The fact that the effects of sexual torture expand far beyond prisoners, and affect the communities to which these individuals belong, is, therefore, not surprising. This is especially the case of rebellion movements led by specific religious or cultural groups. As Ross (2002, 309) explains, (threat of) sexual torture, and in particular (threat of) rape and castration are very effective tools to reassert the superiority of the State and the subordinate status of these communities, sometimes with a racialized undertone: “The administration of a racial system requires the constant threat of torture as a means of managing surveillance and maintaining the ideology of mastery”. By sexually brutalizing individuals who embody, for instance, minorities’ struggle for equal rights, for self-determination or for any other political change, the State uses their feminized bodies to discipline whole sections of the population. In this perspective some of the mechanisms described in the previous section seem to apply here as well, in the sense that sexual violence perpetrated in detention is often directed at political, cultural, religious or community leaders, whose masculinity and, therefore, implied leadership capacities, are thereby undermined. Sexual violence thus equates to a strategy of political demobilization of opponents, or even more radically aims at destroying the capacity of opposition movements to act as groups, as suggested by Card (1996, 8): “There is more than one way to commit genocide. One way is mass murder, killing individual members of a national, political or cultural group. Another is to destroy a group’s identity by decimating cultural and social bonds. Martial rape does both”.
These acts aim at terrorizing whole communities by showing (and demonstrating) that they are defenseless. If their leaders can be subjected to such gruesome acts of violence, then these groups should certainly reconsider their participation in rebellion. And if those who were tortured were not community leaders, this is even worse: it means that anyone can be arrested and become a victim of sexual violence. It reinforces a feeling of impunity, and of arbitrary rule. Sexual torture demonstrates that the State is determined to enforce its authority, no matter the cost. They are “unforgivable” acts of violence that are perpetuated in such a way that they cannot be forgotten or expurgated. The excess, the transgression, breaking taboos are all part of a methodology of extremes, the purpose of which is to leave traces, to turn bodies into means of expressing an indelible message. This type of violence is part of a repertoire where the perpetration of unforgivable and imprescriptible acts signals a rationale of a “definitive breach”, of barbaric extravagance (Féron and Hastings 2003). Male sexual victimization stands well beyond the accepted modalities of war, and, therefore, can never be fully accounted for. In official discourses, it is repeatedly described as the acts of an uncontrollable and disgraceful minority, and as such it does not “belong” to the war narrative, and, therefore, cannot be recounted as any other wartime injury. The excess epitomized by sexual violence pushes it in the realm of the anecdotal, of the footnotes. Because these acts are seen as degrading, as unacceptable and because many observers simply refuse to believe that they are perpetrated, they are relegated to a narrative limbo, whose existence undermines the group’s solidarity networks—unless, of course, it is possible for male sexual torture survivors to revert the stigma, to somehow convert it into a badge of honor, by exposing it for what it is: a political act which is feminizing and subjugating only insofar as we still believe in its performativity. Testimonies of male survivors, as we will further explore in chapter 4, suggest that such reversion of the stigma is extremely difficult to accomplish. It is, however, interesting to note than in a series of cases, women’s involvement in rebellion movements was actually triggered by sexual violence, such as in the LTTE case (Eager 2008, 140).
All the societies in which episodes of conflict-related sexual violence against men have been recorded are or were characterized by a very high level of militarization, in terms both of the number of combatants and of weapons in circulation, and of the societal penetration of military values. It is of course important to keep in mind that, as we will further illustrate in chapter 3, not all combatants are willing to perpetrate sexual violence against men, and that such practices can generate tensions within armed groups. However, the way militarization operates, and the way armies and armed groups function, favor the empowerment of highly violent individuals who are likely not only to vie for domination over civilian populations, but also to compete with one another. And the enactment of masculinity is a powerful asset with regards to both of these objectives. It should, therefore, not come as a surprise that wartime sexual violence against men is mostly perpetrated by men in arms, members of armed groups or soldiers and police officers. This feature, which characterizes wartime sexual violence against women too, seems to be slightly more pronounced when victims are male.[5] This suggests that militarized masculinities play a strong role in the perpetration of sexual violence against men, whether it is the outcome of a broader and carefully planned strategy like in Bosnia-Herzegovina, or whether it derives from a loss of control of military leaders over their troops, as the case of DRC illustrates. When conflicts stretch over long periods of time like in Eastern DRC or in the Central African Republic, wartime sexual violence against men can become a way to enforce a militarized heterosexual normativity, both within the perpetrators’ groups and in the whole society that is subjected to military rule.
How can we make sense of these features? Here again, it seems that the way sexual violence against men is perpetrated performs both external and internal functions for the group to which the perpetrators belong. Committing these extremely violent and transgressive acts in public obviously reinforces their impact on survivors and on bystanders, and it also enhances the power of the perpetrators over civilian populations. Sexual violence against men is thereby staged as a performance of militarized masculinities where the power and the virility of the fraternity group are exalted (Price 2001, 216). As such it is a way for armed groups or armies to impose their power and domination, and to contest or abase the masculinity of civilians, which is seen as “soft” or “weak” as compared to the militarized models. This is not without echo to the practice of shaming war objectors for weakness and cowardice, and to submit them to homophobic stigmatization (see, for instance, Conway 2008). Glorified militarized masculinities are opposed to the civilians’ feminized ones, and their assumed lack of virility is substantiated by their emasculation through rape or other forms of sexual brutalization. Sexual violence thus establishes the combatants’ superior status and legitimizes their predatory behavior on civilian populations, especially when, like in Eastern DRC, the conflict increasingly takes on criminal traits. As observed by Daley (2008, 234) in the case of Burundi, militarization is often accompanied by violence exerted upon subordinate and marginalized masculinities: “Military men’s intolerance of alternative forms of masculinity often leads to the most brutal atrocities being inflicted on men who don’t fight or belong to the other social and political categories”. This means that those who are targeted are not necessarily singled out because of their ethnic or religious belonging, or because of their political opinions. Instead, sexual violence, as part of a larger repertoire of violence, is used as a form of social control that cuts across gender, socio-economic, ethnic or religious categories.
In societies torn apart by decades of warfare and/or of instability, and even in the absence of a strong State, militarization entails the penetration of military values in the social fabric. Ideologies of domination are underpinned by a violent heterosexual normativity, which is enforced upon all sections of society. In this context, sexual violence against both men and women is normalized; it becomes part of the militarized culture, as a way to impose a certain social order, where men displaying violent, militarized and heterosexual masculinities subjugate the rest of the population. As Leatherman (2011, 155) explains, sexual violence helps to reinforce their hyper violent and militarized masculine identity: “This identity is predicated on the opposition of Self and Other, so that ‘I am because you are not’. These maneuvers circle around social processes of de-humanizing, treating the other as evil, subhuman or object of revulsion”. In other words, perpetrators promote their hyper masculinized self by feminizing others. Rebellion groups can even use the transgressive nature of sexual violence against men to contest existing rules—for instance, traditional structures of power—and to impose their own militarized power. Precisely because it often appears random, transgressive and extreme, sexual violence against men is a very effective tool for challenging existing power structures, for turning populations into submission, and for asserting a new social order. By breaking taboos, cultural norms and values, and by seemingly ignoring traditional (hegemonic) models of masculinity, perpetrators of sexual violence against men emancipate themselves from existing power structures, and use fear and terror in order to underpin their own desired alternative. Social control is thereby implemented through the gender order.
5
See, for instance, the study led by Johnson et al. (2010) in Eastern Congo, where 82% of perpetrators of male sexual violence were combatants (78% in the case of female sexual violence).