This is somehow consistent with Cohen’s finding (2013) on how forced recruitment is related to high levels of gang rapes, though in Cohen’s study rapes were assumed to be mostly perpetrated against civilians or outsiders to the group. But some interviews also confirm Cohen’s hypotheses, and show that cases of sexual violence against civilian men follow the same logic:
Willy: You know sometimes we don’t need more combatants but we need help for doing other things like carrying weapons and ammunitions. Usually women carry weapons or ammunition in their baskets because soldiers think they are carrying food, but sometimes when the weapons get heavy… women tire easily, so sometimes we also ask civilian men to carry heavy things for us. And it has happened once or twice, but not more than that, that they were very stubborn and even when we beat them they still did not want to do the work… So a few others decided to teach them respect and were really brutal with them…
EF: They were really brutal…?
Willy: You know, beating them and that sort of things.
EF: What did they do apart from beating them?
Willy: Things like forcing them to go naked, joke about them, trying to shame them…
EF: Shame them? About their body?
Willy: Yes, joking that they were going to use them as wives, and asking them to bend and laughing…
EF: And what else?
Willy: No, no, nothing else. If anything else happened I did not see it. (Willy 2009, interview)
Some combatants described episodes of sexual violence against civilian men as bonding and initiation rituals for young and/or new recruits. In one of the rare cases where an interviewee recognized his direct participation, he somehow presented sexual violence against men as an ongoing practice for the group:
They had done it before, so I thought I had to do it as well… I wasn’t given any choice, really. I was new in the group, I just did what I was told to do, what the others were doing as well. (Serge 2010, interview)
This is in line with what some authors have shown about ritual violence in gangs. Moolman, in her study of masculinity models in gangs, explains, for instance, how new recruits are asked to perform a particularly challenging first deed as a way to test their endurance, as well as to reaffirm the centrality of violence in the masculine definition of the group (2004, 115). Once gang members have successfully gone through these initiation rites, they are allowed to exert their domination over land, but also over bodies. In that sense, if sexual violence against women and girls admittedly gives to armed groups a sense of power and control, then sexual violence against men and boys cannot but be seen as the ultimate form of control and ownership over civilian populations, as well as over territory and resources, which local men, in patriarchal societies, usually “own”. In this perspective, many forms of conflict-related sexual violence can certainly be read as a way to subdue victims, regardless of their gender, and to reassure perpetrators about their dominant, though precarious, role. The perpetration of sexual violence thus tries to ensure that power is stabilized and that dissent is policed through a violent gendered hierarchy.
Another, more common, narrative was that perpetrating sexual violence against men is an “abnormal reaction to abnormal (or extreme) situations”, to borrow from Skjelsbæk (2015, 58). Perpetrators insisted on their “normality”, but described the context as conducive to all sorts of excesses. Both sexual violence against men and against women were presented as deriving from the “craziness” of war, and from a diluted sense of right and wrong. Déo (2011, interview), talking about new recruits, explained:
Déo: Some of them were lazy, pretending to be too tired to do the work. And some women did not understand why they should accept…. You see women can also get some protection if they behave in the proper way…. If they can get a guy to look after them…
EF: You mean, if they have intercourse with them?
Déo: Yes, yes, there were many unions. You know even during the rebellion some marriages were celebrated. Of course not real ones, but that gave women a protection from… from other men who might have wanted to abuse them
EF: So some combatants were not behaving properly?
Déo: War is war, it is difficult to control everything, men get nervous and all that. Everybody has to be cautious, because during war men tend to really get astray.
EF: You mean that men were also likely to be confronted to that type of improper behavior from other men?
Déo: That did happen as well, yes, yes, but people don’t want to talk about that, and all sorts of other terrible things happened at that time.
Bystanders likewise used words like “hell” or “beasts” to speak about what happened during war. Discussing episodes of sexual violence against men he admits to have witnessed, but not participated in, René reflects:
Yes I have seen that happen, that and many other horrible things, done to men, women, children, babies, old men, old women, everyone. But we don’t talk about it. I don’t want to talk about it. War is horrible, men become beasts, hell is on earth. I am not the same man anymore, because of the things I have seen. (René 2014, interview)
This largely echoes what Eriksson Baaz says about Congolese soldiers’ description of “evil rapes”: “‘Evil’ rape, they explained, stems from a sense of moral disengagement that accompanies the climate of warring and violence in which they have been living; previously unthinkable behavior becomes conceivable and even dedramatized through the process of dehumanizing and ‘normalization’ of violence and killing” (2009, 510). Undoubtedly, the availability and proliferation of small arms as well as the deep militarization of civilian society facilitate the perpetration of sexual violence, not just because they allow those who own weapons to brutalize others, but also because they participate in the glorification of militarized and violent masculinities. Many combatants have the feeling they are invincible, that for them nothing is prescribed or forbidden, including the transgression of taboos:
You know with a gun you can get everything that you want. Everything you need. You just have to go to someone, and if you have a gun, they will do whatever you want, give you food, work for you, sleep with you…. You can be the boss. (Jean Bosco 2009, interview)
Possessing a gun is clearly equated with power over others, particularly civilians, who have to satisfy every whim of combatants often crazed by fighting. And, as Price explains (2001, 217), exerting extreme forms of violence eventually gives birth to a vicious cycle, made up of low self-esteem, excitement, intoxication and feelings of impunity.