Last week, Terrence Howard appeared on Patrick Bet-David’s PBD podcast and shared that his first sexual experience occurred at the age of four with girls aged six and seven who were watching him. He described playing “hide and go get” daily, stating that he had more sex back then than he has had in his entire life.
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Pause. Take a moment to process that.
Over the years, the actor has spoken openly about being sexually assaulted as a child by older boys and men who were supposed to protect him but instead violated his trust. He talked about these violations as part of an environment of extreme sexual and physical violence that robbed him of a childhood and forced him to grow up too quickly.
When Howard said he used to play “hide and go get it” and that was how he was sexually violated, I cringed. I think many did.
Many of us played this game as children, and though most of us did not have the same experience as he did, this game could provide cultural cover for the sexual assault of Black children.
On the surface, it is a silly game. But in many communities, the phrase has long functioned as a euphemism for sexual activity. When we look at Howard’s description of his involvement with girls in these settings, the problem becomes clear. The language of “play” softens what is actually happening. It turns behavior that would otherwise raise a serious alarm into something people dismiss as childhood curiosity.
Howard’s willingness to discuss this trauma sheds light on a subject that has been shrouded in silence for too long in the Black community. We often feel the need to protect Black girls from sexual predators, but they are not the only ones who are vulnerable.
Black boys are twice as likely to experience child sexual abuse as their white peers. And while 1 in 13 boys in the U.S. will generally experience sexual abuse, the rate of abuse for Black boys is 61%—the highest of any racial group. That’s just the experience of young boys, and yet we almost never talk about it. However, when we look at teen boys, things become even more complicated.
For Black male teens, there is an adultification bias. What that means is that they are often perceived as being older, more mature, and less innocent than their white peers. This means that if a teen has a sexual encounter with an older woman, it is dismissed as a rite of passage.
This adultification doesn’t just skew the way Black boys are perceived, it keeps them from having access to the status of a victim. When a Black teen is involved with an older woman, society often shrugs it off as a lucky encounter rather than calling it what it is: a sex crime.
This creates a dire situation for boys in our community. They are simultaneously among the most vulnerable to abuse and the least likely to be seen as needing protection.
Howard’s description of an environment of extreme sexual and physical violence isn’t an outlier. It’s the logical result of a system that robs our children of their childhood while forcing them to navigate adult trauma before they can even process it.
We talk a lot about protecting Black children. But that protection often comes with an asterisk. Black girls are seen as victims. Black boys are seen as men in waiting. Until we confront that lie, boys in our community will keep carrying trauma that the rest of the world refuses to even acknowledge.
Straight From 
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