insideMAN

Why Eric Bristow is wrong about male victims of sexual abuse

by 6 Comments

The former darts world champion, Eric Bristow has lost his role with Sky Sports after suggesting that the footballers speaking out about being victims of childhood sexual abuse are not “proper men”.

It’s a shocking fact that between 2011 and 2015 there were an estimated 679,000 sexual assaults on men and boys in the UK and 96% were not reported to the police. Yet according to media reports, Bristow said on twitter that footballers are “wimps” and that the victims should not be able to look at themselves in the mirror for failing to get revenge on their abusers as adults. In contrast, Bristow said that darts players are “tough guys” and that he “would have went back and sorted that poof out”, later claiming he “meant paedophile not poof”.

In response to the comments made by Eric Bristow, the Sussex-based charity for male victims of sexual abuse, Mankind, issued the following statement “as a way of gaining greater understanding of some of the issues that Mr Bristow raises”. The statement says:

We recognise that Eric Bristow’s comments on his twitter account were unhelpful and could be received as deeply offensive by the courageous men who have agonised over whether or not to come forward and share their stories of historic sexual abuse. We also feel it is useful to separate the behaviour from the man. Over the coming days and weeks, Mr Bristow will no doubt be pilloried in the press. Sometimes this public shaming of people who express their misunderstanding of a social issue is just as unhelpful as the ignorance of their poorly conceived comments.

https://inews.co.uk/opinion/eric-bristow-bigot-hes-not-alone-hes-one-many-need-challenging/

 

Let’s take a moment to unpack some of Mr Bristow’s misconceptions about how an individual responds to sexual abuse in the moment and how they choose to heal from this experience later in life. Mr Bristow’s twitter feed would suggest that in the first instance a child is fully in control of their faculties to resist a sexual perpetrator. Secondly, he implies that as a survivor matures to adulthood, they “should” seek out their perpetrator in order to take their violent revenge.

Both of these assumptions are often untrue for survivors of sexual abuse. Sadly, Mr Bristow’s views are not held in isolation. At Mankind, we regularly hear from our clients about a general lack of understanding about the impact of sexual abuse on an individual and the pain caused by friends and family members expressing unhelpful comments like “why didn’t you fight back?” and “surely you could have done something about it!”.

So let’s look at Mr Bristow’s first assumption, the idea that a young person can choose to fight off their perpetrator when the abuse is taking place. A crucial problem with this assumption is the idea that a person faced with trauma has full resource of their brain. When confronted with a traumatic event, the back brain referred to as the limbic system takes the lead. This part of the brain is unconscious, automatic and invested in survival. It is this part of the brain that will determine a person’s response when confronted with a serious threat. The front brain or neo-cortex where thinking, choosing, planning and reflecting takes place is bypassed. Accordingly, at the moment of trauma, the individual does not choose how to respond and may be surprised by the response of their body to freeze, take flight or fight.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/pa/article-3981728/Eric-Bristow-dropped-Sky-sparking-fury-football-abuse-tweets.html

When the fight or flight systems cannot be activated or escape is impossible, the limbic system can simultaneously activate a different branch of the autonomic nervous system, causing a state of freezing called “tonic immobility” – like a deer caught in headlights. There could be many reasons, both physical or relational as to why fighting or fleeing are not viable options, particularly if the traumatic threat is prolonged.

Now let’s take a look at Mr Bristow’s second assumption, the idea that a survivor of historic sexual abuse “should” want to exact violent revenge on their perpetrator. From our experience of working with men who have experienced childhood sexual abuse, we have seen that fantasies about taking revenge are common. These thoughts can sometimes be all consuming and can swallow up an individual’s every waking moment. However, these thoughts often remain just that; thoughts, re-occurring fantasises of what revenge might feel like. As clients begin to recover from their experiences and grow in different areas of their life, they tend to be less interested in revenge.

A far greater need is often their desire to be heard, believed and understood by their community. On another level, Mr Bristow’s comments about seeking revenge underestimate the potential complexity of a survivor’s relationship to their perpetrator. In the tabloid press, sexual perpetrators are often presented in cartoonish form where they are stalking strangers who were “born evil”. In reality, the majority of individuals who experience childhood sexual abuse are abused by a member of their own family, a trusted family friend or a person in authority. In the case of the footballers, their abusers had significant influence and power over their lives and indeed the continuation of their careers.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/29/eric-bristow-twitter-toxic-attitudes-stop-abuse-victims

If we imagine a scenario where the perpetrator is an aunty, much loved by the rest of the family and celebrated for her superb community work and social standing, how easy is it for the survivor to seek revenge? For this survivor, to speak out may risk a huge rupture in the family. Worse still, what if they are not believed or their experience is denied? Where the perpetrator is viewed as a sinister male stranger who exists in a vacuum and was simply born evil, Bristow’s idea of a survivor seeking violent retribution is perhaps easier to understand. The idea of an adult survivor paying a visit to their aging aunt who abused them 30 years ago with the aim of beating her up is perhaps a less palatable concept.

It is all too easy to shower Mr Bristow in shame. Perhaps, it is more helpful to unpack some of the stereotypes and prejudices that are contained in his words. These are the views that persist in many sections of our society and act as a barrier to men in coming to terms with their abuse and finding a way forward that works for them .

Mankind is a Hove-based agency that offers support to men who have experienced sexual abuse at any time in their lives. All of its services are by appointment only and details can be found on the website www.mankindcounselling.org.uk.

For more immediate assistance for men who wish to talk about their own experience of sexual abuse, there is a national helpline run by Safeline www.safeline.org.uk who can be contacted on 0808 800 5005.

  • paul parmenter

    Thankyou for this article, which hits very close to home with me. Firstly let me say that I don’t think Bristow should have lost his job because of his opinions. That has happened far too often, and Bristow should be accorded the right to speak his mind without being punished or abused for doing so. But I profoundly disagree with his views, for very much the same reasons as outlined in this article.

    I think I can speak with some authority on the subject, since I was sexually abused as a young child. It was a one-off, and the abusers were a group of girls, none of whom I knew. It was horrific and shattering at the time, and I was engulfed in humiliation and shame that prevented me from telling anyone. It was not the only emotion I felt: there was also furious anger, hatred and fear. Frustration too, springing from the fact that I knew I could not fight back because I had always had it drummed into me that “boys don’t hit girls”. I knew that if I did so, I would immediately be treated as the abuser and they would be the victims. It’s still much the same today. I was also eaten up with jealousy, because I didn’t understand why girls had complete licence to do whatever they wanted to me, while I would never have been allowed to do anything to them.

    Unable to speak, and unable to live with what had happened, I tried to kill myself. It was only by pure luck that I survived. I never told anyone about that either, because to do so would have meant explaining why.

    Yes, this is one of the main reasons why I regularly post comments on this and other forums whenever the subject of male/female relations comes up, and why I take the slant that I do. I learned at a very early age that females can be abusers and do the same vile things that male perpetrators do. So I have never, for one moment, had any truck with the one-sided narrative of “male bad, female good” that is so often pumped out at us.

    The article is also correct in its description of how you might react. In my case, while it was happening, I froze. It was a natural and instinctive reaction; anyway I had no other choice. But the idea that I should wait until I grew into a hulking great muscular brute and then seek out my abusers to extract some violent form of retribution, was as absurd as it was impossible, for many reasons. We are not all knuckle-dragging cavemen who believe two wrongs make a right and every problem can be solved by beating somebody’s brains out; and I never developed into that type anyway. So does that make me a wimp per Bristow’s view? Maybe it does. But even wimps are entitled to go about their lives without being attacked; and if they are abused, they are surely as entitled to help and support as anyone else, without being insulted for their pains.

    But I can also explain why it can often take so many years before victims come forward. Firstly, it is only very recently that there has been some small movement in our society towards accepting and believing that such events do actually happen to men and boys; and that charities and agencies have been put in place to support victims. Throughout all earlier history, there was no acceptance, no belief and no help available. Victims were just ignored or closed down completely. We simply don’t know how many must have suffered in silence. Also, if you are not able to speak out in the immediate aftermath, it gets harder and harder to do so as time goes by. Instead you revert to just hoping that the memory will fade and you will somehow get over it. But it takes something extraordinary to do so; in most cases, including mine, the memory just festers and never gives you any peace, often leading to severe consequences in later life. It may only get better when you can finally find someone to listen and understand – and such people are still few and far between. Even now, there is a common assumption that if you have waited for decades before speaking out, you must be making it all up, and your motive is just to jump on a bandwagon and fish for attention or compensation.

    It took me more than 50 years after the event before I was finally able to face up to speaking about what had happened to me; and also to find a suitable charity with a counsellor that I felt able to talk to and tell my story. Once I did so, repeating it here or elsewhere became easier, so I am not afraid to do so now. But obviously far too late for justice, revenge, or anything else. I let those girls get clean away with it; and that was also part of my shame, because I don’t know if they tried it on other boys whom I might have saved if I had had more courage at the time. But while I can blame myself, and have done so often enough, I also think that there were many others who must share that blame.

    That Bristow harbours his simplistic, unthinking and blinkered views is sad – although I repeat that he is entitled to express them. But I have read a large number of comments about them on other public forums, and found that there is a substantial majority in support of them. So it seems that there is still a frighteningly long way to go before sexual abuse of males, whether old or young, is taken seriously by the great British public, and appropriate (not knee-jerk) responses become acceptable. What is needed:

    Be receptive.
    Listen.
    Understand.
    Don’t judge.

    That would be enough. Not too much to ask, surely? And something that I would hope every “real man” is capable of doing? It would make a world of difference. This abuse must be stopped. No child, male or female, should have to go through this kind of hell and be made by everyone else to feel too ashamed or afraid to speak about it.

    • Groan

      Both the Article and you moving testimony are so helpful. Eric Bristow’s comments at least have the virtue of moving into a real discussion about this issue. Well actually any issue in which the ideas of “manning up” and dealing with any and all crises on ones own. Boys and men need to be “heard” as much as girls and women. Of course to stop further abuse but as part of being a human being. Bristow unwittingly helped us all by reminding us of one of the ways boys and men are silenced. We learn little without confronting the world as it is, rather than as we might like it to be.

    • insideMAN

      Paul

      Thanks for sharing you personal experience so articulately.

      Best Wishes

      Glen

  • CitymanMichael

    Yes, this article correctly points out some of the widely held beliefs around male sexual abuse which Paul Parmenter so eloquently points out in his comment.
    Sky Sports totally missed the point as do the “liberal” press when they pillory people for simply publically stating their views – the best way forward for Sky Sports would have been to have a filmed meeting with Eric and some of the abused footballers. Understanding of the abuse & effects thereof is what is needed – not lambast someone for having obviously deeply held beliefs (and which he is entitled to express).
    BBC radio 4’s presenter on the 5pm programme kept saying Eric Bristow M.B.E. – M.B.E. – M.B.E. – in such a patronising and condesending way which is typical of a sneering “we are more intelligent than you – and more deserving of our rightful place as the voice of the people”.

    • Groan

      Apologies I made a similar comment. As you say no one gains from just making an easy theatrical flourish.

  • Groan

    Excellent piece by Martin Daubney in the Telegraph.