Sexual Violence Against Men in Global Politics

Marysia Zalewski, Paula Drumond, Elisabeth Prugl, Maria Stern, Marysia Zalewski, Paula Drumond, Elisabeth Prugl, Maria Stern

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138209909
• eBook ISBN: 9781315456478
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Sexual violence against men is an under-theorised and under-noticed topic, though it is becoming increasingly apparent that this form of violence is widespread. Yet despite emerging evidence documenting its incidence, especially in conflict and post-conflict zones, efforts to understand its causes and develop strategies to reduce it are hampered by a dearth of theoretical engagement. One of the reasons that might explain its empirical invisibility and theoretical vacuity is its complicated relationship with sexual violence against women. The latter is evident empirically, theoretically, and politically, but the relationship between these violences conjures a range of complex and controversial questions about the ways they might be different, and why and how these differences matter.

It is the case that sexual violence (when noticed at all) has historically been understood to happen largely, if not only, to women, allegedly because of their gender and their ensuing place in gender orders. This begs important questions regarding the impact of increasing knowledge about sexual violence against men, including the impact on resources, on understandings about, and experiences of masculinity, and whether the idea and practice of gender hierarchy is outdated. This book engages this diverse set of questions and offers fresh analysis on the incidences of sexual violence against men using both new and existing data. Additionally, the authors pay close attention to some of the controversial debates in the context of sexual violence against men, revisiting and asking new questions about the vexed issue of masculinities and related theories of gender hierarchy.

The book will be of great interest to students and scholars of sex, gender, masculinities, corporeality, violence, and global politics, as well as to practitioners and activists.

Part I

Provocations

1 Provocations in debates about sexual violence against men

Marysia Zalewski

Opening comments

It should be straightforward. It seems obvious that sexual violence is unquestionably abhorrent in any circumstances. It would then also seem obvious that attempts to effectively deal with its effects and prevent its future occurrence should be at the core of political and theoretical interventions. Yet the couplet ‘sexual violence’ – in practice and in theory – remains troublingly enigmatic. The relationship between ‘sex’ and ‘violence’ is a notoriously unsettled one, any connection between the two typically presented by more conservative institutions as a deviation from ‘correct’ versions of sex which are usually related to procreation, sometimes love. Women in many of these traditional narratives appear as simply containers for procreation, men as providers. The corporeal experiences of sex typically understated and at the same time often assumed. Here, men as active and women as passive (in all their varied physical and psychic permutations) conventionally materialise as paramount (see Chapters 2 and 5 by Hendershot and Cottet). I open this chapter with these observations in part because a plethora of paradoxes and what we might call ‘complexities shrouded in simplicity’ seem to mark representations of sexual violence, as well as its theorisations and attempts at its obliteration. The question or spectre of an intimate relationship between sex and violence is one that will largely remain unanswered, at least explicitly, in this volume. But it is the intellectual spirit of this opening chapter to ‘unfold’ paradoxes as a way to raise some questions about the inflection of debates about sexual violence. To do this, I will first briefly explain how I became interested in the issue of sexual violence against men, and then offer my reflections on a series of issues that perturb me about debates about sexual violence against men.

Introduction

I initially became interested in the incidence of sexual violence against men through an interest in the hyper-celebrity fuelled attention to sexual violence against women. This manner of violence has been subject to a great deal of theorising, policy construction, and political discussion, and current international governance attention is intense. The United Nations presents as something of a paragon of virtue in this context from the ‘ground-breaking’ Security Council Resolution 1325 to more recent developments including the creation of UN Women,¹ the Sustainable Development Goals,² the 2014 Global Summit to End Sexual Violence,³ the latest Security Council resolutions (two of the most recent relevant ones include SCR 2106 and SCR 2122 both in 2013),⁴ and the 2015 Global Report reviewing progress since UNSCR 1325.⁵ These are preceded, accompanied by, and variably indebted to the multiple archives of feminist scholarship, theorising, and activism most obviously since the 1960s, at least in its documented Western frames. As such, a central reason for the abundant attention to women in this context is attributed to domination of feminist writers who have worked very hard to ‘highlight the sexual victimisation of women’ (Graham 2006: 188) especially as this was an ‘everyday occurrence’ (Brownmiller 1975; Stanko 1990; Leatherman 2011).

But we know that gender is not only about women, thus the apparent lack of sustained theoretical and political interest in sexual violence against men is curious. Humans are capable of all manner of violent acts and this kind of violence is not unusual. It is also not that sexual violence against men, especially in zones of conflict, has not visibly featured across the centuries. Goya’s Disasters of War etchings tell explicit stories about sexually violated men.⁶ Though it is true to say that sexual violence against women drenches artistic, literary, and public imaginations. The list here would be a lengthy one: the Rape of the Sabine Women, Jack the Ripper, tales of everyday domestic violence and the ‘sex slaves’ of contemporary ‘extremist groups’. The prevalence of sexual violence against women seemingly increases in war and conflict scenarios, its reporting (especially currently) is immediate (more or less), its salacious presence at the top of international political agendas assuring good press and attention from researchers and policymakers alike. It’s a very ‘sexy’ topic; a disturbing paradox perhaps. It is now not news that rape, sexual assault, and sexual mutilation have become among the ‘preferred methods’ of inflicting pain in wars/conflict; ‘war’ offers permission to deliver a whole host of inventive and brutal levels of pain. However, given current increasingly noticed incidences of sexual violence against men, the imbalance of gendered attention is causing concern – ‘Everybody has heard the women’s stories. But nobody has heard the men’s’ (Storr 2011). Men suffer from sexually violent attacks – why not simply include them in as serious ways as female victims? It should be straightforward, though it seems it is not and the reasons why are complex, some of which I will point to in this chapter (and other authors in the book will take these complexities up in varied ways).

The remainder of this chapter works with what Barbara Tomlinson describes as the ‘scene of argument’ (2010), or, simply the framing of debates, specifically here around some of the reasons made (even if via assumption) for the theoretical and conceptual inclusion of men and boys made in debates around the gender(ing) of sexual violence. My discussion here will focus on a range of inter-connected issues, though these sections will be brief, more akin to ‘snap-shots’ and in some ways are intentionally ‘unfinished’. The issues are ones that that have vexed me in my readings around a variety of debates and discussions on sexual violence against men.⁷ By way of a conclusion, I reflect on what I think might be at stake.

That description is (almost) enough (data speaks first)

What do we think when we read about sexual violence? What can we think? I open a book on sexual violence in conflict and I am usually immediately assailed by a searing list of sexually violent incidents. The detail has become familiar. But what does the list prove – that the facts ‘speak for themselves’? ‘Facts’, certainly as critical scholars understand them, never speak for themselves, but are ventriloquised through ‘sedimented layers of previous interpretations’ (Jameson 2001: 101), or some facts, as Tomlinson puts it, ‘seem already true before the moment of argument’ (2010: 1). But it’s not that ‘the list’ of sexual violations doesn’t have impact – perhaps more affective than cognitive – though we might ask how certain or clear the separation between ‘feeling’ and ‘thinking’ is. When I show an image from Goya’s Disaster of War⁸ in classes and talks, one (of the many) which depicts the act of severing a man’s penis, many in the audience wince; unsurprisingly. How does this sensory reaction affect or even constitute how we can think about sexual violence against men?

Of course, providing a long list of sexually violent acts to demand attention and reparation is something that feminist scholars and activists have made much use of to illustrate the gendered and sexed damage done to women and girls. The foundational conceptual work of, for example, Mary Daly and Andrea Dworkin (and a host of others in the realm of what can still be called Anglo-American radical feminism), still, surprisingly I think for many, provide the basis for a good deal of the ‘gender thinking’, concepts, and semantic tactics underpinning a wide range of internationalised policies on gender, perhaps especially those targeting sexual violence. There are many problems with this, not least the persistent tethering of injury to the category of woman (and the bodies of women), ‘forever’ placing woman in a (categorised) site of pain and bloodied victimhood – women as ‘always rapeable’ (Marcus 1992). Sexual violence has a particular place in this rendition, with women so often figuratively positioned as (always) at the mercy of patriarchal power and the vicious ways that violence could get hidden in the frames of love or sex. The verification of such injuries as injury became a crucial way in which feminist scholars and activists could both prove the truth of the violence of patriarchal power and gain the right to pursue justice and hopefully reform (Bumilller 2008). The facts of violence against women, not least sexual violence, did, it seems, begin to ‘speak for themselves’. Importantly so, as Emily Martin made clear some time ago, women’s stories of violence ‘are not trivial (…) they are radical, they are threatening, they would mean revolution’ (1988: 20). Could it be just the same for men? That the facts of sexual violence against men simply but powerfully need to be afforded visibility and credibility, opening up chances for justice and reparations to follow? Can gender be so conceptually simple especially when it has seemed to belong (only) to women despite decades of more nuanced and attentive theorising? Erring on the side of theoretical and sensory caution is usually sound advice as Gunne and Brigley Thompson reminds us that:

A powerful subject like rape [or sexual violence] can be a trap … we can be so seduced into thinking the material itself is so strong … we don’t have to engage with it very deeply – an outpouring of emotion or an emphasis on graphic detail will suffice.

(Gunne and Brigley Thompson 2010: xix)

Sexual violence against men and boys is (almost) as frequent as that against women and girls

This simple proposition invokes a glut of questions, for instance, what is to be counted in the frame of ‘sexual violence’? How would this be measured? Is the claim related to sexual violence in war, conflict and post-conflict zones (and when is it decided that a country/nation/state/society is beyond any of these warring states?), or sexual violence in ‘peace-time’? Some of these questions will be taken up in other chapters in this book; to recall, my aim here is only to open up some of the complexities summoned by the empirical levelling of the incidence of sexual violence across the traditional gender-binary, most notably in relation to sexual violence associated with conflict/post-conflict. In this context, it is surely the case that men have conventionally been largely ignored in narratives around sexual violence (though this is also credibly claimed to be the case in ‘peace-time’), as the Guardian headline introduced earlier about the ‘darkest secret of wars’ infers. Others also make this point, as Graham notes, ‘male victims [of sexual violence] are largely neglected’ (2006: 187), and for Sivakumaran, ‘relatively little material exists on the subject [sexual violence against men in armed conflict] and the issue tends to be relegated to a footnote’ (2007: 253). Though despite centuries of depictions of sexual violence against both men and women in times of conflict (especially as depicted in art), it is only in the last few decades that this kind violence has been acknowledged as ‘wrong’ or indeed (and crucially) as even noticeable as different in some way to the ‘regular’ violence of war – or even as violence at all. But it is the case that this ‘new’ attention has largely focused on sexual violence against women. At least that is how it seems and is generally reported in the academic literatures, related legislation and policies, and in the media. As stated earlier, perhaps a central reason for the focused attention on sexual violence against women is because of the decades of work by feminist writers who have worked very hard to highlight the sexual victimisation of women. Has this work and its ensuing influence on policy hidden the facts about sexual violence against men, designating such violence as a paradigmatically feminised injury, making masculinised ownership conceptually and psychically very difficult, oftentimes impossible?

The complexities invoked here also emerge in the atmosphere of incredulity about the veracity of claims that incidences of sexual violence are (more or less) equally divided (or suffered) by both genders.⁹ Many continue to insist that ‘women and girls are the primary victims of this [sexual] violence’ (Ward 2016: 296).¹⁰ However, work over the last decade or so has clearly unearthed and made visible (empirically, conceptually, legislatively) sexual violence against men in a range of conflict and post-conflict zones as the work in this volume testifies. Men are indeed a gender too and their vulnerability to violence associated with gender (notably that to which the label of ‘sexual’ get attached) surely must be recognised as such. Though this does beg a specific question about gender, which is: are men the same (kind of) gender as women? The answer must be no, as gender, despite its varied appearance and impact across the binary, implies difference – minimally sexual difference (Zalewski 2010; Irigaray 1993). The markers of femininity and masculinity, notwithstanding their considerable variations over time and cultures, are, it seems, indelibly marked by their difference to each other (Kramer 2000). And their constructed character enhances infinite possibilities. Thus, to make claims about the gender of specific forms of violence named sexual is to invoke, however ephemerally, the workings of gender in their differentially masculinised and feminised shapes. And the ways that masculinity and femininity in all their constructed and shifting pluralities are conjured, have different kinds of implications (to each other). Think of Hélène Cixous’s provocative comment, ‘when we say to a woman that she is a man or to a man that he is a woman, it’s a terrible insult. This is why we cut one another’s throats’ (quoted in Sellers 2004: 200).

The sense of Cixous’ comment is more forcefully clarified when we consider some of the ways in which narratives about sexual violence against men mobilise ideas about masculinity and what it means to be ‘a man’. At the trial of Jean-Pierre Bemba,¹¹ one of the witnesses reported that his rapist had said after the attack, ‘you are a woman now’. The forced removal of a man’s ‘manliness’ through an act of sexual violence is powerfully invoked here. This is especially the case given the further detail supplied – his wife left him because he ‘wasn’t a man’ anymore. Or for Dhia al Shweiri, a former prisoner in Abu Ghraib,

we are men. It’s OK if they beat me. Beatings don’t hurt us: it’s just a blow. But no one would want [his] manhood to be shattered. They wanted us to feel as though we were women, the way women feel, and this is the worst insult, to feel like a woman.

(Puar 2007: 89)

Masculinity here is presented as the conduit through which to (fatally) damage a man, even if the body still lives. In this sense, perhaps we can say that masculinity (really does) ‘make a man’ (Berger, Wallis, and Watson 1995). Though this is not to say that masculinity is just something that is ‘in the head’, or a ‘simple’ matter of personal identit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: sexual violence against men in global politics
• ‘Tribulations’
• PART I Provocations
• Reflections
• PART II Framing
• Reflections
• Index