Lawrence KilliumAlex Morgan, a male rape survivor and CEO of Stay Brave UK, was horrified when he was told by a helpline that “men are the attackers, women are the victims” when he tried to talk about everything that had happened to him.
When he was 14 he was chased and attacked while walking home from school by a 20 year old, and struggled to find someone who he could talk to about it. When he dialed a rape crisis hotline, he was told very bluntly that “this number is for women and girls.”
‘I remember her saying “men are the abusers, women are the victims, we need to terminate this call now so we can help victims.”‘
He recounted his story to The Telegraph:
On one return journey from the car park Morgan took a short cut through a field. He noticed someone following him, a young man, 20 at a stretch, who he’d not seen at the car park. He quickened his pace then hid among the crops. When he thought the coast was clear he returned to the narrow path and carried on walking. The attacker charged at him, knocked him down, smashed his face into the ground with one hand and ripped off his jeans with the other. He doesn’t remember walking home. He never returned to the car park.
“It didn’t start affecting me emotionally until about six to eight months later,” says Morgan. When he stumbled across the number for a rape crisis helpline in the back of his school diary he dialled and asked for help. “Nothing in it really said it was for girls, or anything like that. But I was told very bluntly down the phone that this number is for women and girls. I remember her saying ‘men are the abusers, women are the victims, we need to terminate this call now so we can help victims’. I remember just hanging up. She didn’t finish her sentence.”
Can you imagine that? You’ve gone through something as traumatic as that, you call a phone number fully staffed with people who have supposedly been trained to help those who have been raped, and that is how they treat you?
Without the help that he needed, Morgan admits that his mental state had severely suffered, he entered multiple unhealthy and abusive relationships that he may not have otherwise.
He ended up meeting a teacher from a different school through a dating site, and said that the teacher used Morgan’s past to his advantage.
He told The Telegraph that he was “very manipulative in saying that he wanted to start recording what we did and sharing it with his friends. Then he was kind of like, ‘well I want to start bringing my friends over,’ so he started to bring his friends over. Then I realised that his friends were actually paying him to have sex with his twinky boyfriend.”
If only someone had decided to help him instead of discriminating against him because of his gender, his story may have been different.
H/T: The Telegraph
