Some of the stories collected also justify sexual violence as a sort of preemptive violence, resulting from the fear of being caught by “the other side”, and then from a fear of being subjected to castration and to torture if it were to happen. This fear of what might happen, some people I spoke with explained, triggered the perpetration of similar acts on some men who were abducted:
During the war everybody gets crazy, so we did… we did things we would not have done at home, we would not have done if it wasn’t war. It was not us, it was because there is violence everywhere, and some of us were really scared of what could happen to them, of being wounded, of being caught by others. So sometimes I think they did bad things because of fear, and because violence was everywhere. (Jean Bosco 2009, interview)
Laurent (2014) expressed similar ideas:
Laurent: You are always scared of being left behind, of being caught. If you are too badly wounded then you won’t be able to carry on. You will be left behind. And what will happen then? What will happen if the army catches you, or others? They will kill you, torture you, or worse.
EF: Worse?
Laurent: I have heard stories… about bad things they do to those they catch. I would rather die than being caught. But what they would do to us, we do to them. That is the only way. (Laurent 2014, interview)
This can be related to the “lootpillageandrape” dynamic described by Enloe (2000, 108), or to the concept of “forward panic” developed by Collins (2008) and also quoted by Eriksson Baaz and Stern (2013, 76), which describes moments of excessive physical violence when fear is at its peak. Not surprisingly then, several interviews suggest that episodes of sexual violence against men (and women) are more likely to occur either during or immediately after raids on villages, or after military confrontations:
After a fight, you can get really excited. Maybe you are happy to be still alive, maybe you are happy you have won, or maybe you just want to celebrate with others. At these moments bad things can happen. For instance, the guys would drink a lot, they would have sex with the girls from the villages, they would be violent with them and also with the prisoners. It is forbidden of course, but after a fight you often have a lot of energy, you don’t care, you just want to celebrate. (Serge 2010, interview)
Here, we can clearly see how sexual violence loses its taboo, and how the context of conflict—and of celebration—provides an excuse for transgressing rules, and for using sexual violence as entertainment. Sexual violence is also clearly a way to assert domination, to crown victory by claiming ownership of the prisoners’ bodies. This is far from being specific to the Great Lakes region of Africa, and is present in other conflict settings, including those where the confrontation displays completely different characteristics, including in terms of involved actors. Peel et al. describe, for instance, cases of recreational sexual violence perpetrated by Sri Lankan soldiers, forcing male Tamil “friends to rape each other in front of soldiers for their ‘entertainment’”, among other abuses (2000, 2069–70). Interestingly, some of the narratives I have collected did not seem to really differentiate between circumstances in which rapes and other types of sexual violence were committed against men, and when they were committed against women. In some cases, and especially in pillaging contexts, men and women seem to be victims of the same types of torture and violence, even though, because of sexual and gender-related taboos, people were much more willing to speak about sexual violence when it was committed against women. This certainly calls for caution when trying to understand the reasons why sexual violence against men is committed, as the context in which sexual violence is perpetrated is likely to have a strong impact on the identity and gender of the victims, as well as on the motives of the perpetrators.
One recurrent theme in these stories is the consumption of drugs and of alcohol, which is used as an excuse for explaining excesses, and for relieving perpetrators of their responsibility. Alcohol and drug abuse has also been described by survivors, and it is present in almost all perpetrators’ stories I have collected, as well as in those compiled in the Bassiouni Report (1994) on the former Yugoslavia, by Eriksson Baaz on the Congo (2009) and by Sooka (2014) on Sri Lanka:
We did crazy things. Some were fun, we had good times. I did not take drugs, but some others did, but when we could afford it we shared beers, alcohol, cigarettes, that made life easier…. And yes, some of us could get drunk and then do bad things, very bad things. But when you are drunk you don’t really know what you are doing, and it makes bad things come out of you. (Jean Bosco 2009, interview)
There is also some evidence that perpetrators of sexual violence use alcohol and drugs as a way to numb their emotions and escape their own doubts and uncertainty vis-à-vis their actions (see also Price 2001, 217):
Willy: War is hard, very hard. It is dangerous, you can die every day, and sometimes you have to do things you don’t like, because it is necessary.
EF: You mean, to commit violent acts?
Willy: Yes. We don’t kill other people because we like it, but because it is necessary in the fight. It is difficult for many of us. So everyone tries to get courage somewhere and cheer up. Some think about their families, they will fight for their families, and some will fight for their country. But some also try to find courage in alcohol and that sort of things.
EF: So alcohol gives you courage?
Willy: Maybe not always, but you can forget about war for a time, you can forget about your nightmares, you can forget what you have seen and done. (Willy 2009, interview)
War and genocide studies have long established the importance of peer pressure for explaining why soldiers perpetrate atrocities. In the case of the Holocaust, for instance, Christopher Browning (1993) has shown that while most men of Unit 101 of the German Ordnungspolizei participated in the killings out of obedience to authority, other factors such as peer pressure, but also the fear of being called “weak” or “coward”, or the fear of “losing face” in front of other members of the group, played a central role. Jean Hatzfeld (2005) has come up with similar findings in the case of the Rwandan genocide. My own fieldwork data suggests that the perpetration of sexual violence against men can be interpreted as the result of internal group dynamics and of peer pressure too; it performs internal functions for the groups responsible for its perpetration, and has an impact on their functioning. For new recruits as well as for more seasoned combatants, opting out is seemingly complicated, because it would indicate a reluctance to share the fate of others, and would, therefore, mark the objector as suspect, either in his loyalty to the group, or in his masculinity, or both. The collective perpetration of rape and of other acts of sexual violence also signals them as products of the group, not of individuals: they participate in combatants’ bonding, while diluting their individual responsibility. This is not anecdotal, especially when one thinks about the combatants’ conditions of living:
When you are in the bush, life is hard, really hard. You might die any time. You don’t know whether you will see your family again. So you have to be united, you have to stand together with the other guys. You cannot get in a fight with them because of bad things they do. You have to side with them. (Jean-Baptiste 2011, interview)
The need to enact solidarity and group cohesion might explain why sexual violence against both men and women is often perpetrated publicly in that region of the world, as I have already detailed in chapter 1. In that sense, what Cohen says about the participation of new recruits in gang rape (of women) seems to apply more generally to all combatants, and to episodes of sexual violence against men, not just against women: “By participating in group rape—and perhaps by bragging about the individual rapes they have committed—combatants signal to their new peers that they are part of the unit and are willing to take risks to remain in the group” (2013, 465).