A comparison of statistics available on sexual violence against men in detention settings suggests that the most frequent types of sexual violence perpetrated are beatings of the genitals, electrical torture in the genital area, introduction of foreign bodies in the rectal area, as well as sexual humiliation such as forced nudity. In Abu Ghraib, for instance, male prisoners were forced to remain naked for days in a row and were photographed while being naked. Further, sexual torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo seems to have been specifically tailored to include what was assumed to be the most humiliating for Muslim detainees: “A Briton released from Guantánamo alleged that, as in Abu Ghraib, sexual humiliation was identified by US officials as a way of breaking Muslim detainees. In Iraq it was the simulation of oral sex, forced masturbation and human pyramids, with people kept naked for long spells. In Guantánamo, according to one British detainee, naked prostitutes paraded before inmates to taunt them” (Dodd 2004; see also, for an analysis of these narratives, Puar 2004). In Syria, Amnesty International (2012, 11) has collected testimonies of former prisoners detained by Syrian official security forces who had been “hit in the genital region with truncheons, (…) forced to watch as a male detainee [was being] raped (…), forced to have a glass bottle with a broken top inserted into his anus, (…) raped with a metal skewer”, among other abuses. Similar techniques of torture had been observed in the case of Sri Lanka (Peel et al. 2000, 2069).
Is it possible to make sense of all these instances of violence? Quite obviously, patterns of wartime sexual violence against both men and women are tightly connected to the larger context. In particular, the conflict type (guerrilla war, civil war, genocide, interstate war, “war against terrorism”, etc.), but also the status of combatants (state or non-state), the terrain, the type and number of weapons available, among other factors, all seem to impact on patterns of sexual violence. This means that similar trends in occurrence and type of wartime sexual violence can be observed in very different settings, but also that similar types of conflicts can generate quite divergent patterns of sexual violence. Military strategy and control (or lack thereof) might, for instance, have a strong influence on the spread of sexual violence, as explained by Myrttinen (2014): “Sexual violence (…) is not something that happens in a vacuum and the driving factors are not the same in all conflicts. Whereas, for example, in the concentration camps of the Bosnian war sexual violence was used systematically against women and men, in other contexts, such as in the Democratic Republic of Congo, it may be more due to a loss of military control and individual frustration rather than a planned strategy”.
As we will further explore in the next chapter, wartime sexual violence against men can notably be interpreted as an expression of power struggles between militarized groups, and the masculinity models that they embody. As such, conflict-related sexual violence attempts to either impose a new social hierarchy and order, or to strengthen the existing one. It follows that the shapes that it takes are tightly related to how these power struggles are framed. In conflicts framed as “ethnic”, for instance, men who belong to the “other” ethnic group become primary targets for types of violence like castration or mutilation, which aim to destroy their reproduction capacities, such as in Bosnia-Herzegovina, or they are bluntly killed. If the conflict is primarily political or ideological, sexual violence is more likely to be used as a repression tool aimed at opponents, often described as terrorists; in those cases, sexual torture aims at breaking their resistance by terrorizing them and by inscribing structures of power in their bodies and gendered identities, as the cases of Syria or Sri Lanka illustrate. And if the conflict takes on criminal features, and is more about social domination, control of economic resources and/or of territory, then men of any religious or ethnic group can be targeted, meaning that those who are less able to protect themselves, such as disadvantaged men, are particularly vulnerable to sexual violence, as empirical data collected in Eastern Congo demonstrates.
The ever-changing nature of conflicts, the emergence of new issues while some others lose relevance, the rise in power of new actors and so on significantly complicate the picture, though. Issues and framing of the conflict might differ from one region to another—the multiple Congolese conflicts being a good case in point. Actors within the same conflict might also have very different views on what is at stake, and thus employ dramatically different strategies and war tactics. Repertoires of action matter too, especially when it comes to torture techniques that have been tested and found efficient in the past. Patterns of sexual violence thus seem to be determined partly by structural factors and general conflict characteristics, and partly by individual combatants’ agency and experience. For instance, Bjørnlund (2011, 29), looking at cases of sexual violence perpetrated during the Armenian genocide, argues that if the political and military hierarchy did not openly encourage or condone sexual violence, much was left to the appreciation of perpetrators: “Sexual violence during the Armenian genocide can at least partly be seen as a result of a thoroughly brutalized environment that left room for local initiatives when it came to the methods of killing and humiliation, initiatives that satisfied individual needs, not only for self-gratification but also for variation”. This leeway left to perpetrators then comes to explain variations in the occurrence of certain types of violence, including during the same conflict episode.
Some researchers have already attempted to develop typologies describing abuses by types (see, for instance, Sivakumaran 2007, 261–67) or by objectives. Peel (2004, 65–66), for example, lists three patterns of conflict-related sexual violence against men: the first in Nigeria where rape and other forms of sexual torture are a part of the detention and interrogation process, the second in Algeria where sexual violence is part of a policy of intimidation and humiliation of opponents and the third in Sri Lanka where the rape of prisoners was common but not officially condoned. One of the main issues here is of course the scarcity of available data, which impedes generalization and makes typologies too case-dependent. How would other cases fit into this typology, especially if they display significantly different characteristics?
On the basis of the empirical evidence listed in the previous section, we can first observe that sexual violence perpetrated in detention seems to display specific characteristics, with a predominance of cases of sexual humiliation, forced nudity, genital beatings and electric torture and fewer cases of rape. These forms of sexual brutalization are clearly related, at least in a number of documented cases such as Abu Ghraib, to a wish to break the prisoners’ resolve. In other settings and especially genocidal ones, rape and castration are more frequently practiced, and seem to be often related to a wish to turn male victims into “lesser men”, into “womanized men”, and to annihilate their reproductive capacities. It is, however, worth mentioning that some cases display both features, like Bosnia-Herzegovina. Sexual violence perpetrated on Bosnian prisoners indeed included sexual humiliation, forced nudity, genital beatings, electric torture and so on, alongside numerous cases of rape and castration. This case thus shows similarities both with other cases of sexual violence perpetrated in detention, and with patterns of sexual violence committed in episodes such as the Rwandan genocide. This hybridity probably pertains to the fact that no confession or conversion was expected from Bosnian prisoners, and that sexual violence was not used as a counter-rebellion or “counter-terrorist” strategy but rather took its meaning within a broader ethnic cleansing context. In any case, these cases strongly highlight the fact that, as is the case of conflict-related sexual violence against women, patterns of male sexual victimization are tightly related to broader conflict features, factors and issues.