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CORPUS OF MALE SURVIVOR MEMOIRS (CMSM)

Silent No More: Male Survivor Works on Childhood Sexual Abuse

An ongoing project of the Phoenix Foundation is the Corpus of Male Survivor Memoirs (CMSM), which seeks to assemble a research collection of all memoirs by male survivors of childhood sexual abuse worldwide, in all relevant languages. It also includes journals, diaries, compilations of letters, and interviews, poetry collections and plays by male survivors, as well as translations, anthologies and biographical works, academic studies, research aids, self-help guides, workbooks, and textbooks. As of summer 2025 the corpus consists of about 7000 items. Nearly 3000 of these are memoirs by male survivors, comprising about 95% of all known male survivor memoirs published worldwide.

Explore our Male Survivor Literary Bibliography - A Comprehensive Collection of writings by sexual abuse survivors spanning from 1800s to 2020s, including autobiographical memoirs and diverse literary works.
Bibliography example of the corpus

Types of Memoirs

The memoirs are of two types. The majority are “recovery memoirs,” in the sense that the author’s primary theme, or one of his main themes, is sexual abuse in childhood, its impact on his life, and his experiences in recovery. It is in such memoirs that one will find detailed and nuanced information on such topics as grooming, cognitive distortions, disclosure, and impact later in the survivor’s life.

Other memoirs, classified as “survivor memoirs,” are included in the CMSM because their authors disclose sexual abuse in childhood, but do not pursue it as a major topic. Examples of this latter category would be:

  • a memoir by a recovering alcoholic who reveals that he was sexually abused as a child but does not explore the subject;
  • a musician whose account of his chaotic childhood includes incidents of sexual abuse, without pursuing the subject in further detail;
  • numerous accounts in which the author discloses what is in fact sexual abuse by an older female, but which he regards as “getting lucky” or a landmark in his “coming of age,” and therefore does not perceive as harmful.

These works tend to “flatten” incidents of abuse and offer a more limited range of detail. And to the extent that they offer information on later difficulties in life, they are likely to miss the possibility that these problems are related to their sexual experiences in childhood.

Categories of Memoirs

The memoirs range over the various forms that sexual abuse of children takes, and thus fall into differing categories. So in addition to distinguishing between survivor and recovery memoirs, the CMSM divides them according to these categories of abuse:

  • Abuse by Adolescents
  • Abuse by Female Offenders (non-incest)
  • Abuse in Medical Institutions (by physicians, in hospitals)
  • Abuse by Service Institutions (non-Boy Scout)
  • Abuse in Trafficking and Sex Rings
  • Abuse in the Workplace
  • Abuse in Residential Institutions (orphanages, foster care, detention centers)
  • Acquaintance Abuse
  • African American Survivors
  • Boy Scout Survivors
  • Clergy Abuse (Catholic Church)
  • Clergy Abuse (other Christian denominations)
  • First Nations/Native American Survivors
  • Gay Survivors
  • Hispanic Survivors
  • Jewish Survivors (non-Holocaust)
  • Maternal Incest (including stepmothers, grandmothers, and aunts)
  • Paternal Incest (including stepfathers, grandfathers, and uncles)
  • Sex Ring Survivors
  • Sibling Incest (including step-siblings and cousins)
  • Stranger Abuse
  • Street Kids and Prostitution
  • Teen Memoir Authors
  • Young Adult Survivors (ages 18-early 20s)

As these categories are not mutually exclusive and it is not unusual for a child to be abused by multiple perpetrators, the CMSM involves extensive cross-referencing, with some memoirs appearing in several categories. Other categories may emerge as work proceeds.

Diversity of the Material

The CMSM covers survivors of many national and ethnic origins, family, social, and economic backgrounds, sexual orientations, professional occupations, and religious convictions. Authors vary in age from thirteen-year-old boys to men in their nineties. Some are relatively unknown individuals leading more or less private lives; others are internationally recognized historical figures (e.g. Lord Byron, Benjamin Franklin, Leo Tolstoy) and modern celebrities (e.g. Sean Connery, Benjamin Spock, Orson Wells).

The nations represented in the CMSM include most of the countries of North and South America and western Europe. Eastern Europe and Africa (except for South Africa) are poorly represented, and Asia is covered by only a few memoirs from Japan and Korea. From the Islamic world there are only memoirs published in Western languages by emigrants now living in Western countries. (This dearth probably reflects the extreme level of stigma attached to sexual victimization in these regions, though problematic access to published works may also be a factor.) The languages represented thus far are Afrikaans, Catalan, Dutch, English, French, German, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish. (Cf. below on foreign language memoirs.)

Disclosure and Anonymity

In some cases an included work is a memoir by a male survivor who says nothing about his sexual abuse experience in that particular context, but discloses it in a subsequent book, interview, or blog, or in a revised version of his memoir. The English actor David Niven, for example, published several memoirs framed by his professional Hollywood image as a debonair man-about-town, but later revealed in an interview his devastating experience of childhood sexual abuse.

Numerous authors represented in the corpus have published under pseudonyms. Some of these are obvious (e.g. “Medusa Stone”), others less so; in some cases the author uses a pseudonym on his title page and for marketing purposes, but discloses his true name in his text. The Phoenix Foundation does not pursue this matter in the CMSM, recognizing pseudonymous authorship as a boundary a survivor has every right to ask that others respect.

Foreign Language Memoirs

Memoirs by male survivors do not begin with works in English; the first was written in French by the Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, generally regarded as the pioneer in modern autobiography. At various places in his Confessions, published posthumously in 1782, he talks about being seduced at the age of twelve (1724) and drawn into a troubling sexual relationship by the 22-year-old daughter of a woman his father knew.

By the end of 2020 (and continuing since then) another 118 survivors have disclosed and discussed childhood sexual abuse in memoirs in eleven languages other than English:

What are we to make of this data? As in all matters of statistics (and many other things, for that matter), “the devil is in the details.” The following are some of the factors one must bear in mind when assessing non-English male survivor memoirs:

  • In vast parts of the world, sexual abuse remains an absolutely taboo subject, even more so than in the Anglophone world. Victims of both sexes are devastatingly stigmatized, more so that an outsider might expect, and their families subjected to enormous shame. Being a survivor seriously compromises marriage prospects for both sexes in cultures where the family has a major say in choice of a partner, and murder of the victim can occur if the shame heaped onto a family is intense enough. Boys are routinely blamed for their own abuse, because they should have been sensible enough or strong enough to prevent it: if abuse occurred, then, it’s the boy whom observers blame, and who knows, perhaps he’s a homosexual – another source of enormous shame. It comes as no surprise, for example, that in the Arab world, including both Muslims and Christians in a population of over 450 million, not a single memoir by a male survivor has been published in Arabic. Public revelations of abuse cases rarely occur, though incidents are frequently mentioned informally or privately. The key factors in the silence are shame and suppression. The same seems also to be true of numerous other cultures.
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  • In some cases the total number of memoirs published in a certain language reflects the activity of authors who published more than one work. It seems that all of the Japanese works, for example, were authored by one man – the renowned writer Osamu Dazai (1909-48), and the four in Icelandic all come from the pen of Jón Gnarr (1967- ), former mayor of Reykjavik.
  • A potentially relevant work may be out of print, or may be available in only in libraries within its country of origin, or may now be entirely unavailable, except in unknown private hands. It is impossible even to estimate how many survivor memoirs remain inaccessible or hidden from view for such reasons. In 2020, for example, a 716-page volume of the complete works of the Argentine poet, essayist, and punk musician and performance artist Josué Marcos Belmonte (“Ioshua,” 1977-2015) was published in Buenos Aires, and included numerous works previously unknown outside Argentina.
  • It is not unusual for a survivor to write in a second language, which can obscure the nationality of the author. Hamed Abdel-Samed (1970- ), for example, is Egyptian, but he has lived for many years in Germany and wrote his memoir in German. The reasons for this trend vary:
    • The author is now living in a foreign country, or went to school there, and has learned its language, perhaps to the extent that he feels more comfortable writing in his adopted language.
    • He is multilingual and wishes to write in a language that will make his book available to a broader audience.
    • He is multilingual and wishes to reach out with a memoir, but for personal reasons does not want it to be widely accessible in his country or culture of origin.
    • He wrote in his own language, but the text was published only in translation.
  • Use of a certain language does not mean the book originates from the country with which that language is primarily associated. French works in the CMSM include books by French Canadian and Belgian authors and an American Samoan raised in Hawaii and Seattle. Spanish works include books published in Mexico, Argentina, Chile, and Costa Rica (but not, interestingly enough, Hispanic authors in the United States, who so far have always written in English).

One must also bear in mind that the ongoing research for the CMSM is primarily based on online search resources. Methodologies and classifications differ, despite efforts at standardization, with significant results. A search of the WorldCat for sexual abuse memoirs originally written in Spanish will turn up one memoir; the CMSM holds twenty. Also, online resources are dominated by the input of American institutions and so favor books written in English; it is not unusual to find that an important foreign-language memoir is held in no American library. It may be that a book is simply unknown, often because accessions departments lack the skills and incentive to locate and acquire it. Another factor is the many Anglophone institutions will not acquire non-English books (unless a request for a specific book is submitted and justified), either for budgetary reasons or simply because their students lack the skills to read foreign-language books. Other books, despite their importance, are not acquired because they were self-published and thus have been excluded from the Library of Congress cataloging system.

There is also, unfortunately, an arrogant prejudice against non-English works in some Anglophone (especially American) academic circles, where it is not unusual to hear, for example, that if a German work were worth reading it would have been published in English. This is self-evidently absurd. As the critic in question, a professor of psychology at the University of Delaware, has evidently not read such books (and may not know the language), how can she comment on their merit? And of course the problem begins earlier in life: the vast majority of American students in K-12 education do not study a foreign language.