At a more general level, what seems to limit the efficiency of the approaches that are currently developed in order to address wartime sexual violence against men is the fact that they fail to acknowledge and factor in the context in which this type of violence is perpetrated. As has been amply documented, during conflicts both men and women are victimized in multiple, gendered ways that are also often interrelated. Organizations that focus exclusively on sexual violence and hence neglect other types of violence that are perpetrated during conflict times, and to which sexual violence is tightly connected, run the real risk of coming up with unsuitable answers. As we have explored in chapter 2, conflict-related sexual violence does not happen in a vacuum, and has to be put in the context of the other experiences of war that the person has had and that are paramount for making sense of sexual violence itself. If support programs for male victims centralize the experience of sexual violence and thus signal it as the worst that can ever happen to any man, they run the risk of replicating the flaws of support programs for female victims. The idea that some male survivors might not think that this is the worst that happened to them, and that they might actually draw agency from their victimization, should not be overlooked.
Taking the broader context of conflict and violence into account is also essential for helping survivors overcome their trauma. As with every person who has been victim of any form of torture or violence (McClure 2015), male survivors of wartime sexual violence strive to understand why this has happened to them. Of course, they are often aware of the specific conditions as well as of the more general factors (such as belonging to a certain ethnic group, supporting an opposition movement, and so on) that increase their vulnerability. But whether sexual violence is seemingly committed in a “random” fashion, or can be explained by the specific religious, political or ethnic belonging of the victim, it ultimately only makes sense in the broader context of the war situation and of the spread of uncontrolled violence. Wartime sexual and gender-based violence is tightly connected to other forms of violence, and is a highly multicausal phenomenon linked, among other factors, to specific gender roles and images in the relevant society, but also to impunity, poverty and so on. What is more, the other experiences of violence that survivors have faced often make it more difficult for them to recover from the physical and psychological trauma entailed by sexual violence. Having been forced to leave their country or region of origin, having lost several or all members of their family, having witnessed atrocities, for instance, all dramatically hamper their capacity to deal with, and recover from, the suffering induced by sexual violence:
It would not be that bad if I still had my family. But I have lost everything, I have lost everyone. It is very difficult to be in pain, on the top of everything else. (Didace 2014, interview)
What complicates the contextualization of sexual violence is the fact that it has, especially when it is committed against women, become a stand-alone category, as if it was all that mattered about what happened to women during war, to the point that, as we have seen in the previous chapter, sexual violence has come to epitomize women’s experience of war. In many ways, most male survivors of conflict-related violence are in the exact opposite situation: up to now, everything but their sexual victimization matters in their experience of war. As a consequence, neither male nor female survivors can own their experience of sexual violence, men because it is unspeakable, or because it is “anecdotalized”, and women because it becomes larger than them, it is categorized, standardized and “relocated to a place (the imaginary body of a colossus) where it is no longer recognizable or interpretable”, as Scarry (1985, 71) aptly describes. For female survivors, this standardization impedes the narration of individual stories or experiences that would not fit the pre-established model. For male survivors, this pre-established model disregards, minimizes or even negates the possibility of the occurrence of sexual violence, when it does not try to requalify it in order to fit traditional conflict narratives. In both cases, contextualization becomes impossible.
What current support programs at local, national and international levels also lack is an emphasis on longer-term prevention. Admittedly, programs addressing conflict-related sexual violence against women have just started developing prevention strategies, focusing on education, awareness-raising activities and on associating men “as central agents of change”.[4] It is, therefore, no surprise that support programs for male survivors, which are still in their infancy, have not yet worked much on the issue of prevention. But since wartime sexual violence against women and against men are both tightly related to how masculinities are built in times of war, and in particular to models of militarized and dominant masculinities, it would be worth considering the implementation of prevention programs addressing all types of wartime sexual violence in a holistic way. This would necessitate acknowledging and better understanding the core relationship between conceptions of masculinity and the conduct of war, while taking into account the fact that male and female survivors have specific needs in terms of protection.
In other words, the study of relevant conflict factors and features, and of masculinity models, is a key aspect that has to be mainstreamed in responses and support offered to male and female survivors, as well as in prevention policies. Masculinity models are important not only because they largely explicate why wartime sexual violence against both men and women occurs, but also because they determine how male survivors react to their victimization: for instance, whether they will question their gender identity, how much they will put the blame on themselves rather than on perpetrators, whether they will feel guilty when they seek help, or whether they think that they should be able to cope with the suffering and the trauma on their own. Similarly, masculinity models help to understand specific patterns of sexual violence against men, for instance, against new recruits in military groups, against political opponents in detention, against some specific ethnic or religious groups and so on. They also suggest that some individuals are more likely than others to become perpetrators. In that sense it seems impossible to design, and much less implement, prevention policies until we factor in these contextual variables—conflict features and masculinity models, among others—which will help us gain a better understanding, for each conflict situation, of why men are targeted by sexual violence, and which categories of men are more vulnerable.
This also entails thinking about the way gender intersects with other variables to produce specific vulnerabilities—for instance, how men and women belonging to a specific ethnic or religious group are more likely to be targeted, or how geographic location, poverty, age, displacement and sexual orientation can heighten the vulnerability of men and women in different ways. Without this systematic screening and analysis, sexual violence against men will continue to look like a random (and, therefore, inexplicable) phenomenon, and prevention will remain wishful thinking. Similarly, responses to sexual violence against women will stay trapped in the “rape as a weapon of war” paradigm, which does not provide much detailed analytical tools, and which overlooks the relations between patterns of sexual violence and the wider structures of power in society, between but also within groups (Kirby 2012). As Dolan explains, such intersectional analysis cannot be conducted without institutionalizing data collection and processing:
4
See, for instance, the Wababa Project developed by Heal Africa (checked on 30 April 2018): https://healafrica.org/nehemiah-initiative/.