I came to Burundi because I wanted to try to live a normal life, to find a job, maybe start a small business. I had also thought about Rwanda, but it is less complicated here. It is not easy and it takes time but with God’s help I will manage. (Bernard 2013, interview)
Fleeing allows male survivors to escape shaming by their communities of origin, or persecution for political, religious or other motives, and decreases the probability that they will have to face again the perpetrators. At the same time, it creates new burdens for survivors, who still have to cope with the physical and mental consequences of their ordeal, as well as with the difficulties related to settling, integrating and finding a job in another country, not to mention facing the hostility of populations in countries of settlement. If, as we will see in chapter 6, a few support programs are available for male survivors of sexual violence and torture in Western countries and especially in Northern Europe, they often face indifference and hostility in developing countries, especially in regions where all acts that can somehow be assimilated to homosexuality are penalized. It should also be noted that being a refugee increases the vulnerability of both male and female survivors, because without the protection of their relatives and communities of origin, they are likely to be targeted for sexual violence and all sorts of trafficking and exploitation, especially in refugee camps (UN 2013, 12). By fleeing, survivors thus often expose themselves to significant difficulties, and possibly also to further episodes of violence.
Where is the male survivor’s gender identity located, in the interplay between masculinities and femininities? As we have seen, sexual violence is a feminizing and subjugating act that seems to leave most male survivors in a limbo, as many of them think that their gender identity, and their social status, have been affected. However, especially during post-conflict and reconstruction processes, and unless they flee their regions of origin, they have to act according to dominant models of masculinity again, to take up their responsibilities as family heads, as breadwinners, and so on. But the memory that they have symbolically—and sometimes physically—been “unmanned”, and maybe also forced to perform as women (for instance, in cases of imprisoned boys and men used as “bush wives” by armed groups in sub-Saharan Africa), stays on. The “material incorporation” (Connell 1987) of the feminized gender identity assigned by sexual violence is sometimes even visible at the corporeal level, as has been made apparent during several of my interviews. By keeping their eyes down, their voice hardly audible even when secrecy was ensured, and by staying as still and discrete as possible, many male survivors[8] abide by the social and cultural norms that a woman living in this region of the world is expected to respect. Of course, their behavior can also be explained by their wish to remain anonymous and not to attract attention, but experiencing sexual violence often seems to provokes a corporeal feminization, as well as a silencing of survivors—two effects that are obviously interrelated:
I don’t like going out, there are too many people outside, and there is too much noise. I prefer to stay at my place, where it is quiet, and I don’t need to talk. And I don’t like it, when people are looking at me. (Léonard 2014, interview)
If the survivors’ plight becomes public, their communities of origin or of adoption when they try to settle elsewhere often consider them as neither women nor men: they are women in men’s bodies:
Nobody supported me. I was a wife who had a wife (Aimable 2010, interview).
Again, this is not without echo to how the military treats soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder, mocked as “hysterical men” (Cornwall and Lindisfarne 1994, 18; Whitworth 2008), though there have been indications that a number of armed forces now take the issue of post-traumatic stress disorder more seriously, notably by investing a sizeable amount of resources in treatment and prevention. In any case, the feminization that is enacted through sexual violence seems to render survivors ineligible to any “respectable” masculinity model, and their assigned gender identity contradicts the one displayed by their bodies. Even when what happened to them stays hidden, many male survivors still have to struggle with a feeling of emasculation that hampers their capacity to enact traditional masculinity models, not to mention post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms interfering with their sexuality and capacity to still act as fathers to their children.
A minority of male survivors seem to react to enforced feminization by strongly restating their masculinity, by displaying heightened levels of violence towards others, by falling into criminal activities, or even by becoming perpetrators of sexual violence themselves. In the course of my African fieldwork, for instance, I have met survivors who had been abducted by armed groups, been sexually assaulted, and consequently stayed in the group and become perpetrators of sexual violence themselves. In the rare cases when such information was shared, male survivors have recognized having subsequently participated in the rape of women during raids on villages (for instance, Félicien 2010, interview). It is, however, worth noting that none of the male survivors I interviewed ever mentioned subsequently perpetrating sexual violence against men. Such mechanisms of compensation, through the perpetration of violence, have also been observed by medical staff working with male refugees from the Middle East who have been sexually tortured (Halla 2016, interview).
These findings are also in line with the work of Messerschmidt showing that crime can constitute a resource for enacting masculinity (Messerschmidt 1993, 85). The idea that perpetrating violence, and specifically sexual violence, for redeeming one’s masculinity, has sometimes been called the “compensation hypothesis”, whereby “feminized” men reassert their masculinity by performing feminizing acts on others (Mechanic 2004, 22; Leatherman 2011, 140). This would suggest that sexual violence against men is likely to generate a vicious cycle of further violence, by potentially increasing the incidence of gender-based, domestic, sexual and other types of violence against women, men and children. This also strongly implies that patterns of sexual violence against women, and against men, are even more tightly interrelated than usually assumed. At the policy level, such findings further underscore the need to come up with prevention programs addressing in an encompassing way wartime sexual violence against both men and women.
One should beware of simplifications, though. The proportion of male survivors turning into perpetrators of sexual violence is unknown, and seems unlikely to be very high. Many survivors are physically and mentally broken by what they have been through, and are more likely to display a self-destructive attitude than aggressiveness towards others. Moreover, it has been shown that in some cases, and especially if the survivor’s partner has also been victim of sexual violence, male survivors can display more egalitarian behavior in their own couple, and more understanding towards gender equality issues (see, for instance, Edström et al. 2016, 32).
One of the main characteristics of sexual violence, related to its feminizing nature, is that it is a physically and psychologically disempowering act that underscores the victim’s weakness and subordinate status. Retrieving agency is not an easy process for survivors, be they men or women, especially when they have to face hostility on the part of the rest of the society; but it is also an indispensable one for male survivors in patriarchal societies that see men’s mental strength and will to act as a key masculine requirement. As we have seen, for many male survivors, going back to performing their duties as chief of household, father and husband can be a real challenge, not least because they sometimes face the hostility of their own relatives. Many, however, strive to achieve it: