After a rainy morning in Boulogne, on the outskirts of Paris, the sun was finally out. Its soft light filled the living room of Adrien Borne's apartment. The 43-year-old writer was devoting his afternoon to talking about male victims of sexual assault, speaking frankly and modestly. In 2022, he published La Vie qui Commence ("The Life That Begins"), a novel rooted in a personal trauma he experienced the summer of his 13^th birthday. In it, the former journalist turned writer – he also published the novels Mémoire de Soie ("Silk Memory") in 2020 and L'Île du Là-Haut ("The Island Up There") in 2024 – weaves a story around the memories of Gabriel, who had been sexually assaulted at summer camp 20 years earlier, at the dawn of his adolescence, by "the camp supervisor in the red tracksuit."

Despite glowing literary reviews, Borne was never invited on any TV shows to talk about the subject of his book. Today, he openly says that he had "a crazy, unspoken and shameless hope: that this book might bring attention to boys." But, faced with the media's indifference, he laments: "I've had to accept that sexual violence against boys remains uncharted territory."

Seven years after the #MeToo movement surged to prominence in 2017, women's testimonies are still flooding the public sphere – "rightly so, given the magnitude of it," he says. But it wasn't until February 2024, when French actor Aurélien Wiik launched the #MeTooGarçons ("MeTooBoys") hashtag, that Borne was contacted to participate in shows looking for men similarly willing to testify.

A statistical gap

The available data on sexual violence shows significant differences between the sexes: 3.9% of men experience sexual violence in their lifetime, according to the 2015 Violences et Rapports de Genre ("Violence and Gender Relations") survey by the French Institute for Demographic Studies (INED). For women, this rises to 14.5%. In addition, women are victims of sexual violence throughout their lives, while more than two-thirds of men who experience such violence do so before the age of 18 or in early adulthood. Does this statistical gap explain why men are less likely to speak out? Compared to women, men's stories seem both more subdued individually and less acknowledged collectively, as if society absorbs them in silence.

While women's testimonies often amount to a societal tidal wave, the #MeToo movement for men manifests itself in small ripples. Yet the men we spoke to, who have dared to expose their damaged lives, describe the same kind of torment. Like women, men are also predominantly assaulted by adult men – 90%, according to INED data – and they too describe a life marked by trauma. Yet their stories contain nuances and silences that reflect gender stereotypes, building a picture of why there has been this delay in men's testimonies emerging into the public sphere.

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