuse or sexual violence.
“Gay and bisexual men often have do not see each other or their experiences are not represented in the way sexual violence is approached, and there are very few support services available to help them, ”says Executive Director Leni Morris.
“From our investigation, we know that many will never report to the police and will be left behind by what happened to them without professional support,” Morris said.
“We need to make sure that the public discourse on sexual assault include all victims, and that every survivor of sexual violence can access the assistance she needs. ”
Lee (not her real name) was 15 when he was admitted to hospital after self-injuring while struggling to come to terms with his sexuality.
There, he was sexually assaulted by a male counselor for over a year, an experience which he says resulted in many years of trauma.
“For a good decade this experience permeated other levels of my functioning. Sexual assault or violence felt normalized and I wasn’t taking very good care of myself, ”he says.
“I needed to get out of my head, but the cure turned into chaos and I created another problem for myself, abusing drugs and sex to deal with deep discomfort and discomfort and deal with how I felt. ”
When he finally asked for help, he was also unsure whether this happened to him constituted a sexual assault.
“Maybe I mistakenly saw that what he did to me was not violent: he did not hit or kick me, he did not rape me and I did. deduced that I could continue. ”
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