In many ways, young men and women living in conflict areas are in a no-win situation. Those who choose to invest in a militarized masculinity model, and who enroll, or are forcefully enrolled, in rebel groups or armies instead of trying to follow more traditional masculinity or femininity scripts, will not be guaranteed to gain social respect and power. For instance, in the Great Lakes region of Africa, men are expected to ensure their financial independence, to own a house, to have a family and to be the breadwinner. But reconciling these objectives with a life as an armed combatant is complicated:
You see now I am 23. I should have married a long time ago. I should have children, a woman waiting for me at home. I think my parents would be disappointed in me. But I am proud of what I do, of fighting for my country, for my community. (Laurent 2014, interview)
Respectability and power, whether understood in a Gramscian or a Foucauldian sense, are not necessarily achieved by the use of physical violence, as many of my interviewees discovered. This is what Alexis, a former officer in the FNL in Burundi, explains:
I was fighting for my country. But people don’t respect you even if you risk your life for them. Today we are back in the same situation than before, sometimes I feel like it was all for nothing. (Alexis 2013, interview)
And indeed, in societies like the Congo, Burundi and Rwanda, traditions define a “real man” by his ability to refrain from using physical violence, by his self-control (Lwambo 2013, 52). Many of the combatants I have met also resent the difficulties of clandestine or military life, especially when they had been expecting riches and an easy life. Hunger, sleep deprivation, serious medical issues due to a lack of hygiene and of access to medical care and so on make up their everyday life. In these conditions, some have the feeling that all that remains available to them is their ability to threaten and terrorize others thanks to their gun. As one of the combatants I spoke with somewhat cynically noted:
At least I have my gun, with it I can eat and get what I need. (Jean-Baptiste 2011, interview)
His words were echoed by several other research participants, including former combatants who confessed that they were considering taking up arms again:
You only need a gun. With a gun I could feed my family. (Serge 2010, interview)
This resonates with Messerschmidt’s assertion that crime, violence, aggression and in particular sexual aggression can be used to reassert masculinity for men who are under psychosocial stress and who are unable to perform as they think men should (1993, 85). If, as explained by Silberschmidt (2001, 668), this desire to restore self-esteem is primarily expressed through sexual aggressiveness towards women, it is clear from my fieldwork that it can target other men too.
In many conflict zones, this belligerence seems to primarily target civilians. The Congolese soldiers interviewed by Eriksson Baaz and Stern, for instance, connected their involvement in sexual violence to their frustration at having a bad reputation and a low status in the wider society, as well as at receiving low salaries (2013, 81). If civilians are particularly targeted, it is also because militarism equates soldiers with the figure of the strong man, embodying male power and dominance over society, in particular women and feminized Others, that is, those who do not fight (Daley 2008, 234). This is also consistent with the perpetration of sexual violence against civilian men, as a way to use feminization to reaffirm super/subordination relations. One of the pernicious effects of these violent practices is that they are in turn likely to be self-perpetuating, since breaking taboos by committing random violence—and particularly sexual violence—can generate hatred of oneself, fear of being wrong and distress among combatants, which in turn might cause more violence, as shown by Price in the case of war rape in former Yugoslavia (2001, 217).
Some authors, following Fanon (1963), also convey a (post)colonial analysis grid to explain that in (post)colonial settings the perpetration of the worse dehumanizing atrocities on fellow men “is not compensatory humiliation but rather doing exactly what white men do, following the hegemonic script” (Dowd 2010, 46). In light of recent scandals regarding UN peacekeepers involvement in sexual trafficking and sexual violence, or regarding sexual torture in Abu Ghraib or Guantánamo, these interpretations cannot but be appealing. In their study of masculinities in sub-Saharan Africa, Barker and Ricardo (2005, 25) hint at the role played by violent versions of manhood such as Rambo, which are propagated by Western movies, in the recruitment and socialization of young combatants. And indeed, such role models transpired in some of the interviews I conducted:
You know when I got enrolled I had all sorts of images in my head, on how things would be. About how I would fight for my country, for democracy in my country. And that it would become a great and powerful nation like in Europe, that we would become a model. How I would be a courageous soldier, like in the movies. I was a bit naïve, I was very young you know. (Alexis 2013, interview)
In that sense, sexual violence and other acts of extreme violence might be triggered by versions of manhood and masculinity that are neither directly inspired by local traditional models nor inspired by the immediate experience of conflict. Mimicking movie characters, but also borrowing from other conflict scenes—which is facilitated, among other things, by the circulation of mercenaries across countries—constitute obvious sources of inspiration for combatants. The institutionalized circulation of violent practices say, of methods of torture, as discussed in the case of Northern Ireland by McGuffin (1974) or by Faligot (1992), is also a clear indication of the fact that our understanding of sexual violence should not be restrained to local influences and patterns.
It is important to underscore that my purpose here is not to find “excuses” for perpetrators of sexual violence. I recognize that it is easy to infer from the above discussion a rather simplistic explanatory model whereby the difficulty to enact socially respectable masculinity models in a war situation leads to frustration and resentment, as well as to violence and aggressiveness to restore male self-esteem. Perpetrators of sexual violence against both men and women would then just be the unsuspecting victims of gender models and of the war context. But as we will see in the next section, most of them have a choice not to commit these atrocities, and actually—and fortunately—most use their free will and decide not to participate. Convening gender analysis, together with an examination of the social, cultural and economic factors that might impact on the perpetration of sexual violence, does not entail a negation of individual agency, but invites an improved understanding of how it can be constrained, or on the contrary enhanced, in some specific configurations. In that sense, some testimonies I have collected confirm the thesis according to which the perpetration of sexual violence against both men and women can to some extent, and in some cases, be related to individual frustration and humiliation, emotions that are themselves tightly related to a wider institutional and cultural context. In these cases, the individual decision to initiate and/or to participate in sexual violence can be interpreted as a performative act to regain power and respect, values that are in many cultures strongly associated to masculinity. But as we will explore in the next section I have also collected testimonies qualifying existing explanations for the perpetration of sexual violence against men, as well as testimonies clearly questioning the masculinity model enacted through the perpetration of such acts.