I tried to speak about it to the chief of the village, but he told me not to speak about these things. These are evil things he said, better not to speak about it. So I try to forget what happened to me, and I have told nobody else. (Jean-Paul 2009, interview)
These representations are also quite obviously related to a strong heteronormativity, whereby what we can call a hegemonic heterosexuality is shaping the perception of male victimization experience. This is particularly true of male survivors who also happen to be civilian, and who are, therefore, doubly feminized (and homosexualized): “A male who is exposed to rape and sexual violence in wartime has already been feminized by virtue of having assumed noncombatant status or having been forced into it through disarming and detention/incarceration” (Jones 2006, 459). Because it exposes collective fractures, tensions and weaknesses, the vulnerability of male survivors threatens to contaminate the whole society, and should, therefore, be silenced in order to hide the immense shame they carry.
Ultimately, the wider recognition of, and response to, the suffering induced by wartime sexual violence against men is impeded at the national and community levels by the same assumptions regarding “typical” masculine values and behavior that are held at the international level. As we will explore in the next chapter, some actors in the humanitarian field also fear that acknowledging the suffering of men, or paying “too much” attention to it, will somehow distract attention from the suffering of women. But such beliefs are the result of simplistic understandings of gender relations. Actually, as I have tried to show, the silencing of male survivors’ stories results in the strengthening of patriarchal discourses, and should, therefore, be considered as counterproductive by those who are fighting for women’s rights. Pretending that wartime sexual violence against men does not exist, or that it is anecdotal since “women make up the vast majority of victims”,[9] is playing into the hands of patriarchy. This silencing reinforces existing gender representations, and allows for the perpetuation of a masculinist gender order, where masculinity is associated with violence and power, and femininity with weakness and powerlessness. In other words, far from drawing attention to gender inequalities, and from helping to improve women’s situation, this silencing is highly detrimental to feminists’ objectives, because it reinforces the link between masculinity, power and invulnerability: “Perceiving men only and always as offender and never as victims of rape and other forms of sexual violence is a very specific, gendered narrative of war. In that narrative, dominant notions of masculinity merge with norms of heterosexuality and definitions of ethnicity and ultimately designate who can or cannot be named a victim of sexual violence” (Zarkov 2011, 69). In these narratives, conflict-related sexual violence, trauma and vulnerability are feminized, paradoxically resulting in a heightened vulnerability of women, and in a reluctance on the part of male victims to seek physical and mental health support.
Chapter 6
Conceptualizing and Implementing Care and Support Programs for Male Survivors
Providing support to male survivors of wartime sexual violence entails overcoming a series of major challenges, some of which are related to the narratives detailed in the previous chapter, while others pertain to material and funding obstacles. Because men have long been totally invisible as victims in international as well as national discourses about conflict-related sexual violence, the policies that have been designed and put in place to help female survivors have de facto excluded them from access to support. Further, when men appear in the equation, it has most of the time been as potential perpetrators of sexual violence—which some of them undoubtedly are—thus generating policies somehow presenting men as threats from which survivors of sexual violence have to be protected. As noted in a report published by the UN, “sexual and gender-based violence scenarios are populated by male perpetrators and female victims” (2013, 9). In many ways, the efficiency and impact of policies designed for offering support to survivors are impeded by these discourses’ Manichaean structure, offering simplistic explanations and thus unable to grasp the complex causes underpinning the phenomenon they are trying to oppose. As we will see, this Manichaean and binary discursive structure is part and parcel of a humanitarian narrative that needs simple explanations to attract external support and funding.
There are, however, some indications that discourses and practices are slowly evolving, becoming more aware and more inclusive of male survivors’ needs (Touquet and Gorris 2016). Over the past decade, academics, NGOs but also medical staff have started articulating strong criticism of existing programs addressing conflict-related sexual violence, especially because of their blatant oversight of male survivors (see, for instance, Carpenter 2006; Gorris 2015; Sivakumaran 2010). For the time being, however, this increased awareness has only generated fairly limited changes. In conflict settings all around the world, most humanitarian organizations, including major international ones, still focus almost exclusively—in discourse as well as in practice—on female survivors. As we will see, the setting up of support programs specifically targeting, or being inclusive of, male survivors is particularly complicated to organize in conflict areas, and not just for reasons pertaining to how gender-based violence is discursively framed. Organizing support in neighboring countries, and especially in refugee camps, constitutes an alternative but not fully satisfactory path. Support is sometimes provided in a post-conflict environment, decades after the sexual assault has taken place, as the example of Bosnian survivors’ associations shows. In such circumstances, the much-needed reflection on how to set up care policies that would take stock of recent research on wartime vulnerabilities, not to mention long-term prevention policies—addressing wartime sexual violence against both men and women—looks like a very remote prospect.
The analysis framework of care outlined by Vaittinen (2015, 111) proves very useful for understanding where we currently stand with regards to support for male survivors of wartime sexual violence. According to Vaittinen, the process of care can be subdivided in four separate and interconnected phases: “The first, caring about, refers to the processes where a need of care is recognized, whereas the second phase, taking care of, refers to assuming responsibility for the other’s needs. The concrete bodywork of care is then the third phase, labeled as care-giving, and the fourth and final phase is about care-receiving, which ‘recognizes that the object of care will respond to the care it receives’”. If we apply this framework to male survivors of conflict-related sexual violence, we see that if the need of care is increasingly recognized by major international and local actors, responsibility for providing that care is not yet entirely clear, especially as far as national institutions are concerned. As a consequence, “care-giving” is only partially implemented, and “care-receiving” is considerably impeded by the stigma and isolation still faced by male survivors. This chapter proposes to explore these multiple and overlapping discrepancies.
9
This is a statement often heard and read, even in discourses otherwise acknowledging the important victimization of men. My point here is absolutely not to deny that across the world women and girls are the first targets of wartime sexual violence. However, because it is also known that men are a lot less likely to report acts of sexual violence, and because recent research has shown that in certain conflict areas the proportion of affected men and boys was more than half that of women and girls (see, for instance, Johnson et al. 2010), we also have to admit that it is impossible to say how large exactly that majority is.