These explanations implicitly build on the assumption that sexual violence is perpetrated in a random way, that it is the product of madness, therefore, both unpredictable and uncontrollable. Almost all express puzzlement and even bewilderment, like Bernard, a Congolese refugee in Burundi:
Every day I ask myself why, why me…. What if I had chosen to do something else, to be somewhere else the day when it happened? (Bernard 2013, interview).
Some of my interviewees even challenged me to come up with an explanation, to explain to them why they had been targeted:
You who are studying this, can you tell me why they are doing this? What is their goal? Why doing this to me? I am not someone important you know. (Aimable 2010, interview)
Most of the male survivors I have met in Burundi and in the DRC didn’t seem to have been specifically targeted for sexual violence, at least in terms of their political, ethnic, religious or geographic belonging. But all came from rather poor families, and very few inhabited, at the time of the assault(s), in a large city. In other words, all were vulnerable to violence committed by roaming armed groups. Many of them had been abducted by armed groups during raids on villages, or while they were in the countryside running some errand. And many had the feeling of having been at the wrong place at the wrong time. The apparent random nature of these acts makes it extremely difficult for survivors to come to terms with what has befallen them. While some thought that sexual violence against women could be explained by the sexual “urges” of combatants, they did not understand why this would happen to them, and what relation it might bear with the other types of violence they are victims of:
They rape our women, they beat us, they kill our cattle and they take our food, but why doing this to me? They can have our food without doing this. When they beat you, when they take everything you have, when they burn down your house, they have what they want! So why did they do that? (Jean-Paul 2009, interview)
In these cases, incomprehension dominates, and most survivors seem to fight a nagging feeling that perhaps there is something that they cannot yet grasp, that would help them understand what happened, and thus hopefully overcome it. But because this explanation rarely comes, most survivors opt either for silencing the matter, or for re-labeling what has happened. Castration and rape are, for instance, re-qualified as torture or beatings, and many survivors use metaphors to speak about what happened to them, or describe it as if it had happened to someone else (Halla 2016, interview).
Things are somehow different in cases where survivors have the (right or wrong) feeling of having been singled out, especially in cases of sexual torture for political or ideological motives. In the testimonies collected by Feldman (1991), former political prisoners in Northern Ireland spoke almost casually about sexual torture: “They don’t say a word, they just beat you rabbit punches, squeezing the testicles, anything at all. Just general brutality. (…) It was very clear then strip searching wasn’t a method for finding anything: it was an opportunity for them to do whatever they were going to do on you” (128, 158). The Northern Irish paramilitaries I have met also inscribed their experiences of sexual violence in detention within a larger narrative on their political struggle:
They [interrogators] would beat me down there [gesturing at his groin], because they had tried everything else, and they couldn’t break me, see? So they tried that too, trying to break me, but of course that didn’t work. (Jim 2006, interview)
For some of them, it was an almost natural part of prison experience, an additional vindication of their wish to bring down this abusive system. And instead of depriving survivors of their agency, living through this kind of violence was seen as a proof of their (masculine) strength and resilience:
And yes of course like many others I was abused, you know, that is part of what you go through in there. But in a way that made our resolve stronger, because this is wrong, just like the whole system is wrong. It made us more determined to do whatever we can to bring it to an end. (Kieran 2005, interview)
Everything was done to make you feel like shit, like you are a piece of meat, you know? So whatever humiliation they put you through, whatever indecency they could do to you, like put their fingers in you or things like that, it was nothing. What was done to us is nothing as compared as to what they do to our families and to our communities. This is what counts. (Pat 2006, interview)
In Sri Lanka too, male survivors acknowledge that political motives triggered their arrest and torture, and put forward explanations pertaining to gender roles and local cultural values: “To be subjected to rape in front of other people is a shameful thing. If other Tamil people come to know they will look down on me. They did this to make us ashamed” (quoted in Sooka 2014, 41). Unlike many survivors I have met in the Great Lakes region, those who have been victims of sexual torture because of their political beliefs, or their ethnic or religious belonging, do not seem to struggle with the “why me” question, or with the “why sexual violence” one. But it is not necessarily the case for their (surviving) relatives. Claire, a Tutsi rescapée from the Rwandan genocide, speaks about her brother who was castrated in front of her, before being eventually being “cut”[6] by the Interahamwe (radical Hutu militias). She was eight years old at the time:
I don’t understand, I really don’t understand. Why did they have to do that before cutting him? (Claire 2012, interview)
Other rescapées of the Rwandan genocide shared similar stories, suggesting that this practice was, if not common, at least not exceptional during the genocide:
Nina: With my mother we decided to flee, cross the border and ask a cousin living in Burundi to help us. (…) We saw so many bodies on the way, at night. They left them there, rotting in the streets, in the houses, everywhere. They didn’t care. Some of the bodies were half naked and mutilated, especially the men’s.
EF: Mutilated?
Nina: Yes, mutilated. Cut. Some men’s and boys’ bodies were cut, down there.
EF: Why do you think they did that?
Nina: I don’t know, I don’t understand. Wasn’t it enough to kill them? (Nina 2013, interview)
In Burundi and the Congo, male survivors’ difficulty to comprehend sexual violence is frequently mirrored by the incapacity of their communities of origin to show understanding towards them, often precipitating their decision to leave—and also, in some cases, to commit suicide. This explains why the percentage of victims of sexual violence is so high among refugees.[7] Isolation, self-imposed exile and flight thus often characterize the experience of survivors. But flight can of course also be triggered by the situation of conflict itself, inducing mass killings, forced displacement, destruction of crop and cattle, bombings and attacks, epidemics and so on. But even in cases where violence is sporadic, some survivors prefer to leave their communities of origin for fear of another encounter with perpetrators (Refugee Law Project 2014, 8). And this insecurity often seems to follow them in exile, as if their incapacity to make sense of what happened had led them to assume that they would never be safe anywhere.
Evidence shows that migration can most of the time be explained by several reasons, and even for male survivors the experience of sexual violence is not necessarily the triggering factor. For people having experienced sexual torture in the hands of a national security agency, for instance, other experiences of control, repression, harassment and threat by security forces can precipitate the decision to start a new life abroad (see, for instance, the case of Sri Lanka, Sooka 2014). For them, leaving is a way to try to start anew, and to retrieve some agency and control over their lives:
6
“Cutting” is an expression that was used during the Rwandan genocide, meaning being killed with a machete.
7
For instance, a survey by Johns Hopkins University, in cooperation with the Refugee Law Project in Uganda, surveyed 447 male refugees (99% from Congo) and found that 38.5% had experienced sexual violence at some point of their life (Dolan 2014a).