Article

Men and Masculinities

16(1) 115-135
ª The Author(s) 2012
‘‘Stop Rape Now?’’: Reprints and permission:
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Masculinity, DOI: 10.1177/1097184X12468101
jmm.sagepub.com

Responsibility, and
Conflict-related Sexual
Violence

Rosemary Grey1 and Laura J. Shepherd1

Abstract
Inspired by the themes of violence, masculinity and responsibility, this article
investigates the visibility of male victims/survivors of conflict-related sexual violence
in war. Despite the passing of UNSCR 1820 in 2008, the formulation of UN
ACTION (United Nations Action Against Sexual Violence in Conflict), and the
appointment of a United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary-General to
lead policy and practice in this issue area, we argue here that male survivors/victims
remain a marginal concern, which has, among other consequences, profound
implications for the facilities that exist to support male victims/survivors during and
after periods of active conflict. In the first section of the article, we provide an over-
view of the contemporary academic literature on rape in war, not only to act as the
foundation for the analytical work that follows but also to illustrate the argument
that male survivors/victims of sexualised violence in war are near-invisible in the
majority of literature on this topic. Second, we turn our analytical lens to the policy
environment charged with addressing sexualised violence in conflict. Through a dis-
course analysis focussed on the website of UN ACTION (www.stoprapenow.org),
we demonstrate that this lack of vision in academic work maps directly to a lack of
visibility in the policy arena. The third section of the article explores the

1
University of New South Wales, School of Social Sciences, Sydney, Australia

Corresponding Author:
Laura J. Shepherd, School of Social Sciences, University of New South Wales, 165 Morven Brown Building,
Sydney 2052, Australia.
Email: l.j.shepherd@unsw.edu.au
116 Men and Masculinities 16(1)

arrangements in place within extant peacebuilding and post-conflict reconstruction

programmes that aim to facilitate recovery with victims/survivors of sexualised
violence in war. We conclude with reflections on the themes of violence, masculinity
and responsibility in the context of sexualised violence in war and suggest that in this
context all privileged actors have a responsibility to theorise violence with careful
attention to gender in order to avoid perpetuating models of masculinity and war-
rape that have potentially pernicious effects.

Keywords
masculinity, responsibility, conflict, war, violence, rape

Introduction
Conflict-related sexual violence is multidimensional and its perpetration, prevention,
and punishment raise a complex set of issues.1 The United Nations (UN) has recently
begun to make a concerted effort to streamline its policy responses in this arena; sex-
ual violence as a ‘‘tactic of war’’ was formally recognized as an issue critical to inter-
national peace and security by the United Nations Security Council (‘‘the Security
Council’’ or UNSC) with the passing of UNSC Resolution 1820 (2008), while
subsequent Resolutions such as UNSCR 1960 (2010) have laid out the para-
meters of member state and UN responsibility in this area. The creation of the
post of UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict (SR-SVC) in
2010, pursuant to UNSCR 1888 (2009), suggests that financial and political
resources will continue to flow toward this issue area in the future, as does the
unification of thirteen disparate UN entities through the creation of UN
ACTION (United Nations Action Against Sexual Violence in Conflict).
These recent measures and policy prescriptions outlined by the UNSC suggest that
the UN feels keenly the responsibility for combating sexual violence in war. We
propose here that this endeavor may be compromised by the seemingly paradoxical
lack of attention paid to gender in discharging this responsibility; the lack of atten-
tion is paradoxical because one might expect that any effort to combat sexual vio-
lence would investigate ‘‘the concept, nature and practice of gender’’ (Zalewski
1995, 341), but we argue here that this is not the case. In fact, while some (not
enough) global attention has been paid to female survivors/victims of violence,
considerably less has been directed at their male counterparts.2 We suggest that this
narrow envisioning of violation has led to a partial understanding of how gender matters
in/to conflict-related sexual violence, such that gender is equated with women (some-
times women and girls). Male victims/survivors of sexual violence remain a marginal
concern to international policy, which has profound implications for the facilities that
exist to support male victims during and after periods of active conflict.
In this article, we map out the ways in which male survivors are marginalized
from academic scholarship on sexual violence in war and argue that academic
Grey and Shepherd 117

scholarship should bear some responsibility of ensuring that theorizing gender and
sexual violence in conflict does not perpetuate a discursive slippage, either between
‘‘gender’’ and ‘‘women,’’ or between ‘‘victim’’ and ‘‘woman,’’ such that male
victims are marginalized and women’s agency is curtailed. We consider the
initiatives of various international political and legal institutions to demonstrate that
the lack of vision/envisioning in academic work we outline in the first section maps
directly to a lack of visibility (both literal and figurative) in these arenas. In conclu-
sion, we suggest that a responsibility to ‘‘stop rape now’’ should be felt by academia
and international institutions alike and that, in this, recent policy initiatives such as
UN ACTION and the appointment of the SR-SVC should be applauded. We do,
however, suggest that there is work yet to be done in this area.

Theorizing Responsibility
In the academic study and policy discussion of armed conflict, the concept of
responsibility has mostly featured in one of two ways: either as a synonym for
accountability in instances of war crimes and associated human rights violations
(an example is the defined function of the International Criminal Court [ICC], to
allocate ‘‘criminal responsibility’’ to those guilty of ‘‘crimes of concern to the
international community,’’ see ICC n.d.); or as a duty to be discharged by states and
international organizations in pursuit of global justice (an example is the emergence
into international security discourse the suggestion that key political actors should
acknowledge a ‘‘responsibility to protect’’ specific populations under specific cir-
cumstances). As noted by the editors of this volume in their introduction, in the con-
text of armed conflict, as elsewhere, responsibility has ‘‘slipped almost unnoticed
into a range of everyday languages, legislations, policies and practices’’ (Griffin,
Parpart, and Zalewksi, this volume), yet is rarely explicitly theorized despite its reg-
ular usage.
The two most common invocations of responsibility in relation to armed conflict
map on to the conventional representation of two conceptually separate, though
related, modes of the concept. The first, responsibility as blameworthiness, can be
recognized as legal (or practical) responsibility, while the second is more properly
described as moral responsibility (Smiley 1992, 14–19; see also Korsgaard 1992,
305, who categorize these modes of responsibility as ‘‘legal’’ and ‘‘personal’’ and
Shaap 2004, 14–18, who draws on Paul Ricoeur’s work to discuss responsibility
in terms of juridical and ethical imperatives). In her analysis of responsibility as a
social process and normative device rather than a ‘‘certain kind of thing’’ (2001a,
275), however, Nicola Lacey produces a persuasive account of the ways in which
these two modes are intrinsically interwoven. In Lacey’s terms, to be held responsi-
ble (deemed to have had the capacity to commit for a criminal act) is to be judged
responsible (as a failing of character); the moral judgment ‘‘stows away’’ within the
juridical decision. To contextualize her account of responsibility, Lacey argues
elsewhere that the presumption of the responsible subject as ‘‘a rational,
118 Men and Masculinities 16(1)

self-determining moral agent’’ (Lacey 2001b, 357) is a relatively recent construction

based on one of the many possible interpretations of subjectivity derived from
centuries of philosophy. In short, the concept of responsibility is not necessarily
‘‘anchored in liberal and androcentric assumptions about individualism, free will,
agency, subjectivity and morality’’ (Griffin, Parpart, and Zalewksi, this volume);
there are other ways to think about responsibility.
One way to theorize a concept of responsibility ‘‘after the subject’’ (Mills and
Jenkins 2004, 12) is to follow Nietzsche in arguing that ‘‘the self-responsible
subject assumed in ethics and politics is made, not given’’ (cited in Diprose
2006, 438) and, further, he or she is produced through as well as productive
of the ethical standards of the time. That is, though paradoxical, our responsibil-
ities are part of what constitute us as subjects, what make us human. This allows
for a concept of responsibility that is relational rather than individualistic, in that
the process of subjectification is a fundamentally social process, and extensive
rather than restricted, in that we bear responsibilities for events and phenomena beyond
our immediate cultural and also temporal contexts. The shift away from a narrow
subjective account of responsibility such as that assumed to exist within ‘‘The Story
of Enlightenment’’ (Lacey 2001a, 357)

can help us re-conceptualise our familiar ways of understanding identity and difference
to better accommodate contemporary conditions of cultural diversity, and with it our
ways of understanding what is involved in taking responsibility not only for what
we do but also for what we are. (Gatens and Lloyd 1999, 72)

In the context of this article, such a concept of responsibility demands that we as

authors recognize our position of privilege (‘‘what we are’’) in writing about rape in
war from a place of safety. But we write as well to ask that others similarly privi-
leged acknowledge their responsibility to theorize war rape with due attention to
gender in order to avoid perpetuating a model of masculinity that has potentially per-
nicious effects.
In the analysis that follows, we attempt to harness the productive power of
responsibility as a social process and extend arguments about war-rape beyond the
important step of involving men in efforts to end violence against women. We
suggest that all actors at every level need to proceed from an understanding of gen-
der, violence, and responsibility that neither distinguishes victims and perpetrators a
priori nor separates responsibility from action, because the taking of responsibility,
as we see it, is action. We propose that all privileged actors (including academics,
activists, advocates, policy makers, and practitioners) ‘‘must assume responsibility,
as impossible as it is, in countering . . . conservatism’’ (Diprose 2006, 436) in the
tendency to equate gender with women and women with victim.
Without this wider acceptance of responsibility that relates not only to violence
but also to the concept of gender itself, the success of violence prevention programs
(from the grassroots to the international) is likely to be compromised.
Grey and Shepherd 119

Visions/Versions of Masculinity in Scholarship on War Rape

In her introduction to a recent symposium on gender-based violence and justice in
conflict and postconflict areas, Sara Lulo (2011, 1) states:

The disproportionate impact of conflict on women and girls is well documented and not a
new phenomenon. The experience of women during and in the wake of conflict is steeped
in gender discrimination and inequality . . . Even today, women and girls are targeted for
sexual and other gender based violence during conflict, and in the post-conflict context,
when the rule of law is characteristically weak, and aggression, societal breakdown and
poverty are acute. Reports of mass rape during current and recent conflict—including in
the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda (among
many others)—underscore the widespread and insidious nature of conflict-related crimes
against women and girls around the world.

Lulo’s presentation of sexual violence as a women’s issue is characteristic of the lit-

erature on sexual violence, which, we argue, tends to represent sexual violence dur-
ing periods of conflict according to one of two logics. We label the first of these the
logic of ‘‘the vast majority,’’ which effects closure on discussion of the minority
(however that minority is constituted) by virtue of appealing to a common sense
discourse of resource allocation: we cannot (even if we would so wish it) expend
resources infinitely, so it makes sense, so the logic goes, to focus resources—both
fiscal and intellectual—on the population group that constitute ‘‘the vast majority’’
of survivors. The second logic is that of ‘‘the absent presence,’’ which constructs a
gendered understanding of sexual violence in conflict (paying attention to both male
and female bodies) but then slips into the conflation of gender with women, such that
male bodies are first present then absent in the scholarly literature.
It is understandable that the literature has focused on sexual violence against
women, given the gravity and the assumed scale of the problem (acknowledging the
data are patchy and unreliable in this highly sensitive issue areas). Further, scholarly
accounts are often written by feminist scholars, who express a commitment to
centralizing women in discourses of law, international relations, and security
studies, and to contextualizing conflict-related sexual violence in broader patterns
of discrimination against women. However, a feminist research agenda also involves
an exploration of the silences, the gaps and the margins of any constellation of
power, even (or perhaps especially) when that might make us uncomfortable as
feminist researchers. From this perspective, it is concerning that sexual violence
against men has received relatively little attention in the literature.
We note that some key contributors to the feminist literature have addressed
sexual violence against men in their analysis (see, e.g., Alison 2007; Askin 1999,
2003; Buss 2009; Jones 2002, 2006; Oosterveld 2011), while others have forcefully
noted the existence of female perpetrators of violence in ways that has challenged
the dominant construction of female victim versus male perpetrator (see Gentry
120 Men and Masculinities 16(1)

2009; MacKenzie 2009; Sjoberg and Gentry 2007). Yet, when we consider the body
of literature as a whole, we can see that the shape of that body is female and the issue
of sexual violence against men is peripheral: akin to clothing for this body, perhaps,
or a surgical enhancement. Little has been written about gendered meaning of sexual
violence against men, what forms this violence takes, and how it relates to the
broader conflicts within which such violence occurs.
The first logic we identify is evident in the works of several prominent writers,
who emphasize that sexual violence is experienced predominantly by women,
implying that sexual violence against men is an exception to the norm. For example,
Kathryn Anastasia Gabriel says that sexual and gender violence is ‘‘committed
disproportionately—if not exclusively—against women and girls’’ (2004, 43), while
Anne-Marie De Brouwer argues that ‘‘[w]hilst men may also be targeted for sexual
violence during conflict, it is an acknowledged fact that sexual violence primarily
and disproportionately affects women, particularly when it rises to the level of
genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes’’ (2005, 26, our emphasis). Neither
Gabriel nor De Brouwer provide any evidence to support their claims that women
constitute ‘‘the vast majority’’ of victims, relying instead on the assertion of
‘‘common sense.’’ In turn, this common sense relies on ideas and ideals about
agency and perpetration of violence organized according to conventional logics of
gender that posit men as perpetrators and women as victims.3 Similarly, Catharine
MacKinnon suggests ‘‘[w]omen are violated in many ways which men are violated.
But women are also violated in ways men are not, or that are exceptional for men.
Many of these sex-specific violations are sexual and reproductive’’ (1994, 184). This
articulation functions to normalize ‘‘sexual and reproductive’’ violences against
women, while simultaneously rendering similar violences against men abnormal
or ‘‘exceptional’’. A further consequence is to suggest that sexual violence against
men is somehow separate from broader gendered power dynamics while sexual
violence against women is symptomatic of these dynamics.4
The second logic we identify within the scholarly literature on gender and
wartime rape is the logic of ‘‘the absent presence.’’ In these cases, although the
writer does not expressly say that sexual violence is targeted predominantly at
women, where a gender is ascribed to the victim, it is almost invariably female (see,
inter alia, Bedont and Hall Martinez 1999; Brownmiller 1975, 1994; Copelon 1994,
2000; De Londras 2011; Eboe-Osuji 2010; Enloe 1994; Kuo 2002; Leroy-Hajee
2010; Manjoo and McRaith 2011; Mertus 2004; Sacouto and Cleary 2009; Sellers
2009; Stiglmayer 1994; Van Schaak 2009; Weinberg de Roca 2010). Male bodies
and masculinity are epiphenomenal, according to this logic, secondary to the
primary phenomenon of the rape or violation of female bodies and femininity. For
example, Bedont and Hall Martinez state that ‘‘[f]or millennia, women and girls
have suffered rape, sexual slavery, forced pregnancy, and other brutal forms of
sexual and gender violence during armed conflict’’ (1999, 65) and argue that the
failure to classify sexual violence as a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions in
the statutes of the Yugoslavia and Rwanda tribunals was ‘‘discriminatory since it
Grey and Shepherd 121

treats violence which occurs mostly to women less seriously in relation to violence
which occurs to both men and women’’ (1999, 71). Van Schaak says that ‘‘[f]or most
of human history, the rape and sexual abuse of women associated with the enemy
was an expected spoil, inevitable by-product, or legitimate tactic of war’’ (2009,
362). Rhonda Copelon (2000) uses the phrase ‘‘crimes against women’’ as a
stand-in for ‘‘gender crimes’’ in the title of her article on sexual and gender-based
violence in international law, and makes no mention of sexual violence against men
in that article.5
These two discursive mechanisms persist, despite the fact that research
demonstrates high levels of conflict-related sexual violence against men in specific
situations. For example, in a 2010 study of 1,005 households in the eastern
Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), 39.7 percent of women and 23.6 percent
of men reported having experienced sexual violence in their lifetime. The bulk of
this sexual violence was associated with the conflict: for women, 74.3 percent of the
sexual violence was reported to be conflict related; for men, the figure was 64.5
percent (Johnson et al. 2010, 558). The actual figure for sexual violence against men
is likely to be even higher than 23.6 percent reported, as further research shows there
is a generalized underreporting of sexual violence, which is exacerbated when the
victim is male (Eriksson Baaz and Stern 2010, 44; Lewis 2010, 9; Sivakumaran
2007, 255). Dustin Lewis explains that men’s underreporting of sexual violence is
the product of ‘‘shame, confusion, guilt, fear, and stigma that flow from imputing
a homosexual and/or feminine identity onto a man in combat’’ coupled with ‘‘a ten-
dency for men to associate their victimization as incompatible with their masculi-
nity, and a lack of vocabulary to describe their sexual violence’’ (2010, 9). The
DRC is by no means an isolated case in terms of the pattern of sexual violence
against men. In the last decade alone, sexual violence against men has also been
documented in relation to the conflicts in Central African Republic (CAR), Burundi,
Kenya, Liberia, Rwanda, South Africa, Sudan, Uganda, and Zimbabwe (Sivaku-
maran 2007, 257–58; Neumann 2009; Aranburu 2010, 616).
In recent years, as the literature on sexual violence has become more extensive
and multivocal, various commentators have called for greater attention to sexual
violence against men. For example, Xabier Agirre Aranburu has complained of the
‘‘reductionist focus on female victims’’ (2010, p. 616); Maria Eriksson Baaz and
Maria Stern have critiqued the ‘‘invisibility of men and boys’’ in narratives of sexual
violence (2010, 43); Lewis describes male survivors of sexual violence as ‘‘unrec-
ognized victims’’ in international law (2010); Johnson and her coauthors highlight
the ‘‘need for inclusion of men in sexual violence definitions and policies in addition
to targeted programs to address their needs’’ (2010, 559); and Urban Walker speaks
of the need for further research on both the frequency and the meaning of sexual
violence against men (2009, 38).
Sandesh Sivakumaran has observed that nongovernmental and intergovernmental
organizations have similarly awakened to the issue of sexual violence against men;
however, he believes the analysis of this issue still has a long way to go:
122 Men and Masculinities 16(1)

There would seem to have been a breakthrough in recognition that men can be, indeed
are, victims of sexual violence in armed conflict. Non-governmental and intergovern-
mental organizations now include a standard sentence in their reports on sexual atrocities
in armed conflict in which they note that men can be victims of sexual violence.
However, recognition of this practice has not translated into detailed consideration of the
issue, let alone ideas for prevention. (2007, 275)

The recognition of men as victims of sexual violence and the treatment of care for
men as survivors of sexual violence in conflict are important empirical steps forward
in acknowledging a responsibility to protect men as well as women from war-time
rape and sexual violations. These are important conceptual and theoretical issues as
well, however, as the question of ‘‘whose bodies are visible?’’ relates directly to the
question of ‘‘whose bodies matter?’’. If we proceed with a poststructuralist feminist
theory of the body as performatively constituted through discursive practices (see
Butler 1993, 1999), then the absent presence of masculinity and the silencing effects
of the logic of ‘‘the vast majority’’ in scholarly literature on war-time rape denies the
materiality of the violated male body. For us, this is problematic, as without
envisioning the violated male body we can neither hope to prevent its violation nor
seek redress for violence committed against it.
Simply put, without paying serious and sustained attention to the ways in which
assumptions about who is an appropriate victim of violence and who is its
perpetrator constitute the parameters of our engagement, without questioning the
taken-for-granted assumptions about ‘‘the vast majority’’ of victims and without
refusing to perpetuate the exclusionary politics of representation that construct male
survivors as—at best—absent presences in our analyses, we cannot discharge
the responsibility that we have to these vulnerable victims of violence. Further, the
logics of gender that underpin these exclusionary politics must also be opened to
critical scrutiny. These logics rely on inscribing conventional, somewhat essentialist
links between bodies and behaviors such that men are fixed as aggressive/powerful
and women as passive/powerless. This is a form of discursive violence done to all
individuals that cannot be fully comprehended and therefore cannot be adequately
addressed unless we are prepared to recognize how assumptions about bodies and
behavior reflect and are reflected in theories about and practices of managing
conflict-related sexual violence.

‘‘Stop Rape Now’’: Whose Bodies Matter?

In this section, we turn our analytical attention to policy initiatives at the interna-
tional level in this specific issue area, through a discourse analysis of the website
of UN ACTION.6 The homepage of the website opens to a prominent and interactive
graphic that shows a world map populated with crosses. These crosses are
‘‘clickable’’; if you click on a cross you see a pop-up box containing images of
people—citizens of the country in question—that have added their image to the
Grey and Shepherd 123

campaign by uploading a picture through the link at the top of the map that suggests
‘‘GET CROSS! Add your image now’’ (Homepage 2012). Most of the images show
people with their arms crossed in front of their bodies, fists clenched, an apparent
play on the English dual usage of ‘‘cross’’ (meaning both to be angry and to intersect,
depending on the context). The effect of the dominant graphic on the homepage is
not only to suggest that ‘‘you’’ (the assumed viewer/reader) can literally become part
of the campaign against sexual violence in conflict but also to suggest that this is an
issue that ‘‘you’’ should ‘‘get cross’’ about.
More to the point, for our purposes, is the question of on whose behalf ‘‘you’’
should be getting ‘‘cross.’’ We suggest that this is not, in fact, a campaign to ‘‘Stop
Rape Now.’’ This is a campaign to stop violence against women. Both are important
political activities, but they are not the same thing. One of the videos hosted on the
homepage (discussed in more detail below) states ‘‘We need your help. Together we can
make a difference,’’ over background images of people of diverse racial appearance
standing in solidarity with their arms crossed. The substance of this ‘‘difference’’ is
an attitudinal shift (helping to change the attitudes that perpetuate violence against
women) and corollary policy shift (by changing the laws and policies that provide impu-
nity for offenders), but the question of how violence against women relates to conflict-
related sexual violence is left unexamined.
Under the interactive graphic on the homepage are two videos (both are
hosted by and therefore also available to view on YouTube). The still of the first
video shows a close-up image of a brown-skinned thumb with text saying
‘‘Every day hundreds in Darfur . . .’’ (Homepage 2012). The opening scenes
of the video represent conflict with a khaki-colored helicopter flying low over
sandy arid ground (despite the fact that the voice-over refers to a diversity of
conflicts that do not all involve brown people in hot and hostile climates, we still
find this representational short-hand disconcerting); a voice-over tells the listener
about the scope of sexual violence in conflict. That is, the voice-over tells the
listener:

Up to 500,000 women were raped during the Rwandan genocide, as many as 64,000 in
Sierra Leone and over 40,000 in the Bosnia and Herzegovina war. 4500 in a single
province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in just six months. And every day,
hundreds of women are raped in Darfur. (Video 1, Homepage 2012)

The film continues, showing images of women and children, as the narrative persists
in referring only to women as victims of sexual violence, speaking of ‘‘tactics used
to shame and demoralise women’’ and the fact that ‘‘many women and girls suffer
torture and mutilation in front of their families.’’
The second film opens with a black-and-white sequence of scrub-brush and plants
shot from the point of view of someone moving through it about a foot off the
ground. There is no voice-over; instead, there is text imposed on the image, which
tells a story of one person’s experience of conflict-related sexual violence:
124 Men and Masculinities 16(1)

After killing my son, they raped me. They called the other soldier, dragged me in to the
bush, and one after the other they raped me. (Video 2, Homepage 2012)

You will note, as we did, that the text is gender neutral. The film then cuts, however, to
a close-up of Charlize Theron, a white actress famous for her roles in Hollywood
movies and ‘‘UN Messenger of Peace,’’ who tells the audience: ‘‘She could be your
mother, your sister, your daughter’’ (Video 2, Homepage 2012). No longer is the sur-
vivor of sexual violence unseen and ungendered, she is prescribed an identity by
Theron and made visible as a woman. ‘‘She’’ cannot be your father, your brother,
or your son.
The next scene in Video 2 features a white male ex-Force Commandant who
states that ‘‘It is perhaps more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier in an armed
conflict’’ (Video 2, Homepage 2012). This may be true, under certain conditions and
with certain other dynamics in play, but it is by no means universally true.
Representing it as such, vocalized through the mouthpiece of the universal ‘‘Figure
of Authority’’ of the white, educated, senior male (see Shepherd 2006),7 is problematic
as it functions in three separate ways to reproduce logics of gender that we wish to
challenge: it constitutes women as inherently vulnerable by simple virtue of their
femininity; it suggests that women are civilians and not soldiers in armed conflict; and
it precludes the recognition of male victims of conflict-related sexual violence.
There are three documents available to download from the information page
(About 2012). One is a two-page overview document (UN ACTION 2012a); one
is a twelve-page report that provides much more detail on the scope and severity
of sexual violence in conflict (UN ACTION 2012b); and the third is a PowerPoint
presentation about the ‘‘Stop Rape Now’’ campaign (UN ACTION 2012c). We
learned from these publications that conflict-related sexual violence ‘‘specifically
targets women and girls’’ (UN ACTION 2012c, Slide 2); that it is ‘‘a serious,
present-day emergency affecting millions of people, primarily women and girls’’
(UN ACTION 2012a, 1). The detailed report opens with a series of familiar, and
familiarly disturbing statistics concerning the magnitude of sexual violences against
women during periods of armed conflict and its aftermath, including the fact that, on
average, forty women everyday are raped in the ongoing conflict in one province of
the DRC (UN ACTION 2012b, 2).
As will be clear by now, we do not wish to undermine, trivialize, or delegitimize
the commendable efforts made by UN ACTION and associated personnel to combat
conflict-related sexual violence. We would argue, however, that this campaign
should be recognized as a campaign against conflict-related sexual violence against
women. In all three documents available to download, ‘‘men and boys’’ feature
twice (in a total of fourteen pages and ten slides). In accordance with the logics
organizing academic literature on this topic, these subjects are ‘‘the absent presence’’
in the detailed report. The report, in one simple sentence, actually operationalizes both
of the logics we identify: ‘‘Though women and girls are the primary targets of rape,
men and boys may also be targeted to inflict humiliation and shatter leadership
Grey and Shepherd 125

structures’’ (UN ACTION 2012b, 5). Here, ‘‘women and girls’’ are ‘‘the vast major-
ity’’ and, given that this is the document’s only mention of male bodies, ‘‘men and
boys’’ are the absent presence here as well. In a similarly worrisome representational
practice, UN ACTION claims that ‘‘The constructive involvement of men and boys is
vital’’ in combating conflict-related sexual violence (2012c, Slide 4); this is
problematic because presumably such involvement is vital only if is assumed that men
and boys bear responsibility for perpetrating the violence and should therefore lead
efforts toward violence prevention by desisting in the perpetration of such acts.
The ‘‘Testimonies’’ page contains ten short personal narratives from survivors of
sexual violence. All but one are testimonies from women and girls. All make for
difficult reading. As we have noted throughout, we do not wish to draw international
attention away from these female survivors through our insistence that the violences
done to men are recognized, but we do insist that the male body is constituted as
violable, that the narratives men have to offer are taken seriously, and given time
and space in international campaigns such as UN ACTION’s ‘‘Stop Rape Now’’.
The campaign has a responsibility to ensure this sensitivity toward masculinity.
Without such a commitment, both to rendering visible the sexual violations perpe-
trated against men during periods of armed conflict and to critiquing (and resisting
the reproduction of) the logics of gender that fix men as powerful and women as
powerless, the discursive and physical violences done to both men and women
cannot be fully comprehended and therefore cannot be adequately addressed. In the
next section, we turn to a discussion of the mechanisms through which perpetrators
of conflict-related sexual violence are being punished in our analysis of various
international organizations and courts.

Punishing Perpetrators, Protecting Victims: Constituting

Gender and Vulnerability in International Peace and Justice
Initiatives
In 2010, Sivakurmaran observed that, although UN instruments acknowledge the
issue of sexual violence against men, they are generally ineffective at responding
to that issue.8 The Secretary General’s 2012 Report on conflict-related sexual
violence suggests that the UN is conscious of its shortcomings in this regard. The
report notes that ‘‘sexual violence, and the long shadow of terror and trauma it casts,
disproportionately affects women and girls. However, recent information under-
scores that the situation of male victims and the plight of children born as a result
of wartime rape require deeper examination’’ (UN SG 2012, 3) and (ibid., 29). The
report also urged the Security Council to ‘‘employ all means at its disposal to address
conflict-related sexual violence, including referrals to the International Criminal
Court’’ (SG-CSV, 29). Against that backdrop, in this section, we consider the
responses to the issue of sexual violence against men in the juridical arena:
UN-affiliated international criminal tribunals and the ICC. We discuss each of these
126 Men and Masculinities 16(1)

institutions in order, organizing this section by chronology to illuminate the ways in

which theoretical, conceptual, empirical, and policy gains made in this area are by no
means linear.9

The Ad Hoc Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda

The atrocities in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the early 1990s prompted the
UNSC to establish two ad hoc (specific purpose) tribunals under chapter VII of the
UN Charter: the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY)
in 1993, and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in 1994. These
tribunals have produced a wealth of jurisprudence on sexual violence crimes, includ-
ing some on sexual violence against men.
For example, in the ICTY’’s first trial, Tadic´, the defendant was convicted for
various abuses against detainees, including ordering two male detainees to perform
oral sex on a third and bite off his testicles.10 In the 1998 Cˇelebic´i case, the ICTY
convicted the defendants for acts of their subordinates, including placing burning
fuse cords around the genitals of male detainees, and forcing two detainees to
perform oral sex on each other.11 Patricia Viseur Sellers, former Gender Advisor
to the ICTY Prosecutor, has observed that in situations of conflict, subjecting men
to sexual violence is a way to humiliate an enemy, so it is instrumental to the
conflict. As she explains, ‘‘not infrequently, men are sexually assaulted because
what better way to demoralise the brigade that charged the hill than to capture those
men and publically have them commit fellatio on each other’’ (ICTY Outreach Pro-
gramme 2011). We can see here, even at this early stage of prosecuting conflict-
related sexual violence, a recognition that men are legitimate victims of violence
whose accounts and experiences should be taken seriously. Further, we appreciate
the efforts made to understand the meaning of such violence in the context of the
conflict, rather than treating it as epiphenomenal.

The Special Court for Sierra Leone

The initial impetus for punishing perpetrators of sexual violence against men in
times of conflict in the ad hoc courts continued with the creation of the Special Court
for Sierra Leone (SCSL). The Court was created in 2000, by the authority of the UN
and the Sierra Leonean government, to prosecute individuals for violations of
international and Sierra Leonean law since November 30, 1996.12 The Revolution-
ary United Front (RUF) case13 dealt extensively with sexual violence, including
many acts of sexual violence against men (Oosterveld 2011, 70–71). For example,
the Trial Chamber judgment noted:

These fighters employed perverse methods of sexual violence against women and men
of all ages ranging from brutal gang rapes, the insertion of various objects into victims’
Grey and Shepherd 127

genitalia, the raping of pregnant women and forced sexual intercourse between male
and female civilian abductees’. (SCSL-04-15-T, Trial Chamber Judgment at [1347])

In Sivakumaran’s view, the issues of masculinity and war rape are overlooked in the
UN’s tribunals (2010, 271–75), but that conclusion should perhaps be tempered in
recognition of the aforementioned ICTY cases that did deal with sexual violence
against men, and the conviction for sexual violence against men in the SCSL’s RUF
case (cf. Sivakumaran 2010, 274 with Oosteveld 2011, 70-71; Trial Chamber
Judgment at [1303], [1304], [1308]).

The International Criminal Court

The ICC was established in 1998 by the Rome Statute, and came into force in 2002
following ratification by the requisite 60 State Parties. It currently has 121 States
Parties, with the notable exceptions of three of the five permanent members of the
UNSC (the United States, China, and Russia). While the ICC is not part of the
UN, its jurisdiction can be triggered by a referral by the Security Council.14 Its
purpose is to try individuals for the ‘‘most serious crimes of concern to the interna-
tional community as a whole,’’ namely genocide, crimes against humanity, war
crimes and aggression (Rome Statute, Art. 5), when the state with jurisdiction is
unwilling or unable to try the case (Rome Statute, , Art. 17).
The Rome Statute includes a more comprehensive spectrum of sexual violence
crimes than any previous instrument of international criminal law, including rape,
sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, and
other similarly serious forms of sexual violence as both war crimes and crimes
against humanity (Rome Statute, Arts 7(1)(g); 8(2)(b)(xxii); 8(2)(e)(vi)). All these
crimes are defined in gender-neutral terms, with the obvious exception of forced
pregnancy. Rape includes situations of anal penetration as well as situations where
the male victim is forced to use his penis for the vaginal, anal, or oral penetration of
the perpetrator. This language was chosen deliberately to reflect male experiences of
rape, according to Valerie Oosterveld, a leading scholar in gender and international
law, who participated in the Rome Statute negotiations (Oosterveld 2011, 68). Thus,
it is clear that the issue of sexual violence against men was considered within the
ICC framework from early on.
To some extent, this attention to male experiences of sexual violence has been
reflected in the jurisprudence of the Court. In particular, it is useful to consider the
Bemba case, concerning the conflict in the CAR, which includes charges of sexual
violence against men. The accused has been charged with crimes against humanity
and war crimes through acts of rape upon civilian men, women, and children.15 The
prosecution framed these allegations in relation to constructs of masculinity,
explaining that ‘‘[m]en were also raped as a deliberate tactic to humiliate civilian
men, and demonstrate their powerlessness to protect their families.’’16 In confirming
the rape charges, the Pre-Trial Chamber referred to evidence of sexual violence
128 Men and Masculinities 16(1)

against men, for example that ‘‘Witness 23 was ordered to lie down in the position of
a horse and was raped in succession by three MLC soldiers in the garden of his house
in PK 12 on 8 November 2002 in the presence of his three wives and children.’’17 At
trial, the prosecution called witness 23 to testify about his experiences before the
Court,18 and was careful to question the expert witnesses about the specific motiva-
tions for, and harms of, sexual violence against men in the CAR context.19 No con-
viction or acquittal has yet been entered in this case, as the trial is still underway at
the time of writing.
However, at other times, the ICC has been less effective at responding to sexual
violence against males. In the Lubanga case,20 which concerned the recruitment and use
of child soldiers in the DRC, the prosecution made some allusions to the sexual exploi-
tation of boys soldiers. For example, at the start of the trial, the Prosecutor told the Court
that ‘‘Lubanga’s armed group recruited, trained, and used hundreds of young children to
kill, pillage, and rape,’’21 and that ‘‘young boys were instructed to rape’’.22 Toward the
end of the trial, he said ‘‘[d]uring battles, [the child soldiers] were incited to pillage and
to steal money from the population and sometimes to rape. If they refused, they were
killed or beaten’’23 and the Deputy Prosecutor said the child soldiers ‘‘were used to kill,
rape, and pillage.’’24 We conceptualize this type of forced sexual activity as conflict-
related sexual violence. Elsewhere, Catharine MacKinnon, the Prosecutor’s Special
Advisor on Gender, observed ‘‘Lubanga made boys into rapists and girls into sex slaves
in order to make them into soldiers he could command and use at will’’ (2009, 5). How-
ever, it was this second narrative of sexual violence—the use of girl soldiers as sex
slaves—that the prosecution emphasized throughout the trial,25 and accordingly the
majority trial judgment referred only to sexual violence against the girl soldiers.26
More recently, sexual violence against men was cited in one of the cases concern-
ing the Kenyan postelection violence.27 The prosecution attempted to characterize
forced circumcisions of men and penile amputations as sexual violence, arguing that
‘‘these weren’t just attacks on men’s sexual organs as such but were intended as
attacks on men’s identities as men within their society and were designed to destroy
their masculinity.’’28 However, the judges were unconvinced of the ‘‘sexual nature’ of
these acts, and treated them as acts causing severe physical injuries instead.29 The
Women’s Initiatives for Gender Justice, the leading gender-oriented organization
working with the ICC, argued that these forced circumcisions and penile amputations
did constitute sexual violence, and criticized both the judges and the prosecutor for
how they handled the issue (Women’s Initiatives for Gender Justice 2011, 180–81).
In the context of the UN Secretary General’s call for greater attention to sexual
violence against men in UN operations, it is heartening to observe that neither the
UN tribunals nor the SCSL or ICC are oblivious to sexual violence against men.
While the recognition and integration of male survivors in these institutions is cause
for cautious optimism, other actors in the international sphere have been less
inclusive. In the final section of this article, we conclude our analysis with a
consideration of the dynamics of responsibility in relation to masculinity and
conflict-related sexual violence.
Grey and Shepherd 129

Conclusions: On Masculinity, Responsibility, and Conflict-

Related Sexual Violence
In this article, we have argued that the dominant representations of sexual violence
in war in the relevant scholarly literature tend to envision the body of the victim of
such violence as female in form; women are ‘‘the vast majority’’ of victims while
‘‘men and boys’’ are ‘‘the absent presence’’ in analytical accounts. Importantly, the
responsibility borne by academics theorizing masculinity and conflict-related sexual
violence relates not only to the representations of the embodied victims but also to
the gendered politics of rape in war. It is not just that the literature tends to envision
the body of the victim as female in form (although it does do that) but also that it
tends to envision the politics of the violence in terms of the female victim: women
are targeted because they are vulnerable/disempowered; because they are seen to
embody the nation under attack; because they are the ‘‘spoils of war’’; because
violating the woman emasculates her male ‘‘protector’’ and so on. That is, the liter-
ature (with notable exceptions as discussed above) not only fails to envision sexual
violence against a male body, it is also fairly disinterested in the gendered politics of
sexual violence against men. We suggest that further careful explorations of this
issue are needed in order to avoid superimposing upon male victims an explanatory
framework predicated on the femininity of the victim.
In the international policy arena, we demonstrated through our analysis of the
‘‘Stop Rape Now’’ campaign under the auspices of UN ACTION that the same
logics apply here also. In contrast, the ICC, the ad hoc tribunals for the former
Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and the SCSL, are all actively prosecuting individuals for
the perpetration of sexual violence against men. Recognizing that sexual violence
against men is an issue both grave and particular, and recognizing that responses
to this issue in the literature and in political and legal fora are inconsistent, we
propose that actors in positions of power, including academics, activists, jurists, and
practitioners, bear a responsibility for theorizing conflict-related sexual violence
carefully and with due attention to gender. ‘‘We are responsible . . . not because
of what we as individuals have done, but because of what we are’’ (Gatens and Lloyd
1999, 81). This expanded concept of responsibility encourages us to challenge the
seductive logics of ‘‘the vast majority’’ which suggest that we turn our resources and
attention away from male survivors; and to consider whether the legal and political
responses we participate in inadvertently perpetuate the identity categories of the
powerful man/powerless woman. Through incorporating these reflexive practices
into our work, we can combat the invisibility of male survivors and work more
inclusively to ‘‘Stop Rape Now.’’

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.
130 Men and Masculinities 16(1)

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.

Notes
1. We use ‘‘conflict-related sexual violence,’’ ‘‘rape in war,’’ and ‘‘war-rape’’ interchange-
ably, led by the documents and literature with which we engage; while recognizing that
each representation has a specific politics, this is not the primary focus of our analysis here.
2. Throughout, we use ‘‘survivor’’ and ‘‘victim’’ alternately, in recognition of the fact that
not all victims survive and that not all survivors consider themselves victims.
3. We recognize that De Brouwer goes on to discuss male victims in her study, but we still
take issue with her representation of victimology.
4. MacKinnon has been more attentive to sexual violence against men in her more recent
role as Special Gender Advisor to the International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor,
indicating that an expansion of responsibility for sexual violence is indeed possible.
5. Copelon does briefly refer an act of sexual violence against a man in a different article,
when theorizing that sexual violence against men has more shock value than sexual
violence against women, partly because sexual violence against men is far less common-
place (Copelon 1994, 255–56).
6. A note on method: given the nature of websites (that they are regularly updated, edited
and sometimes deleted altogether without warning), we have limited our analysis to the
three most stable pages on the UN ACTION website: the homepage (http://www.stopra-
penow.org/), referenced as (Homepage 2012) above; the information page (http://www.
stoprapenow.org/about/), referenced as (About 2012) above; and the page offering testi-
monies (http://www.stoprapenow.org/testimonies/), referenced as (Testimonies 2012)
above. The analysis comments on content available during the period of research and
writing (January to June 2012).
7. Perhaps not consciously, but tellingly nonetheless, the two final scenes of video 2 feature
brown people with agency (Leymah Gbowee from the Women, Peace and Security
Network and Dr Denis Mukwege, Director of Panzi Hospital, DRC), thus undermining
a critique that characterizes the campaign as an instantiation of ‘‘the White Saviour Indus-
trial Complex’’ (Cole 2012).
8. To illustrate this point, Sivakumaran analyzed Security Council Resolution 1820 (2008)
on sexual violence in armed conflict. He found that the Resolution ‘‘has had the impact of
contributing to the relative silence [on sexual violence against men] through the exclusion
of male victims from its framework’’ (2010, 265). Although the Resolution uses gender-
neutral language when describing the problem of sexual violence, the provisions detailing
concrete responses focused exclusively on sexual violence against women (2010, 265–
67). Furthermore, the Resolution only protects civilians, whereas many instances of sex-
ual violence against men take place in detention, against prisoners of war or members of
enemy forces (i.e., against noncivilians; 2010, 270–71).
Grey and Shepherd 131

9. Chronologically, the establishment of the ICC happened (in 1998) before the SCSL was
constituted (in 2000), although the ICC did not come into force until 2002 and we have
thus placed the ICC after the SCSL.
10. The Prosecutor v. Dusˇko Tadić, Trial Chamber Judgment, May 7, 1997, at [206] (see also
Askin 1999, 101).
11. IT-96-21-T, Prosecutor v. Delalic´ et al. Trial Chamber Judgment, November 16, 1998 at
[24] and [26] (see also Askin 2003, 322).
12. SCSL Statute, Article 1.
13. Prosecutor v. Sesay, Kallon and Gbao.
14. Thus far, the Security Council has referred two situations to the ICC: Sudan [SC
Resolution 1593(2005)] and Libya [Resolution 1970 (2011)]. The ICC’s jurisdiction can
also be triggered by a referral by a State Party to the Rome Statute, as was the case in
Uganda, the DRC, and the CAR; or by the ICC Prosecutor initiating an investigation
of his/her own motion, as was the case in Kenya and Côte d’Ivoire.
15. ICC-01/05-01/08-424 at [159] and [286].
16. ICC-01/05-01/08-395-Anx3 [41].
17. ICC-01/05-01/08-424 [170], see also [286].
18. ICC-01/05-01/08-T-50-Red-ENG - ICC-01/05-01/08-T-52-Red-ENG.
19. For example, ICC-01/05-01/08-T-100-ENG p. 11, lines 15-20; ICC-01/05-01/08-T-100-
ENG p. 38 lines 3-6; ICC-01/05-01/08-T-38-ENG p. 25 lines 5-6.
20. ICC-01/04-01/06, The Prosecutor v. Thomas Lubanga Dyilo.
21. ICC-01/04-01/06-T-107-ENG at [4].
22. ICC-01/04-01/06-T-107-ENG at [11].
23. ICC-01/04-01/06-2748-Red at [211].
24. ICC-01/04-01/06-T-356-ENG at [3-4].
25. See, for example, ICC-01/04-01/06-2748-Red at [227-231].
26. ICC-01/04-01/06-2842 at [890-896]. Despite recognizing the evidence of sexual violence
against the girl soldiers, the majority declined to hold the accused liable for this violence
on the grounds that it was beyond the scope of the charges [896]. In a separate dissenting
opinion, Judge Odio Benito reasoned that sexual violence could be part of the charges of
conscripting, enlisting, and using child soldiers to participate actively in hostilities
[15-21]. Her reasoning emphasized the sexual abuse of girl soldiers, but she also made
some references to sexual violence against boy soldiers: ‘‘the use of young girls [sic] and
boys [sic] bodies by combatants within or outside the group is a war crime and as such
encoded in the charges against the accused’’ [21].
27. ICC-01/09-02/11, The Prosecutor v. Francis Kirimi Muthaura and Uhuru Muigai
Kenyatta.
28. ICC-01/09-02/1 l-T-5-Red-ENG at [88].
29. ‘‘The Chamber finds that the evidence placed before it does not establish the sexual
nature of the acts of forcible circumcision and penile amputation visited upon Luo men.
Instead, it appears from the evidence that the acts were motivated by ethnic prejudice and
intended to demonstrate cultural superiority of one tribe over the other. Therefore, the
Chamber concludes that the acts under consideration do not qualify as other forms of
132 Men and Masculinities 16(1)

sexual violence within the meaning of article 7(l)(g) of the Statute. However, as explained
in the following section, the Chamber considers them as part of the Prosecutor’s allega-
tion of acts causing severe physical injuries and will address them accordingly’’ (ICC-01/
09-02/11-382-Red at [266]).

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Author Biographies
Rosemary Grey is a doctoral researcher in the School of Social Sciences and the Faculty of
Law at the University of New South Wales. She works on the topic of gender justice in inter-
national criminal law, focussing particularly on the prosecution of sexual and gender-based
violence at the International Criminal Court. She is based in Sydney but has travelled to The
Hague, Kampala and New York for her research.
Laura J. Shepherd is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of New
South Wales, Australia. She works at the intersection of gendered global politics, critical
approaches to security and International Relations theory. Laura is the editor of Gender
Matters in Global Politics: A Feminist Introduction to International Relations (London:
Routledge, 2010) and the author of Gender, Violence and Security: Discourse as Practice
(London: Zed, 2008), as well as many scholarly articles in peer-reviewed journals, including
International Studies Quarterly, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Review of Inter-
national Studies and Journal of Gender Studies.