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These two books, edited by Richard Gartner (2018a, 2018b), are a follow-up of his 1999 groundbreaking volume, Betrayed as Boys. This is what I said about the 1999 work in my own book, Paradigms in Psychoanalysis:
Gartner (1999) stresses that males also suffer sexual abuse, even if less frequently than females. The reported frequency, however, is lower than the real one for cultural reasons. For example, if a boy has sexual contact with an adult woman, the prevailing culture tends to consider this experience not as violence, but as an initiation. The frequency of abuse endured by males is, therefore, underestimated in statistics (Bacciagaluppi, 2012, p. 156).
This comment is quite correct but does not pay full tribute to the importance of Gartner's work.
As we know, after having acknowledged the reality of sexual trauma in his early work, Freud denied it in 1897, and this denial became a cornerstone of the official psychoanalytic ideology. When Ferenczi validated the reality of childhood sexual trauma in his writings, he was strongly disapproved and accused of being mad (Ferenczi is discussed in Chapter 8 of the first of these two volumes). After the Second World War, Syndrome (PTSD) was incorporated into the DSM-III (American Psychiatric Association, 1980). This development was the result of two sets of events: the protests of American feminists against the sexual abuse of women and children, and the protests of Vietnam veterans against the traumas of war. There was thus a male component in this development, but it did not concern male sexual trauma. After 1980, the trauma literature continued to develop, for example, a few years before Gartner's book, Davies and Frawley's (1994) book immensely helped therapists in their work with female survivors of childhood sexual abuse. It was only with Gartner's (1999) book that male sexual abuse came to the fore. This subject was later taken up in other fields. The movie Spotlight (directed by Tom McCarthy, 2015) focused on the s