Before moving on to detailing perpetrators’ and bystanders’ narratives on sexual violence against men, the next two sections highlight and discuss the main patterns that have come out of my research, regarding the perpetrators’ main profiles and motivations.
Since not much research has yet been done on wartime sexual violence against men, many preconceptions attached to sexual violence against women taint representations of this type of violence too (Skjelsbæk 2015). One of these is that wartime sexual violence against men is usually perpetrated by men in situations of power, and more specifically by high-ranking military officers. And indeed, if we rely on the scattered survivors’ stories that are available in the media, it is tempting to assert that perpetrators are always very powerful men, like military officers or warlords. Such representation is in my view partly misleading. Sexual violence is, as we have seen, an act of power, but this does not necessarily imply that those who are perpetrating it are men holding societal or military positions of power. If the perpetrators’ testimonies that I have collected are to be believed, many of them were just rank and file soldiers or combatants, sometimes freshly (and forcefully) enrolled, just like some of the survivors. But power is of course relational, and the men and adolescent boys who have been subjected to sexual violence and torture certainly felt powerless as compared to them.
Both State security organizations and rebel groups have been known to perpetrate sexual violence against men—though this is by no means a general rule, as shown by Wood (2009) and Butler et al. (2007)—and the data that I have collected on the ground seems to confirm this finding: in Burundi, for instance, the people I spoke with recounted ghastly stories about male sexual victimization perpetrated by the Burundian army, but also by rebellion groups such as the Forces Nationales de Libération (FNL), the Conseil National Pour la Défense de la Démocratie–Forces pour la Défense de la Démocratie (CNDD-FDD) and so on. In the Congo, stories point at the Congolese army, but also at the Mai-Mai, or at the Rwandan Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda (FDLR, a Rwandan Hutu rebel group), among many others. In conflict settings all around the world, there is no doubt that sexual violence against men is perpetrated by men and women in arms, sometimes belonging to national armies, sometimes to rebel armed groups. There is, for instance, a wide range of evidence, collected by NGOs, researchers and international organizations, that demonstrates the overwhelming responsibility of State security institutions in the perpetration of sexual torture against men. In Sri Lanka, for instance, there is ample and compelling evidence that most national security organizations have participated in sexual torture against both male and female Tamils, accused of being members of the LTTE (Sooka 2014, 31; Human Rights Watch 2013). Similar evidence has been collected in other secessionist and political conflicts all around the world, including in Israel and Palestine, where research conducted by Weishut (2015, 75) has shown the implication of Israeli soldiers and border police, secret service, police and jail officers in the sexual torture of Palestinian men, either during arrest or during interrogation. In Peru, the State was recognized responsible for most episodes of sexual violence against men that occurred during the conflict, but evidence of public castrations and of other forms of sexual violence perpetrated against male “traitors” by the Shining Path have also been documented (Leiby 2012, 331 and 344). Other contemporary examples include sexual torture perpetrated by US and UK soldiers on male prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo (see, among others, Razack 2005) and by the British Army during the 2000 decade in Iraq and previously in the 1960s and 1970s in Northern Ireland (McGuffin 1974). Similarly, rebel groups in Liberia and Sierra Leone, to quote two well-known examples, have also perpetrated sexual violence against men at a seemingly very large scale. The number of Liberian male ex-combatants who have been sexually victimized during the latest conflict by combatants of their own, or of the other side, has, for instance, been estimated at one third overall (see Johnson et al. 2008, 38). My fieldwork data thus does not stand as an exception, but rather comes to confirm the scattered empirical evidence available in other conflict settings.
In parallel, some authors have argued that, genocidal contexts aside, the most extreme and transgressive displays of violence—to which, I argue, sexual violence against men belongs—often occur in ideological vacuums, and are perpetrated by organizations with weak institutional cultures. Barker and Ricardo assert, for instance, that “historically, African armed insurgency movements with clear ideologies, as in the case of Tanzania and South Africa, generally have promoted some degree of restraint in the use of violence, including collective decision-making about the use of violence, social control over members who seek to use excessive violence and often used violence after exhausting non-violent means” (2005, 26). This would suggest that armies are somewhat less likely to perpetrate sexual violence against men, with the exception of sexual torture in detention, which often fulfils clear strategic objectives. Such statements have, however, been contested by other authors. For instance, in their critical review and assessment of the stereotypes surrounding perpetrators of wartime sexual violence against both men and women, Cohen et al. (2013) underscore the fact that contrary to what most believe, sexual violence is not necessarily more common among rebel groups than State militaries.
Based on the empirical evidence that I have collected on the ground, and on existing research, it seems that these divergences in interpretation are mostly due to the fact that many cases of sexual violence against men, and in particular sexual torture in detention, are not coded as such, as I have explained in chapter 1. In other words, on average conventional armies are not less likely to perpetrate sexual violence against men (or women), but they tend to favor the use of different types of violence, which are more likely to be considered as belonging to a torture repertoire. On the one hand, and setting genocidal contexts aside, my fieldwork data shows that State militaries often use sexual torture as a means of putting pressure, extracting confessions and enforcing domination; they are more likely to use sexual humiliation, to apply electric shocks to the genitals and anus, to insert objects through the anus or assault the prisoner’s genitals. On the other hand, many of my research participants mentioned examples of rebel groups using forced nudity, enforced incest and enforced rape of other female or male prisoners but also sexual slavery and especially gang rape on male prisoners or new recruits. Quite obviously, more empirical evidence needs to be collected to further document these potential differences, which, if confirmed, could pertain to the context in which these two types of groups operate, their members’ training, their organizational cultures and so on. The fact that military cultures are extremely diverse, and shape different models of masculinity and associated practices (Enloe 1993) is likely to prevent any further generalization, though. And given the remaining strong taboos around these issues, as well as the low level of reporting of male survivors, it will also be complicated to gather systematic evidence.
One of the issues that has been raised by researchers working on wartime sexual violence perpetrated by military groups is that the perpetration of such acts often generates tensions within these groups (see, for instance, Wood 2009). Tensions can arise either because the military hierarchy explicitly forbids the use of sexual violence, or because it raises moral concerns among combatants themselves or because it is seen as benefiting the individual to the expense of the collective (Cohen 2013, 465). The empirical evidence I have collected, however, suggests the absence of a general rule regarding the condoning, or condemning, of the use of sexual violence against men by military hierarchies, and the existence of extremely diverse levels of tolerance. In fact, it seems that in many cases sexual torture has been used simply because it produces “results”—though the quote below also suggests a wish to distantiate oneself from the sexual dimension of the act: