Wartime Sexual Violence against Men: Masculinities and Power in Conflict Zones

219 Pages·2018·1.8 MB·English

by  Élise Féron

Wartime Sexual Violence
i
Against Men
iiMEN AND MASCULINITIES IN A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD
Series Editors:
Simona Sharoni (SUNY Plattsburgh) and Henri Myrttinen (International Alert)
In the past two decades, the field of men and masculinities studies has been
steadily growing in both breadth and depth. As a result, working with men and
masculinities has gained increased interest not only among scholars in the
academy but also among policy-makers and practitioners. This is reflected in a
steady increase in research on masculinities but also in the growth of the global
MenEngage movement. In the political arena, the recent UN Security Council
Resolution 2242 on gender, peace and security also specifically mentioned
working with men and boys. At the same time, however, critical men and
masculinities studies remain under-represented in research and policy debates as
well as in academic publications and curricula. The book series aims to advance
interdisciplinary/multidisciplinary/transdisciplinary scholarship on men and
masculinities
Titles in the Series
Wartime Sexual Violence Against Men: Masculinities and Power in Conflict Zones
Élise Féron
Wartime Sexual Violence
iii
Against Men
Masculinities and Power
in Conflict Zones
Élise Féron

ivParts of this book build upon previously published work. I am grateful to the European Review of
International Studies (Budrich) and to Springer for permission to reproduce parts of the following
publications: Féron, Élise. “Wartime Sexual Violence Against Men: Why So Oblivious?” European Review
of International Studies 4, no. 1 (2017): 60–74.
Féron, Élise. “Suffering in Silence? The Silencing of Sexual Violence Against Men in War Torn
Countries.” In World Suffering and Quality of Life, edited by Ron Anderson, 31–44. New York: Springer,
2015.
Féron, Élise. “Support Programs for Male Survivors of Conflict-Related Sexual Violence.” In Alleviating
World Suffering, The Challenge of Negative Quality of Life, edited by Ron Anderson, 339–47. New York:
Springer, 2017.
Published by Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd
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Copyright © 2018, Élise Féron
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical
means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher,
except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library ISBN: HB 978-1-7866-0929-8
  PB: 978-1-7866-0930-4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data ISBN 978-1-78660-929-8 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-78660-930-4 (paperback : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-78660-931-1 (electronic)
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard
for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
Contents Acknowledgements
v
Introduction
1  Conflict-Related Sexual Violence Against Men: An Overview
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
Acknowledgements I am forever
vii
indebted to those in Eastern DRC,
Burundi, Rwanda, and Northern Ireland
who agreed to share their stories with me,
however painful and daunting. I am also
grateful to all my colleagues and MA
students in the Great Lakes region of
Africa who encouraged me to write this
book and who helped me to identify and
meet relevant interlocutors for this
research. All mistakes or
misinterpretations remain my own, and I
apologize if I have misrepresented or
misinterpreted anything that I witnessed
or was told.
A heartfelt thank you goes to Dr. Emanuela Mangiarotti for having read and
commented on an earlier version of the manuscript and for the numerous
stimulating discussions we have had, many of which are reflected in this book.
My sincere thanks also go to my colleagues at the Tampere Peace Research
Institute in Finland, who have been highly supportive of this research.
Writing this book would have been impossible without my friends’
encouragement, and in particular without Marie-Cécile’s constant support.
May the road rise to meet you.
Introduction
1
Scholarship has long established the multiple intersections between gender and
conflicts, and recognizes gender as a fundamental dimension of politico-cultural
mobilization in nationalist politics, conflict and war (Byrne 1996; Cockburn
2004b; Giles and Hyndman 2004; Mayer 2000; Nagel 1998). Literature has, for
instance, explored how gender and ethnicity are used in narratives and political
discourses, how gender roles, militarism and war are tightly interrelated, how
conflict is likely to have a different impact on women and on men, and how the
meanings of conflict and security might diverge for women and men. One
particularly interesting and fruitful line of inquiry explores how masculinities
and femininities are constructed in times of conflict and war, and how conflict
actors aspire to build a masculine Self by disempowering/feminizing a
threatening Other such that a new, strong masculinity is affirmed (Weeks 1985,
190). So, as the gender hierarchy becomes a signifier of a
domination/subordination paradigm, male and female spheres of action and their
mutual relations inform conflicts between political, social or cultural
communities. Such analysis is particularly relevant for understanding how
conflict-related sexual violence participates in enforcing relations of power,
weaving together gender with other institutionalized dimensions of social power,
for instance, nationalism, religious identity, caste, ethnicity, sexuality and
politics.
Yet, despite a widespread recognition of the relational and intersectional
character of gender, much of the existing literature has shown a tendency to treat
gender as a women’s issue, especially when it comes to wartime sexual violence.
It is, however, increasingly difficult to ignore the fact that wartime sexual
violence targets men too, a fact that a few researchers and NGOs have been
describing and analyzing since the mid-1990s, if not in a systematic fashion. As
explained by Don Sabo, “Whereas researchers and public 2health advocates
began to recognize the sexual victimization of women in Western countries
during the late 1960s, it was not until the latter 1990s that the sexual abuse of
men began to receive systematic scrutiny from human service professionals and