International Human Rights Law and Wartime Sexual Violence Against Males

International Human Rights Law and

Wartime Sexual Violence Against Males

Leah Entenmann

December 2010

LAW 6886: International Human Rights Law

University of Minnesota Law School

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INTRODUCTION AND DEFINITIONS

Sexual violence against males is an extremely understudied phenomenon from the perspective of any

discipline. While molestation and abuse of children has garnered attention, male survivors of adult sex-

ual assault are misunderstood, underserved, and stigmatized the world over, whether in peacetime or

times of war. Feminist scholars have put monumental energy into understanding and analyzing male

sexual violence against women, and many of these insights can be applied to male experiences of sexual

assault. However, to understand sexual violence well enough to make meaningful policies and laws,

more research and analysis is required. This holds especially true for sexual violence in armed conflict,

where rape has been used as a tool of war, terror, and genocide. Developing international laws and

norms must take all forms of sexual violence seriously in order to effectively curb human rights viola-

tions.

Gender-based violence is widely understood to be an expression of dominance, power, and con-

trol by one party over another. In private households, exertion of dominance is primarily (but not exclu-

sively) made by males over females to reiterate supremacy in a private relationship. In situations of

armed conflict, however, individual combatants may use the same techniques of sexual and other physi-

cal violence against individual women on a wider scale to demonstrate supremacy of one belligerent

group over another (which may be armed or civilian). When sexual violence specifically is used against

men, however, similar intents may have disparate effects on individuals, if not entire communities or

societies.

In this paper, I will begin by providing a background in the literature covering wartime gender-

based violence. This will include an overview of theories relating to sexual violence against women, as

well as general gender-based violence against men, sexual violence against men, and the specific in-

stance of Abu Ghraib. In the subsequent section, I will describe the legal recourse for male victims of

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wartime sexual violence, and discuss the shortcomings and traps of existing international law. Finally, I

will conclude with recommendations for lawmakers and policymakers to implement strategies that will

support survivors and prevent wartime sexual violence, no matter who the target.

Definitions

Some terminology must be clarified before proceeding. For the purposes of this paper, I will be using the

terms conflict and war to refer to civil and interstate armed conflicts with at least 1,000 battle deaths

within a year (Cohen, 6). I will use the term rape to refer to the nonconsensual sexual penetration of the

vagina, or anus, whether by a body part or other object, as well as forced contact between the mouth

and the anus or genitals. This definition intentionally does not specify the victim as the penetrated party:

rather, it is the non-consenting party who is the victim. I will discuss the complications of defining rape

later in this paper.

Sexual violence is a broader term encompassing several forms sexualized coercion and intimida-

tion; but there is no common international understanding or definition of the term (Sivakumaran, 2007:

261). Elisabeth Wood describes sexual violence as “a broader category that includes rape, coerced un-

dressing, and non-penetrating sexual assault such as sexual mutilation” (308); Dustin A. Lewis under-

stands sexual violence as “any violence, whether physical and/or mental, carried out through sexual

means or by targeting sexuality,” a definition provided by the Special Rapporteur on systematic rape,

sexual slavery and slavery-like practices during armed conflict (3). Eric Stener Carlson cites the following

definition of sexual torture/sexual abuse:

(1) Violence against the sexual organs;

(2) Physical sexual assault—i.e. sexual acts involving direct physical con-

tact, which can between the torturer and victim, between victims, be-

tween victim and an animal, or all three;

(3) Mental sexual assault—i.e. forced nakedness, sexual humiliations,

sexual threats and witnessing others being sexually tortured; and

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(4) A combination of these.1

Further clarifying examples will be provided later on.

Before defining gender-based violence, the terms gender and sex must be reviewed. The differ-

ence in meaning between these concepts is well established in certain academic fields, but it is largely

misconstrued in the context of international human rights law and policy. Sex refers to physiological

characteristics, whereas gender relates to sociocultural norms, roles, and meanings. It is important to

note that neither of these terms can be adequately described as dichotomies. Primary and secondary

sex characteristics, including genitalia, chromosomes, and hormones, can place individuals outside of

the bifurcated definitions of male and female; transsexual individuals may pursue partial or total out-

ward sex reassignment. This obviously extends to gender as well. As cultural conceptions of gender

change, the limitations of polarized gender expectations become apparent. Additionally, many cultures

acknowledge more than two genders: for example, in certain Native American cultures, two-spirit peo-

ple fulfill distinct social roles; and transgender and genderqueer identities are present in Western LGBT

subcultures.

International laws conflict in their definition of gender-based violence. For example, the Conven-

tion on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women conflates “gender” with “women”

in its definition of gender-based violence as “violence that is directed against a woman because she is a

woman or that affects women disproportionately,” whereas other legal bodies do not specify sex or

gender (Lewis: 19, n. 96). Here I will use the term gender-based violence to describe violence targeting a

person because of their2 actual, perceived, claimed, or assigned gender identity, regardless of what par-

1 Carlson: 19. This definition is taken from Lunde, I. and Ortmann, J. 1990. “Prevalence and Sequaelae of

Sexual Torture,” The Lancet. 2 In recognition of the growing acceptance in both colloquial and formal settings, and in the spirit of

gender inclusivity integral to this paper, I will be using the singular “they” as a gender-neutral third-

person pronoun.

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ticular gender that may be. Gender-based violence is almost always targeted based on sex (but its mean-

ings can be more nuanced in terms of gender).

Still, none of these complications negate the fact that almost all individuals move through their

lives in societies that prescribe clearly demarcated expectations in terms of gendered comportment and

responsibilities. These expectations affect interpersonal behavior and power structures, influencing acts

of domination, abuse and violence.

CONTEXTUALIZING WARTIME SEXUAL VIOLENCE AGAINST MALES

To understand the significance and relative pervasiveness of sexual violence against males during armed

conflict, a firm grounding in a view of other forms of gender-based violence against men is necessary, as

well as levels of gender-based violence against females. Here I will review literature on the meaning and

prevalence in armed conflict of gender-based violence against females, gender-based violence against

males, sexual violence against males specifically, and the particular example of sexual violence at Abu

Ghraib.

Wartime Sexual Violence Against Females

There are a great number of scholars who have used empirical analysis, anthropological and psychologi-

cal hypotheses, and theoretical framings to present new understandings of the meaning of sexual vio-

lence in armed conflict. Almost all scholarly works on the topic deal exclusively with female victims of

sexual assault, with footnotes briefly mentioning sexual violence against males.3 Nevertheless, these

theories provide an important foothold for further theorization on the phenomenon of wartime male

sexual violence. I will provide a few examples here, and will return to further understandings of wartime

3 According to Sivakumaran (2005), “This practice has become so widespread that one commentator is

able to categorize authors’ responses to the subject into disclaimers, generalizations, arguments that a

discussion of male/male rape is unnecessary in a work about rape, and acknowledgments of the au-

thor’s conscious decision not to address the issue” (1281).

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rape focusing on analyses of power and control in a later section. Other analyses will be relevant to dis-

cussion of existing international law.

Many commentators attribute sexual aggression during war to male physiological traits such as

testosterone. These theories fail to provide insight into variations in the use of sexual violence in differ-

ent conflicts, but gain more currency when combined with other analyses. Biosocial theories of wartime

sexual violence are, as Jonathan Gottschall notes, “not theories of genetic determinism; they are, in fact,

biosocial theories that place fully coequal emphasis on genetic and sociocultural factors” (134). These

theories in themselves are difficult to discard because of their broadness. They do not delineate which

sociocultural factors contribute to the presence or absence of rape in a conflict.

In her influential paper “Variations in Sexual Violence During War,” Elisabeth Wood presents six

hypotheses for further consideration regarding the conditions most conducive to the use of sexual vio-

lence in warfare in her study on variation in usage between different conflicts. Among these, one hy-

pothesis postulates that insurgent groups are less likely to commit sexual violence against civilians if

they aspire to command those civilians; another suggests that armed groups with higher proportions of

female combatants are less likely to engage in sexual violence (332).

Robert Hayden and Cheryl Benard agree that males use rape against females to communicate

dominance to other males. Benard delineates other tactical functions of rape: creating an incentive to

flee; signaling to peers an intention to break up society; striking at a symbolically significant group; and

providing psychological benefits to the perpetrators (35-40). Benard also presents several “configura-

tions of rape in war”: rape as bounty, as tolerated outlet for aggression, and as a result of command

structure breakdown (31).

More generally, Henry et. al. consider sociocultural contextualization of warfare as a sexualized

activity as a driving cause of wartime sexual violence.

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The emphasis on hypersexuality is typically characteristic of war envi-

ronments. For example, a long-standing history of institutionalized pros-

titution and the saturation of sexual imagery in wartime illustrates how

the construction of the male soldier is often based on notions of virility

and exaggerated heterosexuality… Power and dominance motives for

sexual aggression are consistent with feelings of inadequacy and power-

lessness as experienced by soldiers when confronted with the challeng-

es of war. Arguably, sexual aggression is used as a means of overcoming

or compensating for these underlying insecurities (541).

Depending on the interpretation of the term “heterosexuality,” this argument may be relevant and even

particularly useful for understanding wartime male/male sexual violence.

Wood provides further commentary on the effect of militarized masculinity:

The gendered formation of soldiers thus rests on particular ideas about

manhood: leaders persuade soldiers that to be a real man is to assert a

militaristic masculinity. One result of such practices is that soldiers then

represent domination of the enemy in a gendered way, leading to the

use of specifically sexual violence against enemy women and, occasion-

ally, against enemy men who are dominated through male rape and cas-

tration (326).

The analysis of militarized gender is salient no matter who the victim of wartime sexual violence: “due to

the nearly universal attachment of aggression, violence, and militarism to cultural constructions of mas-

culinity, armed conflict on any scale is replete with overt and unarticulated expressions of gender” (Lew-

is: 7). This analysis is a point of specific interest to scholars researching wartime sexual violence against

men.

Hayden suggests that mass rape takes place during the partition of a territory, when the state is

liminal and the ownership of territory remains unclear—but only when ethnic groups do not anticipate

future coexistence. Ethnic groups that believe they will live together in the future refrain from rape,

even when they commit mass killings (27). Hostile parties commit rape in order to instill hatred in their

victims and their victims’ families, so that they will find the concept of continued coexistence abhorrent

and leave the contested territory.

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Dara Cohen reviews three common explanations for wartime sexual violence, and discredits the

breadth of their applicability based on statistical relevance, using her own original dataset. These expla-

nations are ethnic hatred, low status of women, and belligerent groups’ reliance on contraband funding.

Instead she finds that forced soldiery is the single best predictor of whether a belligerent faction will

commit mass sexual violence, as old and new soldiers will use gang rape as a “high risk” activity to cre-

ate artificial bonds where there was no group cohesion. Unfortunately, similarly to the evidence exam-

ined by other scholars, Cohen’s dataset is incomplete without figures related to sexual violence commit-

ted against men.

A paper from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, upon review of sixteen

studies, designates explanatory theories of the motivations prompting wartime sexual violence within

four categories: the gender inequality theory, the psychosocial and economic background theory, the

strategic rape theory, and the biosocial theory. The paper surmises that no single theory can predict or

explain variation in usage or characteristics. “Considering sexual violence in conflict as either ‘opportun-

istic’ or as ‘a method of warfare’ is too simplistic,” OCHA concludes. “On the contrary, sexual violence in

conflict is motivated and perpetuated by a complex mix of individual and collective, premeditated and

circumstantial reasons” (OCHA: 1).

General Wartime Gender-Based Violence Against Males

Violence against men, both armed or civilian, is considered a given in times the context of warfare. The

undiscussed patterns of violence based on male sex and masculine gender are key background to sexual-

ized violence against men. Charli Carpenter is an outspoken scholar who uses empirical data to chal-

lenge and even disprove prevalent understandings of agency and victimhood during war.

Gendered, militarized expectations of men and boys have led to sex-selective human rights

abuses that have devastated civilian communities in the course of conflict and war. Through traditional

understandings of masculinity and violence, males are expected to be—and are prejudged as—either

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active or potential armed combatants in conflict. Carpenter delineates a variety of forms of violence

perpetrated against civilian men and boys during the course of armed conflict; some of these patterns

seem mundane due to their customary prevalence.

Sex-selective massacre and forced conscription and soldiery “are rooted in assumptions about

male wartime roles, assumptions that both reflect and reproduce gendered hierarchies prevalent in

both peacetime and war,” writes Carpenter. She continues, “Perhaps one of the most convincing expla-

nations for sex-selective massacre is the gendered way in which the concept of the ‘civilian’ has been

structured in international society…laws requiring belligerents to distinguish between combatants and

civilians…are interpreted in practice according to the use of sex as a shortcut to distinction” (Carpenter:

88-89). Carpenter’s description of the allowance of civilian male deaths as a global “cultural norm” is

insightful and condemning. Within the very crucial discussions recognizing that sexual violence, rape,

and other forms of violence against women during war can no longer be tolerated as an inevitable side

effect of armed conflict, the forms violence against civilian males described by Carpenter have not re-

ceived the same radical reconsideration.

Forced conscription occurs on a massive scale, and is legal in international law. Article 18 of the

International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights recognizes an individual’s right to abstain from com-

bat based on religious convictions—but the right is inconsistently recognized worldwide. Forced con-

scription nearly uniformly targets poor males, but when conducted by legitimate governments drafting

is not considered slavery, forced labor, or political repression—although penalties for dodging range

from fines to the death penalty (Carpenter: 91-92). Carpenter notes that forced military conscription

“deprives civilian men of their liberty and civilian families of their male kin, while reproducing the sex-

gender structures that naturalize gendered perceptions of threat and put other civilian males at risk of

lethal violence” (Carpenter: 93).

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Moving away from the ways men are made primary victims of violence, Carpenter also discusses

secondary victimization in the psychological torture of men. When men are forced to witness the rape of

female family community members, they not only suffer through empathy for the victims, but also

through shame and degradation. As Hayden and Benard note above, the sexual violation of community

women can devastate men in terms of conceptualized damage to “property” as well as shattering long-

held “protector” roles (Carpenter: 96).

While asylum law and practice generally focuses on the “vulnerable” groups of women and chil-

dren, lower-class adult males have fewer resources at their disposal to protect themselves from massa-

cre, forced conscription, and sexual violence. Civilian and combatant men alike face understudied forms

of violence and oppression based on gender roles and dynamics, and policy response has not ap-

proached these issues in a gender-conscious way.

Sexual Violence Against Males

The forms of gender-based violence against men and boys that fall under the rubric of sexual violence

tend to cause disconcertion and consternation to scholars and advocates. But despite the attention

male sexual violence draws due to its novelty, reports on sexual violence continue to obfuscate details.

Scholars who are attempting to build a more robust literature on the topic include Sandesh Sivakumaran,

Eric Sterner Carlson, M. Hilmi Zawati, and Dustin A. Lewis. They, along with Charli Carpenter, Elisabeth

Wood, and a few other academics interested in analyzing wartime gender-based violence as it affects

males have gathered descriptions of male-targeted sexual violence practices in various conflicts.

Wartime sexual violence against men has occurred in sporadic and systemic patterns, in deten-

tion and during village raids, perpetrated by state and insurgent forces, by men and sometimes by

women. However, as far as collected evidence is concerned, sexual violence against males appears to

occur much more frequently in situations of captivity or detention, as opposed to violence against fe-

males, which occurs in homes during raids and occupation. In Iraq, “men were kidnapped and taken to

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holding cells, abandoned buildings or in the homes of the militias. This allowed the perpetrators to con-

tinuously torture the victim over a span of a few days or a few weeks” (Fernandez: 77). A counterexam-

ple to this trend is the conflict in Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. In August 2009 the New

York Times reported an increasing pattern of rape perpetrated against males: in June more than 10% of

the patients at the American Bar Association’s sexual violence clinic in Goma were men (Gettleman).

Academics attempting to assemble this information have found that rape and sexual mutilation

of men are often coded as torture; this is partially because of its frequent comorbidity with other forms

of torture, but also largely because rape is so strongly associated as a crime against female bodies (Siva-

kumaran, 2007: 254-256). Sexual violence against men was recognized as such in the United Nations

Commission of Experts’ Final Report on the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, issued in 1992 (DeZotto

and Jones). Even after such formal acknowledgement, wartime sexual assault against men “has not been

prosecuted as rape or sexual violence at the Hague tribunal, being described rather as ‘torture’ or ‘de-

grading treatment’, and witness-protection initiatives undertaken by the tribunal have identified only

female victims of rape as in need of protection and psycho-social attention” (Carpenter: 95). Still, these

chronicles of “sexualized torture” are often detailed and illuminating. For example, testimonies from

one medical center showed that victims were subjected to “systematic and organized sexual torture…

These assaults included rape, deviant sexual acts, total and partial castrations, injuries to the testes with

blunt objects, and a combination of other injuries” (Ziwali: 34). I will divide the acts various reports have

collected into four categories: rape; reproductive violence; enforced non-penetrative sexual assault; and

sexual humiliation and psychological torture. Many violent practices fall into more than one category.

Rape

Just as sexual violence against women in wartime can be traced back through military history, male rape

in armed conflict is also rooted in several historical traditions. “In ancient wars and societies, male rape

in times of war was considered as an absolute right of the victorious soldiers to declare the totality of

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the enemy’s defeat and to express their own power and control. It has been used as a weapon of war

and a means of punishment in many cultures” (Ziwali: 33). Rape of males includes anal and oral sexual

assault of victims by perpetrators, as well as enforced penetrative masturbation and enforced rape of

other victims (male, female, young, and old) and sexual contact or intercourse with the dead (Sivakuma-

ran, 2007: 263 and Wood: 311). Rape is perpetrated by single or multiple assailants (Fernandez: 77),

sometimes via other victims.

Enforced rape is a term that Sivakumaran uses to describe a concept so novel for human rights

practitioners that there is no commonly used term for it (Carpenter: 95). Carpenter describes the prac-

tice (without using this specific nomenclature) as “when a man is forced to sexually assault another per-

son, often a family member” (Carpenter: 96). This phenomenon is enormously challenging to estab-

lished conceptions of rape. Not only is the victim of such an act male, he is also the “active” (penetrating)

participant in the assault.

In addition to these forms of rape, the term “rape plus” is also used throughout much of the lit-

erature on wartime sexual violence to describe deliberate infection with HIV (and/or impregnation for

women) (Sivakumaran, 2007: 264).

Reproductive Sexual Violence

In the mid-1990s, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia paved the way for rigor-

ous examination of wartime sexual violence. Eric Stener Carlson, who worked for two years with ICTY’s

Sexual Assault Investigation Team, recalls the overwhelming evidence he found regarding systemic sex-

ual violence against men. “The reports were so frequent and so consistent, that I began to contemplate

the possibility that sexual assault against men (soldiers, prisoners and non-combatants) was, perhaps,

not only widespread in war, but that it was also an almost integral part of war-making itself” (16). This

violence frequently involved damage to reproductive organs.

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In his research Carlson has focused specifically on blunt trauma to male genitals (BTMG), which

is not always categorized as a criminal offence; he considers international response to the phenomenon

particularly illustrative of continuing myths surrounding wartime sexual assault. Citing research and re-

ports from Greece, El Salvador, Croatia, and Iraq, Carlson shows that BTMG is one of the most frequent

methods of sexual assault as well as torture used against men (19). Carlson writes,

Investigators may be tempted to consider that some cases of BTMG are

not severe enough to merit attention, because they are composed of

only one or two blows to the testicles—and, again, do not result in any

permanent, physical damage. Because of this apparent lack of severity,

they minimize the sexual nature of the abuse and reduce it, in their own

minds, to a minor form of assault (21).

But not only does BTMG meet the definitions of sexual violence set forth above, it is often an element or

symptom of genocidal activity, along with other forms of genital violence against men, such as castra-

tion, torsion of the testicles, and other mutilating and otherwise damaging acts. For example, in Croa-

tian concentration camps, “A ‘large number’ of men who were beaten on their testicles in camps and

occupied territories were told by their abusers ‘You will never again make Utasha/Muslim children’”

(Carlson: 19). This is consistent with the more widely recognized practice of deliberately and forcibly

impregnating women of a certain ethnicity so that they will give birth to a child of the patrilineal ethnici-

ty (Sivakumaran, 2007: 265).

Enforced (Non-Rape) Sexual Assault

In many reports, imprisoned men have been forced to perform this particular form of abuse on each

other. In the former Yugoslavia, reports emerged of large numbers of male detainees forced to bite off

each other’s testicles (Carlson: 21 and Sivakumaran, 2007: 265). Additionally, male victims of wartime

sexual assault are forced to commit other violent and abusive acts against each other, including manual

contact with or masturbation of other victims and themselves.

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Sexual Humiliation

Sexual humiliation is intertwined with many of these previous categories. While any form of sexual vio-

lence deprives victims of agency, dignity, and self-determination, forced performance for an audience

further complicates and challenges victims’ self-perception and sense of self-worth. Men may be forced

to commit taboo sex acts in public, or stand or dance naked before each other and before women (Hill,

Bastick, Sivakumaran, Carpenter, etc.). For Iraqi men, “sexualized torture was coupled by degrading

taunts to the victim’s religion and family, further humiliating their identity and undermining their psy-

che” (Fernandez: 77).

Abu Ghraib One of the best known and most widely studied examples of wartime sexual violence against men is that

of the leaked abuse of men at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq by American troops and contractors. This

incident provides a strong point of departure for more theoretical analysis of sexual violence against

men during armed conflict. As noted in Eastman,

Photos of abuse and humiliation of male detainees in Iraqi prisons

brought the usually invisible horror of torture under the spotlight of the

world media. The participation of female soldiers in sexual violence

there evoked particular repulsion, and also challenged gender stereo-

types that link sexual violence with male sexuality and an assumed male

propensity for violence (129).

For many observers and scholars, the compounded effect of elements of homophobia, racism, misogyny,

and xenophobia intertwining becomes just as difficult to comprehend as the photos or accounts of

abuse themselves. Why was this abuse so gendered and homoeroticized?

In a New Yorker article, Seymour Hersh wrote: “The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable

to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months

before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.” This suggests a high-up fixation on homosexual sex as torture

for prisoners in Iraq. Media coverage fully indulged this idea of Arabs as particularly vulnerable to their

own prejudices. While there is obvious validity in the cultural contextualization of these abuses, many

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media commentaries took the analysis too far, to the point of rigidifying an enemy culture as closed-

minded and to the point of victim blaming.4 This may be inevitable in a situation where so many differ-

ent discourses are attempting to paint a single picture of overlapping nations, cultures, and civilizations

as backwards. At the time that the Abu Ghraib scandal became known, Andrew Sullivan, a conservative

gay American commentator, “capitalize[d] on the cultural difference discourse, nearly claiming that the

repressive culture of Muslim extremism is responsible for the potency of the torture, in effect blaming

the victims” (Puar, 2007: 91).5 American media attempted to portray Iraqi males’ distress at being put in

nonconsensual homoerotic situations as being incongruous with the more relaxed view of Westerners

towards homosexuality. Jasbir K. Puar provides a damning reminder: “Transposing a cultural explanatory

frame onto the economic and political contextualizations of the torture, this statement was uttered and

reproduced without any ironic reference to the fact that sodomy (collapsed as homosexual sex) less

than a year earlier had been illegal in several states in American law” (2007: 138).

Still, despite the hypocrisy of American media’s condemnations of foreign homophobic cultures,

contextualized homophobia is a relevant factor for understanding motivations and effects of male/male

sexual violence. Writing on Iraqi victims, Karin Fernandez reaffirms, “The more homophobic and con-

servative the culture is, the more shameful it is for the survivors of male rape. Many survivors expressed

4 Certain discussions of sexual violence against men in Yugoslavia provide a stark contrast with the anal-

ysis blaming Muslim homophobia for the potency of male-male sexual torture at Abu Ghraib. Sivakuma-

ran suggests that while part of the propulsion for Serbian males’ sexual assault of Muslim prisoners may

have been to “taint” their homosexuality-averse victims with the experience of homosexual sex, there

may have been a contradictory impetus. Since at least the 1920s, Serbian anti-Muslim discourse con-

tained an articulated contempt for Balkan Muslims’ acceptance of homosexual activity. Genocide was

even suggested in an early anti-Muslim treatise specifically as a solution to Muslims’ widespread toler-

ance of homosexuality (Sivakumaran, 2005: 1299). 5 Muslim victims were not blamed for the similar patterns of abuse that occurred in detention facilities a

decade previously. Eric Sterner Carlson contends, “what primarily distinguishes some of the abuses in

Yugoslavia from those in Iraq is the fact that the fresh-faced young men now committing them come

from the United States instead of the Republika Serbska” (17).

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shame, humiliation and loss of sexual identity and desire” (78). While the relative homophobia of differ-

ent cultures as compared to one another may be more complicated to discuss, operationalized assess-

ments of cultural levels of homophobia in relation to both the sequelae of and the impetus for male

rape could prove to be a fruitful line of inquiry.

In fact, the motivations of the perpetrators at Abu Ghraib may be more steeped in homophobia

than the reactions of the victims. The perpetrators were obviously committed to dehumanizing and hu-

miliating their captives in every possible way: “Indeed the use of a camera to record the abuse at Abu

Ghraib has been described as a ‘shame multiplier,’ extending the humiliation beyond the time and place

in which it occurred” (Stemple: 615). This homophobia and drive to humiliate was closely tied with rac-

ism and xenophobia, and all of these are reflected, as Puar notes, in the choice of the media to focus on

the incidents at Abu Ghraib as opposed to other, deadlier, more widespread abuses committed by

American forces against Iraqis.

Why that line is so demarcated at the place of so-called sexual torture—

specifically, violence that purports to mimic sexual acts closely associat-

ed with deviant sexuality or sexual excess such as sodomy and oral sex,

as well as S/M practices of bondage, leashing, and hooding—and not,

for example, at the slow starvation of millions due to U.S. sanctions

against Iraq, the deaths of thousands of Iraqi civilians since the U.S. in-

vasion in April 2003, or the plundering and carnage in Falluja, is indeed a

spectacular question (2005: 13).

Abu Ghraib provides an example of not only acts of wartime sexual violence against men, but also a baf-

fling and contradictory international response.

INTERPRETING WARTIME SEXUAL VIOLENCE AGAINST MALES

The phenomenon of wartime sexual violence against women is dizzyingly complex, and a clear under-

standing of it is hampered by ingrained understandings of the standard operations of warfare, the chal-

lenges of collecting accurate and complete data, and complex and oppressive stereotypes about women

and sexual violence in general. Wartime sexual violence against men is perhaps even more challenging

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to understand. The tools and theories developed to understand sexual violence as an element of war-

fare thus far are focused on violence against women; some must be either discarded or drastically re-

worked to become relevant to an all-encompassing analysis of wartime sexual violence, while others are

already completely pertinent to male wartime sexual violence. This section will expand upon previously

mentioned interpretations and introduce further analyses of wartime sexual violence targeting males.

With two widely cited papers out in the past five years examining sexual violence against men as

it pertains to international law and norms, Sandesh Sivakumaran is the most influential scholar in a very

small field. He argues that the causes, effects, and meanings of sexual violence against males are very

similar to the causes, effects, and meanings of sexual violence against women, but that these all must be

understood in the light of complicating dynamics. He has drawn connections between homophobia,

heterosexism, and misogyny that have been widely cited and accepted by other scholars on male rape in

general and in conflict settings specifically.

Sivakumaran summarizes prevailing themes in scholarship on the rape of women: “The power

dynamic theory behind rape considers that there is a hierarchy of power in society, with men placed at

the top and women at the bottom. The threat of the existing power dynamic being usurped and those at

the top losing their positions of power explains why those at the top of the hierarchy rape those lower

down” (2005: 1281). However, he seeks to complicate this analysis and draw it out of a basis solely in

sex disparity and place it into the context of a non-dichotomous gender dynamic. “Were the concepts of

masculinity and femininity acknowledged to be non-uniform in nature, the gradations within them

would explain the power hierarchy within masculinity and within femininity, and not just between

them” (2005: 1282). Carpenter too considers gender and power to be key dynamics. “If rape is under-

stood as an exercise of power…we cannot ignore the way in which sexual assault is used against men as

well as women to undermine and invert gendered constructions of protector/protected roles, with the

aim of terrorizing entire societies” (96).

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In his 2005 article “Male/Male Rape and the ‘Taint’ of Homosexuality,” Sivakumaran argues that

the issue of male rape has been ignored in human rights and other discourses on sexual violence not

simply because of the disproportionate number of female rape victims, but also because of homophobic

attitudes. Male rape causes many of the same social repercussions as female rape. However, because

male/male rape consists of sexual contact between two men, “society considers any such contact to be

indicative of homosexuality, regardless of any element of coercion. Given the prevalence of homophobia

in society, this amounts to a ‘taint’ on the part of the victim of the rape” (2005: 1276). What this means

on an international scale is that “if homosexuality is involved, even just a ‘taint’, the international com-

munity can carry on with business as usual and turn a blind eye to the situation no matter how egre-

gious it may be” (2007: 272).

Homophobia is inextricable from socially constructed gender roles and norms. “Society often

equates manhood with ‘the ability to exert power over others, especially through the use of force.’ Thus,

victimization and masculinity may be considered incompatible in the belief that men cannot be victims”

(2005: 1289). In the case of rape, these gender expectations come not solely from societal tradition, but

also from the language of human rights and other instruments aimed at protecting people from sexual

violence. When rape is used against men, the victims, rather than the perpetrators, are seen as failing in

their masculine roles (2007: 271). This argument is reiterated and backed by Lara Stemple in a recent

article. “When both the perpetrator and victim are men,” she writes, “the interaction often typifies a

gendered power-play of masculinized dominance and feminized subordination” (628).

Because they maintain their performance of masculinity through domination and violence, per-

petrators are not “tainted” with suspicion of homosexual identity or desire, as their victims are. Indeed,

“many men who perpetrate rape maintain their heterosexual identity by feminizing their victims and

enforcing their role as the penetrative partner” (Stemple: 631). This is further complicated in the case of

enforced male/male rape. Sivakumaran’s analysis is worth quoting at length:

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19

Power is equated with masculinity, and by masculinity one is of course

referring to heterosexuality. When a guard forces a prisoner to commit

acts typically associated with homosexuality, the guard tries to “taint”

the prisoner with homosexuality, and by doing so, to strip him of his

power. It is this focus on power that explains why, when guards anally

rape prisoners, it is the prisoners who are tainted with homosexuality

while the guards retain their heterosexual status. Aspersions of homo-

sexuality are cast more effectively when two men are forced to sodo-

mize each other. In this situation, the traditional power dynamic no

longer applies because the power is vested with the guards rather than

with the person committing the sodomy.6 As a result, forced sodomy

“taints” both parties with homosexuality and strips them both of their

masculinity and, with it, any power they may have (2005: 1298).

When analyzing the motivations of perpetrators, many of the dynamics described above in the

section on sexual violence against females in armed conflict are present. However, an additional or dis-

tinct motivation to humiliate and abase victims is tied into male/male rape. Sivakumaran argues that

established interpretations fail to “provide an answer as to why men were forced to perform oral sex on

guards, why they were anally raped by guards, or why they were forced to rape each other. It is submit-

ted that the objective in these cases was to achieve the total and utter humiliation of the individuals

concerned, stripping them of any semblance of dignity” (2005:1296). Stemple further clarifies this point:

Assumptions that real men are sexual aggressors and never victims

promote harmful perceptions about the “one” way to be a man. They

can justify violent behavior as an archetypal manifestation of maleness,

promoting a sense of inevitability about its continuation. Such percep-

tions may influence behavior; Judith Butler famously emphasized the

“performative” conduct of individuals seeking to display gendered traits

as a form of social interaction (635).

In order to interrupt the perpetuation of harmful ideas of masculinity, international law must use lan-

guage that challenges these gender constructions.

6 I would urge a move away from the use of the words “sodomy” and “sodomize” except in discussion of

their usage as terms in academic and legal discourse. I make this suggestion for two reasons. 1) These

words tie same-sex sexual activity with religious texts stigmatizing and demonizing homosexual sex. 2)

“Sodomize” is often used to denote anal rape, while “sodomy” can also mean consensual anal or oral

sex. This conflation of specific sex acts with rape is confusing and harmful.

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LEGAL POLICY AND CONTEXTS

There is widespread failure to prevent wartime sexual violence and address the needs of survivors, no

matter who the victim. New studies and rulings are helping to bring about greater awareness of sexual

violence against women during armed conflict and a push towards providing recourse; but avenues for

redress for male survivors are limited, as Lewis notes: “Sexual violence against men as a constituent el-

ement of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes often goes under noticed, under prosecut-

ed, and, ultimately, under punished” (1). The lack of investigation into or prosecution of crimes of sexual

violence lead perpetrators to believe they have impunity; in the case of nearly unspoken and unheard of

crimes such as sexual violence against men, perpetrators may not even believe that the sexual assault

they commit is a crime (Carlson: 24).

Discourse

Advocates and scholars on sexual violence against males in general, and particularly in wartime,

have expressed frustration with the current discourse framing sexual violence. Definitions of gender-

based violence and references to sexual violence in international legal bodies are often worded in such a

way as to exclude men; for example, the UN Security Council Resolution 1325 called “on all parties to

armed conflict to take special measures to protect women and girls from gender-based violence” (Car-

penter: 85). Recourse available to males is limited, as “advocacy work for men and boys that operates

within a human rights framework must solely rely on sex-neutral documents” such as the International

Convention on Civil and Political Rights (ICCR) and the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, In-

human or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT) (Stemple: 637). These documents do not specifical-

ly address sexual violence, and they were not created specifically for this purpose (Lewis: 19). This may

help explain why this form of violence is so underreported or codified as torture.

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While it may be possible for male victims of wartime sexual violence to seek redress under

these broader human rights laws, Sivakumaran emphasizes that there are particular reasons that appro-

priate codification is especially important in this context.

An accurate classification of abuse is important not just to give victims a

voice, not only to break down stereotypes and not merely to accurately

record the picture. Language in general and legal language in particular

‘reinforces certain world views and understandings of events… Through

its definitions and the way it talks about events, law has the power to si-

lence alternative meanings – to suppress other stories’. It is essential

that these stories not be suppressed. (2007: 257, citation omitted).

Lewis argues that all sectors of the international community—academia, nongovernmental organizations, inter-

governmental organizations, advocacy networks, and others—must rework the language the language of both

law and analysis to accommodate all survivors of sexual violence. Indeed, this transformation must extend

across various forms of international law.

International Human Rights Law

The documents, systems, norms, and mechanisms comprised in international human rights law may

seem the most obvious source of legal protection against wartime sexual violence. As mentioned above,

however, several human rights instruments addressing sexual and gender-based violence use wording

that conflates gender with sex and acknowledges only women and children (or only women and girls) as

victims of such violence. One example is General Recommendation 19 on Violence Against Women to

the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which “de-

fines gender-based violence as ‘violence that is directed against a woman because she is a woman or

that affects women disproportionately’” (Lewis: 19). Other documents proscribing violence are targeted

toward specific violations and often do not name sexual violence:

In fact, men with characteristics that make them particularly vulnerable

to violence are consistently excluded from human rights instruments.

Subgroups of at-risk men, such as refugees, the internally displaced, mi-

grant workers, disabled men, or men who are vulnerable to sexual vio-

lence because of their membership in a particular racial or ethnic group

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22

during armed conflict are excluded. Human rights instruments that do

address the vulnerability of these groups to sexual violence address only

the vulnerability of women (Stemple 625).

Some human rights laws pertinent to persecution based on status could be interpreted

in such a way as to protect male survivors of wartime sexual violence, but again, that is

not their primary function.

International Humanitarian and Criminal Law

Other potential sources of protection and redress are international humanitarian law, which is

specifically geared toward protecting noncombatants in times of war and reducing the destructive ef-

fects of war generally, and international criminal law, which proscribes and ensures prosecution of in-

ternational crimes (Lewis: 5). International criminal law is not a reliable force, as political powers can

sway judicial bodies to prosecute certain perpetrators and not others. Still, in the context of the ad hoc

international criminal tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, criminal law has been used to

prosecute perpetrators of wartime sexual violence more effectively than ever before (Stemple: 642),

and the Rome Statute created a more useful definition of sexual violence. Lewis and Stemple both con-

tend that criminal and humanitarian law is more useful for gender-inclusive protection of sexual vio-

lence victims than human rights law.

The criminal proscription of rape in wartime evolved from the Tokyo Tribunal’s condemnation of

“ill treatment,” “inhuman treatment,” and “failure to respect family honour and rights” (Lewis: 22). Hu-

manitarian law also denounced wartime rape against women in post-World War II documents, again

citing damage to victims’ honor: it “used female-specific language when proscribing sexual abuse: the

Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 stated that, ‘[w]omen shall be especially protected against any at-

tack on their honour, in particular against rape, enforced prostitution, or any form of indecent assault’”

(Stemple: 642).

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The ICTR and ICTY broke ground on identifying sexual violence as a war crime and holding per-

petrators of wartime sexual violence accountable. Their statutes, along with the Statute of the Special

Court for Sierra Leone, included sexual violence within the rubric of crimes against humanity (Stemple:

642). ICTR’s pioneering Akayesu trial expanded the legal understanding of wartime sexual violence,

bringing forth the gender-neutral definition of rape as “a physical invasion of a sexual nature, committed

on a person under circumstances which are coercive;” this was the first definition provided that did not

discuss specific parts of the body and did not require penetration (Ziwali: 31). This was an intentional

omission, intended to “recognize cultural diversity on the concept of rape as a violation of the victim’s

personal dignity” (Ziwali: 32). ICTY likewise adopted gender-neutral definitions of sexual violence (Carl-

son: 18).

The Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court, deliberately includes in

its definition of sexual violence forms of abuse falling outside of rape, and all of its definitions are gen-

der-neutral in language. The Rome Statute designates “[r]ape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution,

forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, or any other form of sexual violence” as a crime against hu-

manity. The Elements of Crimes provide further definition of sexual violence:

an act of a sexual nature against one or more persons or caused such

person or persons to engage in an act of a sexual nature by force, or by

threat of force or coercion, such as that caused by fear of violence, du-

ress, detention, psychological oppression or abuse of power, against

such person or persons or another person, or by taking advantage of a

coercive environment or such person’s or persons ’ incapacity to give

genuine consent (Sivakumaran, 2007: 262).

Such a broad definition provides a versatile tool for victim advocates, but whether a particular act is

“sexual” or not may be up for debate.

Lewis argues that thanks to the work of the ad hoc tribunals and the ICC statute, “it appears that

no meaningful distinction can be drawn between men and women with regard to the postulated jus co-

gens character of the prohibition of rape in armed conflict. However, such a character may not yet ex-

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tend to all the other forms of sexual violence that are criminalized under international law” (Lewis: 26).

Additionally, inclusion of male victims in jus cogens prohibitions of wartime sexual violence does not

indicate that other discourse, including aid and humanitarian service provision, will automatically ex-

pand its service and be prepared to offer support and protection to all victims of wartime sexual vio-

lence.

RECOMMENDATIONS AND CONCLUSIONS

A jus cogens standard condemning the use of sexual violence against anyone during armed conflict as a

war crime is essential to the eradication or minimization of such violence. As jus cogens is based in dis-

course and documents, scholars, policymakers, service providers, and other leaders must take care to

couch this standard in broad language. Along with the development of this legal standard, aid workers

and advocates must incorporate complex responses to a complex problem.

1. Documents and discourse should avoid reifying simplistic identity distinctions. Definitions must

be made broadly enough to include those who live in the dangerous liminality of multiple or contradic-

tory identities, for example gender non-conforming, intersex, and other people who are not readily or

easily identifiable as simply male or female. Lewis and Stemple also note that merely adding “male” to

descriptions of gender-based or sexual violence will not solve the problem of exclusion (Stemple: 633,

Lewis: 3). Stemple writes, “the creation of a separate document on sexual violence against males would

be conceptually problematic, resulting in an artificially sex-bifurcated treatment of rape. Those working

to end sexual violence should resist the temptation of identity politics to parse sufferers into tidy cate-

gories” (646). This is particularly important as different cultures and societies may recognize different

definitional borders between identities (Sivakumaran, 2005: 1287).

2. Providers of aid and support should practice a more nuanced gender sensitivity. Bastick rec-

ommends the usage of a broader understanding of gender “at all stages of response to sexual violence

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in conflict: in planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation” (200). In human rights work and

discourse, there is a need for a broader understanding of gender in the “gender-mainstreaming agenda

that takes into account the concerns of the entire civilian population,” as Carpenter advocates (98).

Gender does not mean “women,” and a broader gender focus is not detrimental to women; rather,

through analyzing gender as it affects everyone, patterns of violence can be more easily understood and

circumvented.

Commentators have noted the dearth of resources available to male survivors of wartime sexual

violence (Bastick: 193). Indeed, even peacetime resources for male sexual violence survivors are even

scarcer and more drastically underfunded than resources for females. Bastick argues, “in providing ser-

vices to survivors of sexual violence during conflict, security sector institutions should determine wheth-

er special measures are needed for particular groups, such as children, former combatants, and male

survivors of sexual violence” (200). Carpenter too calls for “culturally appropriate medical assistance

[and] psycho-social support” for male survivors (98).

3. Activists and advocates must consider the intersections of various rights claims and move-

ments, patterns of abuse, and vulnerable populations. Stemple makes a clear case that wartime sexual

violence cannot be fully comprehended solely through a single analytical framework: she argues that

“attending to sexual violence as a health rights issue and a sexual rights issue would allow for new theo-

retical linkages to be made, as well as an important broadening of the response to the problem” (641).

This position is consistent with efforts of certain human rights NGOs to mainstream “sexual rights” ra-

ther than rights for categories of people, linking LGBT/queer rights with related and indivisible issues

such as reproductive rights and gender-based violence. This also serves to make rights that are essential

to the survival of individuals with liminal identities applicable to people with more normative identities,

behaviors, and expressions, and could be used to build sympathy and bridge divides of understanding

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26

and cultural relativism. Lewis’s and Sivakumaran’s research indicates the salience of misogyny and hom-

ophobia in wartime sexual violence against men. Lewis argues that

to reduce and prevent sexual violence against men in conflict settings, a

sufficient definition of sexual violence must include, among other things,

violence targeting an individual's (imputed, perceived, or actual) sexuali-

ty. Such a definition would recognize and delegitimize the root causes of

this type of violence, namely the aforementioned harmful stereotypes

and norms pertaining to gender, sex, and (homo)sexuality (10).

This demand ties together the most pressing needs of male victims of wartime sexual violence: the need

for collaboration across movements, for broader understandings of victims and identities, and for sensi-

tive provision of aid and services.

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27

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