Alongside a default assumption that anyone could be a victim until proven otherwise, therefore, there must be a consistent concern with establishing relevant data that allows context-specific and evidence-based interventions. (…) Documentation is not a matter of stand-alone research projects, as these are neither desirable nor particularly feasible in many crisis situations. What is required instead is to ensure that in the routine collection of data (registration data, food distribution lists, clinic attendance, health screening, etc.), the right questions are asked and the resultant data are subjected to a gender analysis. (2014b, 498)
Several obstacles stand in the way of such an approach, though. There are, of course, funding issues, as setting up comprehensive prevention programs would require significant financial resources, and the building and strengthening of an expertise that is still largely nascent, even when it comes to sexual violence against women. What is more, as we have seen, programming in the field of sexual violence is still too often done in terms of either/or, as if including male survivors in the overall picture would somehow undermine the hard-won advances in the fight against sexual and gender-based violence against women. This is particularly true of prevention activities, as explained by Sivakumaran (2010, 268): “When it is at the level of heightening awareness and responsiveness, the language is inclusive—all civilians, including women and children. However, as the provision goes on, and when the matter shifts to the more onerous prevention of sexual violence, the objects of protection are exclusively women and girls”. More generally, preventive policies are notoriously difficult to implement in conflict settings, where they are seen as too complicated to design and set up, expensive, and where their efficiency is difficult to demonstrate (Ackermann 2003). Harnessing support for prevention on the part of the policy-making community, but also of donors, is, however, imperative if we want to significantly reduce the suffering induced by wartime sexual violence against both men and women.
Several researchers have explored avenues for preventing wartime sexual violence, like, for instance, the PRIO report compiled by Nordås (2013). Drawing on cases of conflict where wartime sexual violence is absent or has decreased, Nordås outlines several avenues for prevention, like “changing norms—including changing how survivors are perceived and treated in their communities”, “creating safer spaces—including improving infrastructure and reporting practices”, “improving reporting—including protection of witnesses”, “ending impunity” and “assuring accountability”. One of the limits of these proposals is that they do not really address the root causes of sexual violence against both men and women, in particular masculinity models, as well as the enabling role played by the conflict context—often entailing, among other things, a breakdown of law and order. These proposals also fail to take into account the fact that a significant proportion of acts of sexual violence are perpetrated by non-State actors whose accountability is almost impossible to ensure. By focusing mostly on how survivors and perpetrators are treated after the fact, the hope that lies at the core of these proposals is that these norms and knowledge will gradually have an impact on practices. Like many other reports written on the issue, which seem more interested in punitive options than in genuine prevention, this PRIO report assumes that by changing the way survivors are treated, by trying to end impunity and by ensuring accountability through the strengthening of commanders’ responsibility for acts committed by their troops, the reasons that push perpetrators to commit sexual violence will disappear. Undoubtedly, as we will explore in the next chapter, impunity is a crucial factor, and military leadership certainly has a role to play too. As Wood (2009) has shown in the case of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka, the enforcement of strict rules and discipline by the military hierarchy, even in a non-State military group, can play a role in the absence, or decreasing occurrence, of wartime sexual violence. But as Kirby (2011, 813–14) has pointed at, all depends on whether you think that the occurrence of wartime sexual violence results from a military strategic choice, or from a lack of discipline within military ranks: “In the latter example, efforts to strengthen and train militaries in conflict zones will decrease rape. In the former, such efforts will only increase the effectiveness of the masculinized war machine”.
In another PRIO policy brief on “Preventing Perpetrators” dealing with sexual violence against both women and men, Skjelsbæk (2013) adopts a different approach, taking stock of the role played by cultural factors and by militarized masculinities in the perpetration of wartime sexual violence. She argues for a three-tier approach: encouraging research on perpetrators (individual focus), holding military leaders responsible (group focus) and fostering military cultures in which perpetrators of sexual violence are exposed and condemned (cultural focus). Even if these proposals again largely ignore perpetrators who do not belong to the military, the recognition that sexual violence can be triggered by individual, group-level and cultural factors, separately or jointly, sounds very promising.
Chapter 7
Prosecuting Wartime Sexual Violence Against Men
Up to a recent period, wartime sexual violence against women or men was very rarely prosecuted, and many observers used to consider it as a harrowing, but inevitable, corollary of war. For instance, only a handful of the numerous and well documented episodes of sexual violence against women that occurred during World War II were prosecuted during the Nuremberg and the Tokyo trials, or during any other major trial that followed. And when they were condemned, these acts were charged as “ill treatment”, “persecution” or “other inhumane acts”, thus overlooking the sexual nature of the offenses. Over the past few years, however, more and more cases of conflict-related sexual violence against women have been taken up and charged as such by both international and national courts. Yet, when it comes to sexual violence against men, progress is much less obvious. As Manivannan (2014, 646) notes, with regard to the prosecution of wartime sexual violence “many of the problems faced by male victims can be considered particularly egregious manifestations of the issues involved in addressing sexual violence against women”.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) established in 1993 was the first international tribunal to prosecute cases of wartime sexual violence against both men and women. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) established a year later in 1994 has been prosecuting cases of conflict-related sexual violence too, but to date has not charged anyone with committing rape or sexual assault against men, despite its well documented occurrence during the genocide. In parallel, several national and ad hoc tribunals, courts and commissions have been set up in various post-conflict countries like Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cambodia and Sierra Leone, and have attempted to tackle the issue, with mixed results. Prosecuting perpetrators and providing justice to survivors is paramount in order to give a sense of justice to survivors, to break the cycle of impunity and also possibly to prevent further cases of sexual violence by acting as a deterrent. Many challenges lie upon the way though, notably related to the existence of a fragmented legal and institutional framework for prosecution, to underreporting by survivors, to the difficulties in apprehending suspects and so on.