Thank you very much for your very comprehensive and informative lecture on this very difficult topic; the sexual victimization of men. I learned a great deal from your lecture which also made me reflect on this topic once again from different angles. As a result I came up with many ideas and questions on the issue. Please forgive me if some of them are not related specifically to the issue of male victims, but to sexual victimization in general.
My Background
First of all let me introduce myself and discuss my professional background which might make it easy for you to understand where my ideas and questions come from.
I spend my formative years as a psychiatrist in the United States for 17 years (1987～2004）where I had initial clinical experiences of victims as well as perpetrators of sexual trauma. While training at the Menninger Hospital to be a psychoanalyst. (I am now a relational psychoanalyst !!) I worked as a staff psychiatrist at a local state hospital (Topeka State Hospital, now closed down.)
In the unit where I worked (Male adolescent and young adult unit), there were several male patients with a history of sexual victimization (themselves perpetrators). I was under the impression that many of them were withdrawn and passive, contrary to what one can imagine. As their treating psychiatrist, I sometimes used SSRIs to capitalize on their side effect of reducing libido in order to suppress their sexual acting out which can occasionally be exhibited toward other inpatients on the unit.
I once used hormonal injection for “chemical castration” which I hoped can be of help to reduce their acting out potential. One of them tested almost “0” level of testosterone due to the injection, but I was disappointed to learn that he was still showing sexual misconduct on the unit nonetheless. This made me realize that it is not easy at all to handle this problem of sexual violence both psychologically as well as pharmacologically.I also ran a therapeutic group for these male sex offenders for a while, where I learned that this type of group should be managed very carefully in the group setting, as members tend to start bragging about their own tactics of seducing children into sexual interactions.
