Fortunately, some major cracks have recently begun to appear in the rather simplistic understandings of wartime sexual violence that have been circulating during the past decades. Scholars and experts working on wartime sexual violence have started taking stock of advances in masculinity studies, highlighting diversities and hierarchies between models of masculinity and also disarticulating equations that had been previously made between men and masculinities, and women and femininities. Reports arriving from conflict zones, focusing on female survivors of sexual violence but also highlighting the plight of male survivors, have rendered the renovation and restructuring of narratives on conflict-related sexual violence even more urgent. In spite of this growing awareness though, when international documents or policies mention male survivors, it is still almost as an afterthought, and without any significant attempt to understand and analyse the phenomenon, and to come up with specifically targeted prevention and support policies.
What is puzzling is that the visibility of victims usually enhanced by a situation of conflict where both the media and the international community function as receptacles and amplifiers of testimonies of suffering, such as in the case of Eastern DRC, for instance, does not seem to be fully enacted in the case of male survivors of sexual violence. In light of these seemingly contradictory trends, this chapter explores understandings of, and narratives on, wartime sexual violence against men, as well as some of the questions they raise: Why are we seemingly paying less attention to sexual violence perpetrated against men than when it is perpetrated against women, even though there is mounting evidence of the latter? Can our understanding of sexual violence be reconciled with situations in which men are the victims and not the perpetrators, without damaging the work done by feminists to highlight the victimization of women? As we will see, this resounding silence originates in various sources. First, survivors themselves have a tendency to silence what happened to them, but so does the rest of the society, and of course the perpetrators. The international community, on the other hand, seems to alternate between recognition and denial, and struggles to find a place for male survivors in its narratives on war and sexual violence. This chapter argues that gender representations that are dominating at local, national but also international levels hinder the acknowledgement of the existence of male survivors of sexual violence, and thus obscure our understanding of the underlying mechanisms sustaining wartime sexual violence. The chapter explores what accounts for such a silencing, from representations of sexual violence where men stand as perpetrators, to patriarchal cultures associating masculinity to strength, protection and invulnerability.
One of the first striking elements about narratives on wartime sexual violence against men is that they seldom come from survivors themselves. Admittedly, even after the conflict has ended they rarely are in a position to make themselves heard, but there is also a genuine reluctance not only to tell their stories, but also to acknowledge the gendered and sexual nature of the violence they have been victims of. This is, of course, not very surprising considering the strong taboo around sexuality that persists in many societies around the world, but it is also related to the specific post-conflict context. In post-conflict and reconstruction settings, male survivors face great difficulties voicing out what happened to them, mostly because that type of sexual violence usually does not fit grand narratives about the conflict—frequently presenting men as saviors, defenders and protectors of civilian women and children. In addition, the apparent impossibility, at least in some settings, to make sense of conflict-related sexual violence against men, to assign a political meaning to it, relegates it to the inherent savagery and folly of war, in a way neither curable nor eligible for reparation. Male survivors are thus pushed away in the limbo of the post-conflict era, as obscene and embarrassing by-products of war that do not qualify for entering the realm of the political and politicized:
Nobody cares what happened to me. I am not a soldier, I am not a rebel, who cares what happened to me? (Jean-Claude 2011, interview)
The difficulties survivors face in coping with the physical and psychological pain also somehow sound dissonant amid discourses calling for peace and reconciliation. Post-conflict discourses enjoin everyone to move on, to let go of their resentment, to forgive and to cease dwelling on what happened. In such circumstances, their unceasing suffering simply does not fit:
I cannot forget what happened. They say it is peace now, that all Burundi’s problems are solved. But my problems are still here, and I don’t feel at peace. (Aimable 2010, interview)
What complicates the recognition of the suffering of male survivors, and of their victimhood, is also the fact that most of their injuries are often not visible to the naked eye, and can, therefore, be dismissed as unimportant. Nicole McClure has highlighted similar processes with victims of the troubles in Northern Ireland, showing that even though many of them are still in pain, they feel like their suffering is illegitimate and largely invisible in current narratives about the past: “The Injured are not visibly marked in any way that indicates that their injury was incurred in conflict violence. (…) There are also those whose injuries are invisible to the naked eye (psychological trauma or injuries that can be hidden from view) who have continued to maintain a seemingly normal life; they disappear simply because their injuries are assumed to be healed or nonexistent” (McClure 2015, 500).
I have met survivors in both “conflict” and “post-conflict”[1] settings. They had faced various types of sexual violence and torture, like having been raped, forced to rape family members, sexually tortured with objects or with electric shocks or been mutilated. None of them spontaneously described any of these instances as sexual violence. It is as if this concept was reserved to women only. Repeatedly, people—survivors, relatives and even local medical staff—I talked to confused sexual violence against males with violence in general, or with homosexuality. According to a local source quoted in a report by OCHA,[2] “Men do not use the word rape, which is too hard. They prefer to talk about torture, abomination”. My research participants were no exception. In a sense, I had the feeling that it was less an attempt to euphemise what had happened than an indication of their own incapacity to recognize that such a thing had happened to them. The interpretation of the metaphors and paraphrases they used was made easier by parallels they made between female prisoners and themselves, or by their indignation of having been “used as if they were women” (Dionise 2011, interview). They were bewildered at having been treated in a way that they considered as contradicting with their gender, and that was “against nature”.
1
Quotation marks are used to underscore the great fluidity and porosity of this conflict/post-conflict distinction, as the situation in Burundi at the time of writing, for instance, illustrates.
2
http://www.irinnews.org/Report/93399/DRC-UGANDA-Male-sexual-abuse-survivors-living-on-the-margins, checked on 27 April 2018.