When Sugar Ray Leonard, one of the greatest fighters to ever put on a pair of boxing gloves, revealed to the world in a new book on his life that he was a victim of sexual abuse as a teenager, I was about as stunned as the rest of the world.
According to his soon-to-be published book, The Big Fight: My Life In and Out of the Ring, Leonard said shortly before going to the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, a boxing coach sexually abused him. In an excerpt from the book, which appeared in the New York Times, Leonard writes:
Before I knew it, he had unzipped my pants and put his hand, then mouth, on an area that has haunted me for life. I didn’t scream. I didn’t look at him. I just opened the door and ran.
On the surface, you would never expect that something like that would happen to an athlete of Leonard’s stature. In the tough, macho world of boxing, even at the amateur level, sexual molestation is not supposed to happen to guys who know how to use their fists as well as Leonard did as a young boxer.
But from my own personal experiences, male-on-male sexual assaults in the African-American community is something that is a lot more prevalent than you might think. There have been many stories I’ve heard over the years from friends from my junior high school days to my college days of young black men being victimized by other men whether those experiences have occurred inside or outside the prison system or even within the realm of sports.
As much as I have heard the various second-hand stories of guys being sexually abused by other guys, it’s not something that you’re going to get African-American men (or any man regardless of race) talk about, especially if they have been the victim of a sexual predator. The common fear is that if you do you will be labeled as a punk, soft or one of many demeaning homophobic slurs that insult gay men.
According to several sources that chronicle this issue, about one in six black males are victims of sexual abuse. Some scholars argue that there are probably even more African-American males that have been victims of sexual assault, but they tend not to report it
Men who are raped while they’re in jail never escape that stigma because reporting it to the proper authorities will mark them as a “punk”and will ultimately invite more unwanted sexual advances by other inmates. When men who are sexually assaulted in prison are eventually released from jail, the damage to their wounded psyche is probably unmeasureable. In street parlance when a young man is sexually assaulted by another man, it’s referred to as somebody taking your “manhood” from you. If it’s happened to you, it’s something you don’t talk about , not even to your best friend. If the “bruhs” happen to find out, you can expect to be socially ostracized by your peers.
“If this experience comes at the hands of a male perpetrator, then they’re viewed in a negative light. And it becomes very difficult for men to disclose because there is still a lot of stigma and misconception in society that men are not sexually abused, and to risk losing your macho image is a very big deal to a lot of men,” said Sylvia Coleman, founder of the Black Survivors Network for victims of sexual assault, during a 2009 broadcast of NPR’s Tell Me More.
When news of Leonard’s sexual abuse hit the social networking sites, some of the reaction from black men ranged from “That’s why call him, Sugar” to some brothers who said that it would be a secret they would have to take to the grave with them. In another words, even when it’s someone of Leonard’s accomplishments in the world of sports, it is still taboo among black men to talk about sexual abuse within our community and that’s not a good thing in the long run.
Getting African-American men to admit they have been sexually abused is going to be difficult considering the various misconceptions that exist about sexual abuse along with the pervasiveness of the homophobia that exists in the black community.
Oddly enough, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that 80 percent of boys who are sexually violated don’t become perpetrators and it does not affect their sexuality.
That’s why I applaud Leonard for coming out and admitting that he was a victim of sexual abuse. If one of the greatest fighters of all time can come out and say that he was abused, maybe others will come forward and maybe we help victims heal from what is a horrible assault on children.
One that is abundantly clear is that not talking about sexual abuse only the makes the problem worse.