Before moving on to detail how male survivors try to deal with their experience of sexual violence, and what consequences this type of violence has on post-conflict and reconciliation processes, this chapter’s first section briefly outlines why and how I began collecting survivors’ stories, and what kind of obstacles and problems I have faced.
My field experience in conflict areas spans over two and a half decades, and I had met numerous male and female survivors of conflict-related sexual violence before getting specifically interested in this topic. I have long failed to grasp the significance of what they were recounting, and of the immense trust they were demonstrating by sharing their stories with me. It is surprisingly easy to overlook veiled references to episodes of sexual torture, especially when narrated by male survivors, when this is not what you are expecting to hear. During a research on former political prisoners in Northern Ireland that I undertook more than a decade ago (Féron 2007), for instance, several former male paramilitaries told me about the “abuse” they had experienced during interrogation and then in prison. At the time, and much to my embarrassment today, I had not fully understood what they meant, nor how frequent those experiences had been. I had been fooled by the fact that they had mentioned it almost in passing, without elaborating much—a typical feature of survivors’ stories, as we shall see—and that they were putting a lot more stress on other dimensions of their experience of detention, like their bonding with other prisoners. As we will see, in highly politicized settings such as Northern Ireland, experiencing sexual torture in detention takes on a strong political meaning for survivors. This political understanding and framing of sexual torture seems to make it a bit less difficult for them to put it in the perspective of other types of violence they have been victims of. Putting this experience into perspective seems somehow more complicated for survivors who are unable to ascribe a strong political or cultural meaning to it, thus failing to integrate it into a consistent narrative. In any case, the Northern Irish male paramilitaries I met at the time had done a great job of weaving this experience into their own consistent narratives of resistance, and of tying it back to the wider social and political context. Some of them also told these stories of abuse as if it had happened to other prisoners, but certainly not to them—another typical characteristic.[3] Re-reading the field notes I had compiled at the time, I am now puzzled at my own distraction.
But facts are stubborn, and often find their own way back to attention. The issue of conflict-related sexual violence against men came up again in 2009 while I was conducting several rounds of interviews with former combatants (both male and female) on the issue of daily life within armed groups in the Great Lakes region of Africa, and more specifically in Eastern Congo and Burundi. Both male and female combatants regularly spoke about sexual violence against women, and described it as an almost ordinary feature of their everyday life. But when one female combatant told me at the end of an interview, and in an almost confidential tone, “You know it happens to men too” (Fabiola 2009, interview), I decided that I could not ignore the matter any longer.
Collecting male survivors’ testimonies has been anything but smooth, though not necessarily because of disclosure issues. Some obviously did not want to talk about it—and of course in these cases I never insisted—but some others seemed almost relieved to be able to tell their stories, though I am not sure talking to me has in any way alleviated their distress. Oftentimes, I had the feeling that people in the Great Lakes region of Africa treated me as if I belonged to a “third gender” (Partis-Jennings 2017), so remote from their own cultural and practical experience[4] that it eventually made it easier for them to confide their stories. I was neither a masculine competitor, nor a local woman who would judge them for their “lack” of masculinity or manhood. Of course, it is almost impossible for me to tell whether, and if yes how, they altered their narratives because of who I am, or because of what they assumed I wanted to hear. In several instances, survivors also expressed their satisfaction that, at long last, someone was paying attention to them.
Being familiar with some of the literature on the business or “commercialization of rape” in the Congo and other conflict areas (Eriksson Baaz and Stern 2013), I have at times wondered what my research was “doing to the field”, not just in terms of possibly turning attention away from female survivors—which I obviously do not want—but also by inadvertently giving male survivors an entry card in that business. Without a doubt, male survivors need to be supported, and I sincerely do not think that those I have met were in any way trying to make money with their stories, and neither do I think that this is why they told me their stories. Undoubtedly, the support attracted by female survivors of sexual violence, paralleled with the almost total obliviousness regarding their own suffering, irritates some of them. But most do not look ready to pay the price of exposure that being part of such business would entail.
Dealing with the survivors’ psychological and physical suffering, but also with the hopes that my attention to their stories was generating, and with my own helplessness in the face of their situation, has obviously not always been easy. Like many researchers interacting with deprived and disadvantaged people, I did not want to give them too high hopes about how my research would have an impact on their lives, but at the same time I still want to believe that my work, together with the recently published work of other researchers, will somehow participate in raising awareness of the plight of male survivors, and will generate more adequate prevention and support policies.
Surviving sexual violence means first and foremost dealing with and overcoming the suffering induced by such violence, but that is complicated by the fact that the consequences of sexual violence span across the physical, psychological and social realms at the same time. As underscored by Ronald E. Anderson (2014, 8–27), suffering is almost never just physical, it often co-occurs alongside mental and social suffering, and the suffering induced by wartime sexual violence seems to be no exception to this rule. While many authors have highlighted physical (e.g. fistula, HIV infection), mental (e.g. anxiety, humiliation) and social (e.g. social rejection, distrust) consequences for women who have been victims of sexual violence, including in conflict settings (see, for instance, Okot, Amony and Otim 2005; Ahuka et al. 2008), in-depth research on what it entails for male victims is still lacking. Reports by male survivors themselves have, however, demonstrated that their suffering spans across these three dimensions too, with dire consequences. Before moving on to detail these, it is worth remembering that sexual violence almost always occurs alongside other types of brutalization, which dramatically hamper the survivors’ recovery capacities. It is also important to keep in mind that sexual violence is not necessarily what all survivors would describe as “the worst” that happened to them:
[After alluding to having been “used as if he was a woman”]
I don’t know if one can live a normal life after suffering abominations like that. But what I can never forget is what they did to my family, how they killed my father in front of me…. I never saw my mother again, I don’t know what happened to her, I think she is dead now. And I lost all my brothers save one. I had 5 of them. It is the hardest, losing your family, seeing them suffering, and not knowing if they are alive or dead. (Didace 2014, interview)
3
This is consistent with survivors’ narratives in many other settings, for instance, in Bosnia-Herzegovina. See, for instance, Karabegović (2010).
4
Maybe worth mentioning also is that being a woman in her forties, unmarried and without children, I embodied a social exception verging on the side of cultural transgression in this region of the world.