Instances of sexual violence against men have been documented in a great number of conflicts and wars, both ancient and contemporary. A number of factors have contributed to keep them well hidden from view, though. First, empirical evidence on wartime sexual violence against men is usually not elaborated upon, and much more stress is put on “other” forms of violence of which civilian and combatant men are victims, such as killing, maiming, and, to a lesser extent, imprisonment and torture.[2] Conversely, most published work on wartime sexual violence takes female victims as their unquestionable main if not unique object of analysis, and research on violence perpetrated on women during conflicts focuses primarily on sexual violence. Numbers and statistics about the sexual victimization of men are also difficult to come by, because male survivors tend to hide that they have been victims of such violence. Of course, both male and female survivors of sexual violence tend to underreport it, but there is evidence that male victims report these cases even less than women and girls do (Sivakumaran 2007). In addition, it appears that sexual violence against men is often not coded as sexual violence, but as torture or beatings (see Manivannan 2014, 643; Cohen et al. 2013). For instance, the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission coded male sexual torture as “torture”, but female sexual torture as “sexual violence”. Leiby (2012, 343) recoded and analysed the original testimonies of Peruvian survivors of sexual violence and found out that 29% of sexual violence victims were men, whereas the truth commission had found that only 2% were men. Finally, it seems reasonable to assume that because patterns of wartime sexual violence against men seem to differ from what we know of conflict-related sexual violence against women, they are not perceived as such. Wartime sexual victimization of women has set the norms for sexual violence more generally, and sexual violence against men does not always fit neatly within these established categories: men are less likely to raped, but are more likely to be victims of sexual mutilation, and of other forms of sexual torture like beatings of the genitals, which are usually not coded or perceived as gender-based or sexual violence.
In spite of these coding difficulties, some numbers have begun to emerge, signaling that the phenomenon is much more common and widespread than usually assumed. The attention of the wider public in Western countries has notably been drawn to the issue with the publication of some reports about sexual violence in armies, such as the figures published in 2012 by the US Department of Defense about the percentage of US male soldiers as victims of sexual assault: of an estimated twenty-six thousand soldiers who have been victims of sexual assault in 2012, 54% were men (Department of Defense 2012). Slowly, other figures collected in conflict zones are being published., for instance, a study conducted by Johnson et al. (2010) has reported that 23.6% of men and boys (39.7% of women and girls) living in Eastern DRC have experienced some form of conflict-related sexual violence. Such figures are in line with what has been observed in many other conflicts, and demonstrate in a striking manner that wartime sexual violence against men is, contrary to common assumptions, far from being an anecdotal phenomenon.
If researchers have only recently started to compile statistics, empirical evidence suggests that wartime sexual violence against men is probably as old as war itself. As explained by Sivakumaran (2010, 264), “the practice has been documented as dating back from almost time immemorial”. In Ancient Greece, when enemy men and boys were captured, they were often used as sex slaves, or turned into “warriors’ brides” in Mesoamerica (Del Zotto and Jones 2002). In the ancient world, Chinese, Persian, Egyptian or Norse armies, to quote but a few examples, castrated their male enemies, and publicly displayed their penises (Goldstein 2004, 357). Castration could be partial (cutting off testicles) or total (cutting both testicles and penises), and sometimes enemy men were circumcised, as a form of symbolic castration. In many pre-Colombian societies, like the Aztec in Central America as well as among Native American peoples, raping male prisoners was used as a way to assert domination, when male enemy combatants were not castrated before being eventually killed. In all these cases, sexual violence constituted a performative act underscoring the henceforth dominated and feminized status of male defeated enemies. Castration in particular was clearly meant to take away the enemy combatants’ manhood, and, therefore, their symbolic and physical power. According to Zawati (2007, 33), in ancient wars and societies, wartime sexual violence against men, and specifically male rape was considered as a legitimate right of the victorious soldiers to declare the totality of the enemy’s defeat, and to show that the emasculated and vanquished enemy could not be a warrior or a ruler anymore. If, as Del Zotto and Jones (2002) explain, these acts have been performed less and less publicly, it does not mean that they are not practiced anymore: “As western Judeo-Christian and Islamic taboos against homo-eroticism (including violent homoeroticism) became institutionalized, the above-mentioned acts became less public, and generally ceased to be part of triumphal spectacles of violence. They continued to be practiced nonetheless, but ‘underground’ ”. One should, however, be careful not to stretch interpretations of today’s wartime sexual violence to existing evidence across ancient cultures and geographical areas. The fact that, in some ancient cultures like Ancient Greece, male-to-male sexual contact was not taboo suggests that it would be simplistic to read issues of gender relations and gender-based and sexual violence through the lenses of contemporary patriarchal and heteronormative societies. In that sense, the “undergrounding” of wartime sexual violence against men suggested by Del Zotto and Jones might have given these practices a whole new meaning, precisely by rendering them more taboo, inadmissible and, as we will see, feminizing. The plethora of historical examples nevertheless demonstrates that sexual violence against men has long been part of war and domination strategies.
Wars and genocides of the twenthieth century also abound with examples of sexual violence against men. During the Armenian genocide, for instance, sexual torture of men was quite prevalent. Many Armenian men were castrated, forced to march naked or circumcised after they had forcibly been converted to Islam (Bjørnlund 2011). Another famous case is the “Rape of Nanking” in 1937, during which Chinese men were raped and forced to rape each other in front of Japanese soldiers. Horror did not stop there: “Cases were reported of castration, and even of selling penises for Japanese men to eat (supposedly to increase their potency)” (Goldstein 2004, 367). Cases of castration and rape of men have also been reported during the genocide in Cambodia (Studzinsky 2012, 92 and 106), among numerous other cases.
2
Of course, such types of violence can, and indeed do often, include sexual violence, but this is almost never discussed.