Twelve years ago, after a visit to Chiang Mai, Alezandra Russell founded Urban Light, a nonprofit serving Thai boys affected by sex trafficking and exploitation. Because of her work, she is intimately familiar with how gender bias and prejudice can hurt males. We are so grateful she agreed to answer our questions — and we were totally blown away by what she shared. Please watch.
‘Boys matter too’ – Alezandra Russell
Below is a lightly edited transcript of a portion of the video above.
Blair Daly: Are there any comments or questions you typically receive from people when they first become aware that there’s a sizable population of boys who are sex trafficked?
Alezandra Russell: Yeah, there’s a stigma tied to boys and men. I often say I’m the Debbie Downer of every cocktail party because nobody wants to hear about vulnerable teenage boys, homeless teenage boys, sexually abused teenage boys. People are so much more confident or comfortable listening to the plight of girls.
Until we can remove that bias, it’s really hard to fundraise, to get people to care, to get people to understand. Advocates like myself are constantly getting pushback, like ‘Boys should just stand up for themselves. They should be stronger. They’re capable. Why don’t they just push off the perpetrator? Why don’t they defend themselves?‘ It’s a laundry list of excuses as to why it’s impossible for boys to be on the receiving end of exploitation.
Through our research we’ve seen that boys can sometimes be even more susceptible to abuse — because they’re so invisible, because they’re so marginalized, and because they’re so absent in the conversation. That’s one thing we’ve been pushing in our advocacy work and our social media content, to make the point that boys matter too.
Even fellow humanitarians are skeptical
Blair Daly: I can see how it would be psychologically discomforting for people to think about male victims of sex trafficking and exploitation when they have a paradigm of males as being responsible for protecting others and females as responsible for being protected.
Alezandra Russell: Yes, it’s really interesting. I think of it as a kind of collective block that we have. We just don’t want to talk about that. And when we have that collective block, it prevents boys and men from disclosing, from feeling like they have a place to share what has happened to them.
I can’t tell you how many men have come to me and have been so open about abuse or exploitation they’ve experienced, like from family members, or even online perpetrators. I want them to know there’s no judgment, either from myself or from Urban Light — that it’s a safe place. But even with that disclaimer, it’s so hard for the boys we see at Urban Light to open up, and for these young men to feel like it’s ok and that there will be no judgment.
I can see why they feel that way. In 2019 I was in India where I received the Mother Teresa Award. It was myself and a handful of other incredible advocates, mostly from India, mostly working in the anti-trafficking space.
I had this heartbreaking moment where I had just given my speech about the issue Urban Light works on — the exploitation of boys — and the founder of another organization came up to me and said, “I disagree with you.” I said, “Ok, let’s have a conversation. What do you disagree with me on?”
She said, “We work in brothels in India rescuing girls. Every girl who’s exploited is exploited by a man. The man is constantly the perpetrator, the pimp, the buyer — there’s no way that they can be the ones that are actually the victims.” This was coming from someone who was a peer of mine.
To hear her so adamantly say that abused boys are going to become the abusers, an idea that is just not true, was upsetting for me. It felt like Wow, we just took two steps back. Here we are wanting to educate people and have them see the reality and hear the stories of our boys, and yet people working within this space are still not convinced. That’s the reality we face. It is very much an uphill battle.
Hear more from Alezandra in the interview video.
For another example of male victimization that flies under the radar, see: Astonishing Facts About Circumcision from a Seattle Attorney along with our page on Genital Autonomy