Wartime Sexual Violence against Men

Masculinities and Power in Conflict Zones

Élise Féron

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786609311
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Peace & Global Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Cases of sexual violence against men have been documented in a great number of conflicts and wars, both ancient and contemporary. Despite this growing empirical evidence, there is still a dearth of analyses on this type of violence, which stands in stark contrast with the abundant literature dealing with sexual violence against women. Based on a fieldwork conducted primarily in the Great Lakes Region of Africa, this book proposes to look at wartime sexual violence against men as a performative gendered act that, stemming from the same logic underpinning sexual violence against women, (re-)affirms a gendered social hierarchy. The book explores patterns of wartime sexual violence against men, and presents survivors’, but also perpetrators’ stories. The book proceeds to analysing the context in which this type of violence can be understood, narrated, but also addressed, either through support programs for survivors, or through legal means.

17Chapter 1

Conflict-Related Sexual Violence
Against Men

An Overview

Sexual violence against women within armies, or used as a “weapon of war” in conflict zones such as in Syria, the DRC and numerous other conflict areas, has recently attracted a lot of media and academic attention1. Overwhelming reports have been published since the end of the Cold War, revealing staggering numbers of women being raped in countries like the DRC, nicknamed the “rape capital of the world”, but also during the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in Liberia and in Sierra Leone, to quote just a few examples. Recent research has also highlighted the multiple forms that wartime sexual violence can take (so that it is not just about rape, but also about sexual slavery, sexual torture, sexual mutilations and so on), variations in who is targeted (e.g. women of a certain ethnic or religious group, all women, women and men of a certain ethnic or religious group, etc.), in who are the perpetrators and so on (for an overview, see Wood 2006). Several types of conflict-related sexual violence, like sexual torture, rape or mutilation, seem to be used in different ways and with more or less frequency in different settings, with, for instance, a predominance of sexual torture in detention during asymmetrical conflicts. In most cases, however, and in spite of accumulated empirical evidence and testimonies, it remains extremely complicated to understand why some conflict actors seem to be more prone to perpetrate sexual violence than others, or why patterns of sexual violence often seem to change over the course of a given conflict. In this perspective, the chapter provides a brief overview of theoretical frameworks developed over the past decades in order to explain the occurrence of conflict-related sexual violence. It shows how these various theoretical frameworks have so far failed to mainstream in the analysis the existence of sexual violence against men. It also presents the mounting empirical evidence regarding wartime sexual violence against men, and details some of its most remarkable patterns.

181.1. Understanding Wartime Sexual Violence

Multiple explanations have been put forward to try to make sense of the occurrence and patterns of wartime sexual violence, with the objective to come up with a theoretical framework that would provide an overall explanation for wartime sexual violence. Scholarly debates have mostly focused on the question of whether sexual violence can be understood as a strategy of combatants using it as a “weapon of war”, or whether it should be seen as the result of the combatants’ opportunistic choices. If understood as opportunistic, sexual violence does not result from a planned strategy, but rather accompanies other types of violence like pillaging and looting, and is facilitated by the weakening of social norms. Both explanatory strands have received partial empirical validation, but the “weapon of war” thesis has become particularly popular at the international policy level, especially since the UNSC Resolution 1820 (2008), adopted unanimously by the UN Security Council, described rape as a “tactic of war”. This thesis is, however, periodically challenged by the declarations of most concerned military and political authorities, who argue that sexual violence occurs without their consent. This suggests a potential lack of discipline within the ranks of armies and armed groups, as well as potential discrepancies between motives and interests of military leaders, and those of rank-and-file combatants (Leiby 2009, 448). Several authors have explored these dynamics and tried to solve this conundrum, like Wood (2006, 331), who proposes to explain conflict-related sexual violence by looking at the interplay between three levels of analysis, that of the relevant armed group, the smaller unit in which the combatants operate on a day-to-day basis, and the individual level, alongside the degree of access that combatants have to civilians. The idea that sexual violence is used as a war tactic, and in particular as an ethnic cleansing strategy, however, still dominates international policy debates, which frequently overlook the nuances offered by academics.

Research has also used gender-related analysis grids to provide a more detailed understanding of who is targeted by wartime sexual violence, and why. Many authors have thus put the stress on how gender roles, norms and relations come into play to enable and sometimes even increase the occurrence of sexual violence. Conflict-related sexual violence has, for instance, been analysed as a consequence of patriarchal gendered social norms (Brownmiller 1975), or of militarization of societies (Enloe 2000). Other authors like Miranda Alison (2007) stress the importance of heterosexual militarized masculinities and of particular constructions of gender, which intersect with ethnicity and other identity factors for explaining specific patterns of wartime sexual violence. In an attempt to map epistemological explanations of 19wartime sexual violence, Inger Skjelsbaek (2001a) has shown how, over the past decades, three main gender-based conceptualizations of wartime sexual violence have emerged, each based on different assumptions about human nature, gender and power relations: first, essentialism, according to which sexual violence, and especially sexual violence against women, is an inevitable part of war and a direct consequence of militarized masculinity (see, among others, Brownmiller 1975; Seifert 1993); second, structuralism, which points to structural factors as predisposing certain women to wartime sexual violence like marginalization, ethnicity, race or political affiliation, and which also sheds light on structural factors determining combatants’ behavior (e.g. Lentin 1997; Wood 2006); and third, social constructivism (e.g. Shepherd 2008; Sjoberg 2013), which explains that “war-time sexual violence can be regarded as a transaction of identities between the perpetrator and the victims” (Skjelsbaek 2001a, 226), a transaction that reinforces the masculinity of the perpetrator and simultaneously feminizes the victim.

While none of these analysis grids (essentialist, structuralist and social constructivist) really provides a definitive answer to the above-mentioned tactics/opportunism debate, it is important to underscore that they are not systematically in contradiction with one another. Actually, they sometimes even overlap, and can be considered more or less valid depending on the conflict situation and the historical context. As noted by Kirby (2012, 800), the context always plays a major role in sexual violence patterns: “The apparent dispute between an account of wartime sexual violence in which all women are targeted and one in which men and women are targeted may tell us more about contingent historical factors (different wars and differing contexts may display different patterns of rape) or analytical distinctions (between acts that are essential to a strategy and those that are peripheral to it) than they do about the philosophical foundations of research”. The sheer complexity and fluidity of conflict patterns seem to preclude monocausal explanations of sexual violence, highlighting the need to mainstream, beyond tactics, opportunism and gender factors, other dimensions such as poverty, collapse of law and order, past uses of wartime sexual violence and so on.

Most of these analyses also share a specific focus on rape as a major form of conflict-related sexual violence. There is, however, to date, no unified theory that consistently explains patterns of wartime rape that are observed at the empirical level (Gottschall 2004). Megan MacKenzie (2010), for instance, looks at how rape has been used as a tool of war and why it has been part of militant strategies throughout history. She argues that because it violates existing patriarchal norms, rape is used to create dis-order and to eventually turn women’s bodies into battlefields. Other authors like Claudia Card (1996) interpret wartime rape as a martial weapon that is related to other types of violence, such as torture and terrorism. A series of authors like Stiglmayer 20(1993) have more specifically focused on the bonding entailed by wartime rape, and argued that one of its main functions is to produce solidarity and friendship between combatants. Gang rape in particular appears to play an important part in combatant socialization for groups that have recruited their members through forcible means like abduction or pressganging (Cohen 2013). Recent research has also critically examined and challenged the “rape as a weapon of war” thesis, by showing its weak theoretical consistency, as well as the practical difficulties it entails for policy-makers trying to devise adapted responses (Kirby 2012). Eriksson Baaz and Stern (2013, 5) in particular develop an extensive critique of this narrative, arguing that wartime sexual violence can be the result of a carefully planned strategy such as in Bosnia-Herzegovina, or its exact opposite resulting from the breakdown of chains of command and lack of discipline, such as in the DRC. The “weapon of war” thesis thus seems to have a very limited applicability, and is far from providing an overall explanatory grid for wartime rape. Some authors like Buss (2009) have even argued that the idea of rape as a weapon of war erases women’s individual experiences, as well as other types of violence that occur during conflicts, by inserting them in a globalizing narrative.

In spite of their diversity, these various approaches of wartime rape have left pending a series of questions, for instance, how wartime rape relates to other forms of wartime sexual violence, how it is fed by wider socio-economic issues, or how to account for male rape victims. Recent research has indeed highlighted that wartime sexual violence cannot be analysed in isolation from other types of wartime violence such as looting and pillaging (Wood 2006, 322), to which it is undoubtedly connected. But, as explained by Dolan (2010, 60), wartime sexual violence is also related to wider socio-economic and political factors, not just to patterns of violence; in that sense, it functions as an indicator of larger societal issues: “Rather than reading sexual violence simply as a consequence of impunity, we need to understand sexual violence as one, if not the indicator of ongoing, unresolved social and political conflicts, especially where those are technologically simple yet psychologically complex”.

Because it lies at a series of nexuses, conflict-related sexual violence challenges and spills over existing taxonomies of violence: it can be elicited by political, military, social, economic and cultural factors; it can be triggered simultaneously by national and very localized issues; it is both public and private, individual and collective, political and sexual, normalized and extreme, set off by emotions and rational calculations and so on. In many ways, current analysis grids fail to capture this complexity, but also the multiplicity of consequences and suffering it occasions for the collective and the individual. Like other forms of conflict-related violence exerted against civilians, brutalization entailed by sexual violence can only be understood by trying to 21reconcile these multiple dimensions and levels of analysis, and in particular by paying attention both to micro-contexts of local power, and to larger orders of social force (Kleinman 2000, 127). In the absence of such an in-depth examination, requiring both conceptual instruments and thorough empirical work, current analysis grids can only be found lacking.

One of the most blatant shortcomings of existing theoretical models is that they fail to account for the occurrence of wartime sexual violence against men, to mainstream it in their analysis, not to mention to try to make sense of it. Some of the authors quoted above acknowledge male sexual victimization in footnotes, in two or three hurried sentences, or at the most dedicate a chapter to the issue (Meger 2016). It is as if sexual violence is triggered by different factors when it is committed against women, than when it is perpetrated on men. But is it really the case? Are men sexually victimized in different ways, for instance, in different circumstances, than women? If yes, what can account for these differences? Is rape of men—or castration, or male sexual humiliation, etc.—a “weapon of war”? Or a result of combatants’ opportunistic behavior? Or something else? And if they are triggered by different factors, what is the relationship, if any, between sexua...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Conflict-Related Sexual Violence Against Men
• 2 Making Sense of Wartime Sexual Violence Against Men
• 3 Perpetrators and Bystanders
• 4 Surviving Wartime Sexual Violence
• 5 The Elusiveness of Narratives on Wartime Sexual Violence Against Men
• 6 Conceptualizing and Implementing Care and Support Programs for Male Survivors
• 7 Prosecuting Wartime Sexual Violence Against Men
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author