Everything You Need to Know When You Are the Male Survivor of Rape or Sexual Assault (Need to Know Library). This item is unavailable.Everything You Need to Know When You Are the Male Survivor of Rape or Sexual Assault (Need to Know Library)

Discusses the phenomenon of male rape, especially of children and teenagers, with an emphasis on getting the help necessary for emotional recovery

Gr. 9^-12. The language is straightforward, and the examples (including descriptions of male rape) are graphic in this entry in the Need to Know Library, but La Valle's "true accounts" present a clear view of how victimizers manipulate children's emotions to achieve their own ends. Forms of abuse are the focus, but also included is information about abusers, aftereffects, pornography, and personal safety. Integration of general information and material specifically for boys is not always smooth, with La Valle sometimes awkwardly switching from third to second person, and there's a good deal of oversimplification. Sixty-four pages is not adequate to give the subject the consideration it deserves. Still, the concise, forthright approach has some advantages: the easy-to-read format, characteristic of the series, makes the material accessible, and the explicitness of the text will fill in blanks for teens who may not really understand male abuse despite protests that they already "know it all." Helen Benedict's Safe, Strong, and Streetwise (1987), addressed to both young men and women, is a less explicit, more encompassing alternative. Stephanie Zvirin