Even when the existence of wartime sexual violence against men is acknowledged, it is often interpreted as a choice that men make, a result of their agency, rather than something that is done to them. As explained by Chynoweth, Freccero and Touquet (2017, 3) in the case of sexual trafficking, “boys may be perceived as ‘prostituting themselves’ or ‘experimenting with their sexuality’ and, therefore, less in need or deserving of protection or support” (see also Dennis 2008). This reinforces stereotypes relating to masculinity, agency and strength, and hampers male survivors’ access to support.
Further, in the few instances where sexual violence against men is acknowledged at the international level, it is not presented as sexual, but as political—a framing which echoes survivors’ stories and refusal to use references to sex to describe what happened to them. Such is the case, for instance, of narratives on the use of torture in detention, where as we have seen in chapter 1, male sexual torture is seldom mentioned as such.[6] It is as if the choice of, say, applying electric shocks to the male genitals was accidental and not related to their sexual and gendered meaning, whereas when a female prisoner is brutalized, the focus is put on the sexual element of torture even if it made up only a small part of the suffering the female prisoner has had to go through (for detailed accounts of torture of female militants, see, for instance, MacDonald 1991). This is in line with the reasoning of Ross (2002) showing how violence against men is racialized or politicized or related to class, whereas violence against women tends to be primarily sexualized and de-politicized. Wartime sexual violence against men is thus de-sexualized, just as male bodies are de-gendered. Sexual violence against men is often referred to with the metaphorical concept of “emasculation” which puts the stress on its political consequences (weakening, loss of agency, and so on), and which somehow obscures the materiality of sexual violence against men as a practice (Ross 2002, 307–11). Conversely, discourses on sexual violence against women often focus on rape as practice, and veil some of its metaphoric and political functions, as in the case of the “weapon of war” thesis.
What purposes do such narratives serve? What is striking to see is that stories focusing on violence against women, as stories of vulnerable, disempowered beings, fit extremely well the objectives of international actors, especially humanitarian ones, because they are seen as apolitical, and thus more in line with humanitarian discourses. Further, as several authors have shown, the victimization of women, and the parallel invisibility of male victims, often serve to justify international intervention (e.g. protect a feminized Kuwait from a hyper-masculine Iraq in 1990, saving Afghan women from Afghan men, etc.; see Sjoberg 2013, 199), where peacekeeping forces and humanitarian organizations can play the role of the masculine protector, which is assumed to be missing in the developing world. As has already been well demonstrated elsewhere, human misery is the strongest basis for NGOs’ appeals for help. But misery also serves to uphold the role of the United Nations as a protector of vulnerable women, rather than to promote women’s participation as agents (Seto 2013, 67). UN discourses build on the implicit idea that peacekeeping forces can help fighting wartime sexual violence—overlooking the fact that peacekeepers have also been found responsible for such acts, both against women and girls, and against men and boys, and that peacekeepers embody a masculinity model that is not much less violent than the ones that lead to episodes of sexual violence. These narratives serve to establish and legitimize a certain international security order, which builds upon a gendered understanding of violence, but also upon a violent reproduction of gender (Shepherd 2008, 170–71). In other words, associating women with vulnerability and victimhood, and men with power, violence and agency, serves to reproduce and to legitimize international policies such as intervention in conflict zones, as well as their multiple corollaries such as violent policing and imposition of Western values, norms and rules.
Such narratives obviously carry a heavy colonial taint (Eriksson Baaz and Stern 2013). Beyond the fact that calls for “gender mainstreaming” strategies try to impose Western values and conceptions of gender roles to the rest of the world, discourses on sexual violence are similarly built upon Western and imperialist understandings of gender identities and gender roles in the developing world. Post-colonial feminisms have already shown how representations of “woman” or “women” that masquerade as “universal” are, instead, universalizing and produced through hierarchical and intersecting power relations. Similarly, the portraying of men living in the developing world as uncivilized objects comes to justify intervention. In particular, one has to recognize that the understanding and framing of the suffering induced by sexual violence in conflict areas is tightly related to how Third World masculinities (and related Third World femininities) are viewed. This is not to say, of course, that violent conflict happens only in developing countries, but rather that our understanding of sexual violence in conflict areas is largely shaped by accounts from Eastern DRC, Uganda, Sri Lanka or the Central African Republic. Women in developing countries are usually pictured as victims of a patriarchal order, but this patriarchal order, as well as the masculine agents who support it, remains largely undescribed and unquestioned: “How are we to understand ‘black men’? This is not a question that has received the attention it deserves, as the focus of gender work in underdeveloped world contexts and in terms of race has been insistently on women. An ironic consequence has been to silence or to render black men invisible” (Morrell and Swart 2005, 96). It is perhaps never truer than in the case of wartime sexual violence against men in the developing world. Because they do not display the right gender or ethnicity, (nonwhite) male bodies cannot be in pain. This is what Lieder shows in her Scarry-inspired work: “The body in pain [is] a specifically gendered (female), classed (lowerclass), and raced (nonwhite) ‘other’ ” (Lieder 2015, 521). Some Western media narratives[7] also purport degrading assumptions about men of the developing world, including that they are “less civilized”, more likely to be violent (Carruthers 2004; Eriksson Baaz and Stern 2013) while at the same time somehow presenting their masculinity as incomplete and lacking (Ross 2002, 318). When attention is drawn to men in conflict areas, they are usually seen as responsible for the very high levels of violence against women, as well as against other men. Consequently, men who are victims of sexual violence must certainly bear some responsibility for their own fate, if only by never questioning the highly patriarchal models valued in their societies. Such narratives explain that men are excluded (save as perpetrators, of course) from accounts on sexual violence in conflict areas; they also feed the assumption that sexual violence is a phenomenon only relevant to women and girls.
6
There are of course exceptions, like the Guantánamo/Abu Ghraib cases, but I would argue that the media focus on the sexual torture of Iraqi prisoners by female officers was not primarily produced by the sexual nature of these acts, but by the gender of their perpetrators. And, needless to say, the other (nonsexual) dimensions of torture used on Iraqi prisoners have been receiving ample media attention too.
7
“News” about events related to sorcery, sexual perversion or cannibalism in Africa are extremely common in Western media. An example among a million others, a BBC report called “CAR Cannibaclass="underline" Why I Ate Man’s Leg”, 13 January 2014. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-25708024 (checked 30 April 2018).