EF: Who do you think did not trust you?
Bernard: Nobody trusted me, not in the camp, not outside. I was a foreigner, and I was alone. They thought I was sick. They thought I would bring trouble. (Bernard 2013, interview)
In rural settings too, where communities are usually more tightly knit, it is complicated for survivors to hide what they have been through. They are thus also likely to face discrimination and ostracism, unless they flee. This is what happened to Aimable, who used to live in a small village in the Cibitoke province, in north-western Burundi:
Everybody discovered what happened, and I couldn’t stay anymore. It is not right, what they did to me. Because of that, I had to leave. I could not face the shame, and I have lost my whole family. (Aimable 2010, interview)
Whatever the setting, however, several common patterns are identifiable. Male survivors of wartime sexual violence are, for instance, likely to experience marital problems, alcohol and drug abuse, lack of trust, but also, if what they have been through becomes publicly known, ostracism, segregation or even discrimination on the part of their communities of origin. Ostracism can be provoked by security concerns, for instance, based on the idea that the survivor might attract the attention of perpetrators and thus put the whole community or neighborhood at risk. But it also seems that most other men try to distance themselves as much as possible from so strong a source of shame that it might eventually contaminate them, and undermine their own masculinity. As Adhiambo Onyango and Hampanda explain: “Social expectations of what it means to be a traditional man in most societies (i.e. strong, tough, self-sufficient, and impenetrable) are contradictory to male victimization in general and especially with regard to sexual victimization” (2011, 241). Just like it is sometimes complicated to accept that women do not respect traditional gender roles and refuse to play the role of victims in need of protection (Gibbings 2011), men are not supposed to deviate from traditional conceptions of masculinity and manhood that exclude the possibility of sexual victimization.
So when survivors speak out, many others, men, women and children, ridicule them; they cannot embody traditional masculinity models anymore. In sub-Saharan Africa, male survivors of sexual violence are sometimes called “bush wives”—a reference to women who have been forcefully abducted by armed groups and forced to marry combatants—to further shame them, and underscore their feminization. “Bush wives” are usually expected to both serve as sexual slaves and to take care of chores that are commonly considered as being women’s work, like cooking, fetching food and water, carrying goods for combatants and washing clothes. Calling male survivors “bush wives” thus doubly endorses the strong performativity of sexual violence, which impacts both on the assumed sexuality of the survivor and on his “social” gender. Not surprisingly, therefore, many of the survivors I have met choose to avoid social contact, especially in public places,[5] and to mostly stay at home, thus symbolically renouncing to some of the most valued masculine privileges. Here, the social impact of sexual violence against men is clearly visible, by weakening the traditional structures of the groups to which victims belong. Elias, a Congolese man I met in Bukavu in South Kivu, has greatly suffered at the hands of a rebel group. He has trouble walking, misses several fingers, and seems to be blind in one eye. The scars he bears are obvious for all to see, but he says I am the first person he tells about being sexually victimized. He explains that his ordeal has aged and weakened him, and that it has also weakened his ties to the wider community:
You know when they held me prisoner they made me suffer in many ways, they beat me, they tortured me, they treated me like a slave, like a woman. Many horrible things were done to me, I have lost limbs, I have lost my dignity, I have lost everything. I am only 28, but I am old now. I am old inside, and my body is old. And nobody understands me, they don’t understand that I have not the strength. I feel like I don’t belong, like I am not welcome anywhere. (Elias 2014, interview)
I have also heard several stories of men being ostracized by their own families and wives after their “unfortunate experience” became known, either because “there cannot be two wives in the same house”, as a common local saying goes, or because male survivors are henceforth assumed to have adopted an homosexual identity:
My wife and children thought it had happened because I was homosexual. I could not be their father anymore. (Jean-Claude 2011, interview)
It is thus not surprising that most male survivors of sexual violence prefer not to tell their spouse what befell them. In some cases, such confessions might actually help mend relations between husband and wife, especially when both have been victims of sexual violence or when sexual violence has provoked the husband’s impotence, thus raising his wife’s concern (Halla 2016, interview). But for many male survivors, the risks of speaking out are just too high, and silence is seen as preferable.
What is striking is also that the male survivors’ relatives themselves can bear part of the consequences of sexual violence, so that the shame and stigmatization often extend to include the survivor’s wife, but also his children: “Not only do other adults mock survivors and their wives, children in the village will say to the children of male survivors, ‘your father is a woman’, stigmatizing the children of survivors” (Christian et al. 2011, 239). Considering the patriarchal nature of many societies where wartime sexual violence is happening, such trends are not surprising. The man, as husband and father, is expected to uphold and represent the honor and dignity of his whole family, so his shame reverberates upon them: “When a man is raped, his family is also raped (…). The whole family is not respected—his wife is considered lower than other wives in the community” (IRIN 2011; see also Christian et al. 2011, 238). This means that even if the act of sexual violence itself might be directly targeting individuals, its consequences actually impact on a much larger group of individuals.
The survivors’ capacity to cope with what befell them is often impeded by the other conflict-related plights they have had to face or are still facing, like losing family members, being forcefully displaced, having their belongings destroyed or taken away from them, etc. Their ability to face and recover from the consequences of sexual violence is, therefore, influenced by a number of other factors that increase their vulnerability. In other words, the suffering induced by wartime sexual violence intersects with other types of suffering, and it cannot be understood without taking into account the context in which the violence has been committed, and in which survivors find themselves.
Understanding why they have been victims of sexual violence is particularly complex for survivors finding themselves in conflict settings where lines of divisions between warring parties are blurred and shifting, and where ideological or political oppositions are not at the center of the conflict, such as in Eastern Congo. Many explanations put forward by the survivors I have met revolved around the apparent “madness” of perpetrators, the loss of values in the context of war and the breakdown of traditions and social links:
These men believe in nothing. They have no family, no proper job, no home. Some say they are true men of God, but it is not right, what they are doing. They do not show any respect of what their fathers have told them, they only know how to destroy, how to bring pain. (Félicien 2010, interview)
5
Aimable, for instance, told me that he had stopped going outside to meet other men and share beers with them, and that he preferred staying at home where he felt “safer” (interviewed in Bubanza Province, Burundi, 18 April 2010).