Over the past few years, the international community’s awareness of the existence, and extent, of conflict-related sexual violence against men has been steadily growing. This evolution has been particularly noticeable within the UN, where the topic is now being taken up by various agencies, including at the highest level (Sivakumaran 2010, 262). This increased awareness has translated into a series of policy papers, such as the guidelines issued by the UNHCR in 2012 on how to identify and support male victims of rape and other forms of sexual violence in conflict settings and displacement situations (UNHCR 2012). This publication had been preceded by other groundbreaking international reports that have been written in the wake of major wars or genocides, such as the Final Report of the UN Commission of Experts on the war in former Yugoslavia (UN 1994), which recognized the existence and extent of sexual violence and torture against men. These reports have significantly improved and enlarged UN agencies’ understanding of wartime sexual violence, to the point that over the past few years the UN has spearheaded several initiatives focusing on wartime sexual violence against men, such as a specific workshop held in New York in July 2013. More recently, a UN Security Council Report published on “conflict-related sexual violence” (UN 2016) explicitly recognizes the existence of sexual and gender-based violence against men and boys, especially in detention settings (§2, p.3). Like previous UN yearly reports on conflict-related sexual violence, this document details cases of sexual violence against both men and women that occurred during the preceding year. In 2016 alone, cases of wartime sexual violence against men and boys were officially documented in Afghanistan, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Myanmar, Sudan and Syria, among other examples.
But even at the UN level, considerable progress is still needed, especially when it comes to translating these texts into concrete plans for action. The report on the above-mentioned workshop on wartime sexual violence against men, organized by the UN in 2013, recognizes, for instance: “While the working tools of the GBV Information Management System of the UN are gender neutral, the materials provided by the UN’s own Global Protection Cluster under the heading Gender Based Violence reflect a gender-exclusive approach to Sexual and Gender Based Violence” (UN 2013, 15). Most of the guidelines and concrete tools used by UN agencies for training on conflict-related sexual and gender-based violence, including reference manuals or indicators, still draw on exclusively female case studies and totally ignore the existence of male survivors.
Another major limit of changes witnessed at the UN level is that so far most of the proposed measures seem more targeted towards the prosecution of acts of sexual violence, rather than towards the provision of support to survivors, not to mention prevention measures. In the UN yearly reports on conflict-related sexual violence, for instance, measures envisaged range from training for UN peacekeepers, to the deployment of Women’s Protection Advisers in Democratic Republic of the Congo and Côte d’Ivoire, and to the setting up of early warning indicators of conflict-related sexual violence to be used by UN forces in countries like South Sudan. The UN has also been providing technical support to relevant countries, through the training of envoys, mediators and mediation experts whose main task is to ensure that provisions on sexual violence are included in peace and ceasefire agreements (UN 2015, §89, p.26). The SG Report includes only one paragraph addressing the issue of support to survivors, stating the importance of ensuring “differentiated and appropriate services” for male survivors, but it remains very vague, stating responsibilities without guidelines for practical implementation (UN 2015, §100, p. 29). In the same vein, the “Guidelines for Investigating Conflict-Related Sexual and Gender-Based Violence Against Men and Boys”, compiled by the Institute for International Criminal Investigations (2016), aim at helping criminal justice and human rights investigators to monitor, document and investigate wartime sexual and gender-based violence against men and boys, but do not discuss support or prevention options. A very similar initiative has been the publication in 2017 of the second edition of the “International Protocol on the Documentation and Investigation of Sexual Violence in Conflict”, which now includes a full and detailed chapter on male victims (UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office 2017). The Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF) has also published a guidance note for security institutions on sexual violence against men, which adopts a broader perspective by focusing on both conflict and non-conflict settings, and by including the issue of domestic violence against men (Watson 2014).
Among all these texts mostly dedicated to prosecution measures, one document stands out, the previously mentioned UNHCR report (UNHCR 2012), which directly focuses on the provision of support to male survivors of conflict-related sexual violence. It offers guidelines for staff and other aid workers on how to identify and support male victims of rape and of other types of sexual violence in conflict and displacement situations. The report underscores the reasons for the vulnerability of refugee men and boys, and “provides guidance on how to access survivors, facilitate reporting, provide protection and deliver essential medical, legal and social services” (p. 2). It also advocates for the setting up of inclusive programs for both male and female survivors of sexual violence (p. 8), and for the creation of peer support groups (p. 13) which, as we will see, have so far constituted one of the most effective, though scattered, source of support for survivors. While this report undoubtedly signals a change in attitudes at the international level, it stops short of developing proactive strategies to prevent sexual violence against men from occurring. This is representative of the generally reactive rather than proactive attitude of the international community on conflict-related sexual violence against both women and men. What is more, it is quite complicated to assess the real impact that this report has on practices, especially since it doesn’t seem to have circulated widely outside of UN agencies.[1] Most health-care professionals who are aware of the existence of the UNHCR Guidelines find them too vague to really help. Most other available guidelines or toolkits for providing medical, mental health and psychosocial support to survivors of wartime sexual violence, like those published by the World Health Organization in 2012, or by the Australian Civil-Military Centre in 2014, only mention male victims of sexual violence in passing. Similarly, the UN-led campaign “Stop Rape Now” (UN action against sexual violence in conflict) does not seem to be interested in male survivors, and is rather structured as a campaign against conflict-related sexual violence against women (Grey and Shepherd 2012). Admittedly, the UN has launched several initiatives to tackle the legacy of conflict-related sexual violence, for instance, in 2015 in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where its objectives are not just to provide access to justice and reparations, but also to improve the situation of survivors of wartime sexual violence by mapping their needs and capacities, and by trying to reduce the stigma still attached to them. However, none of these programs specifically mentions or targets male survivors, and one can also question the efficiency of such programs when they are put in place, as in the case of Bosnia-Herzegovina, more than two decades after the end of the conflict.
In the humanitarian field, several major organizations such as Physicians for Human Rights or Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) have started to open up their programs and awareness campaigns to the plight of male survivors. For instance, in 2015 MSF launched its first comprehensive program dedicated to survivors of sexual violence in Port Harcourt in Nigeria, which includes among other initiatives an awareness campaign targeting different facilities like universities, schools and health clinics, and which organizes discussions around male sexual abuse. In July 2014 MSF also opened in Bangui (Central African Republic) a medical and psychological care service for victims of sexual violence, where male survivors are also taken care of. Similar initiatives have been implemented by the International Rescue Committee and other international NGOs like Care, which has developed in 2015 a Training Manual on “Gender Peace and Conflict” acknowledging male victimhood in situations of conflict-related gender-based violence. Resistance to this inclusion is, however, still strong among regional organizations, where men are still mostly referred to as either indirect victims (for instance, men witnessing female relatives being sexually abused) or perpetrators of sexual violence. Even though NGO staff is increasingly aware of the need to broaden their perspective and programs, the equation between women as victims, and men as perpetrators, still frames humanitarian discourses and actions:
1
Apart from the staff working with UN agencies and in particular with the UNHCR, almost none of the medical staff I have interviewed, be it in conflict zones or in Western countries receiving applications for asylum from people victims of sexual torture, had heard about these guidelines.