Abstract
Feminist international legal scholarship is conventionally aimed at addressing the androcentric bias of international law. Its starting point, therefore, is that women have been and continue to be excluded from international law vis-à-vis both its emancipatory and protective potential. As Elisabeth Evatt states in her foreword to Hilary Charlesworth and Christine Chinkin’s seminal treatise, The Boundaries of International Law, international law ‘shows little concern for women, their interests and their special vulnerabilities’.1 However, in light of the proliferation of international laws, policies and programmes addressing conflict-related sexual violence over the course of the last two decades, this chapter seeks to add nuance to this claim. More specifically and towards this end, this chapter explores the silencing of male ‘victimhood’2 within mainstream international sexual violence discourse.
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Notes
E. Evatt, ‘Foreword’, in H. Charlesworth and C. Chinkin, The Boundaries of International Law: A Feminist Analysis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. x.
The term ‘victim’ ‘connotes powerlessness and stigmatisation’: UNHCR, ‘Sexual and gender-based violence against refugees, returnees and internally displaced persons: Guidelines for prevention and response’ (UNHCR, May 2003), p. 6. Thus, I generally use the term ‘survivor’ in recognition of the agency and resilience of individuals who have experienced sexual violence. However, I use the term ‘victim’ vis-à-vis the under-representation of male survivors, as it is the idea of perceiving men as ‘victims’ that appears to jar. I place the term in quotation marks not to ‘call into question the urgency or credibility of [male “victimhood”] as a political issue, but rather to show that the way [its] materiality is circumscribed is fully political’: J. Butler, ‘Contingent foundations: Feminism and the question of “postmodernism”’, in S. Seidman (ed.), The Postmodern Turn: New Perspectives on Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 153, p. 170.
L. Stemple, ‘Male rape and human rights’, Hastings Law Journal, Vol. 60, No. 3 (2009) 605, p. 635.
See, for example, African Rights, Rwanda: Not So Innocent — When Women Become Killers (London: African Rights, 1995);
M. Alison, Women and Political Violence: Female Combatants in Ethno-National Conflict (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009);
and C.O.N. Moser and C.F. Clark (eds), Victims, Perpetrators or Actors? Gender, Armed Conflict, and Political Violence (London: Zed Books, 2001).
This concept is borrowed from E. Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, ‘Concealing violence against women in Sahrawi refugee camps: The politicisation of victimhood’, in H. Bradby and G.L. Hundt (eds), Global Perspectives on War, Gender and Health: The Sociology and Anthropology of Suffering (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010) 99.
According to Said, these form four core components of all discourses: E.W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin Books, first published 1978, 2003 ed.), p. 2.
R.C. Carpenter, ‘Recognizing gender-based violence against civilian men and boys in conflict situations’, Security Dialogue, Vol. 37, No. 1 (2006) 83, p. 85.
E. Rowley, C. Garcia-Moreno and E. Dartnall, ‘Executive summary: Research themes and questions to guide research on sexual violence in conflict and post-conflict settings’ (Sexual Violence Research Initiative, 2012), p. 2.
United Nation Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), ‘Discussion Paper 2: The nature, scope and motivation for sexual violence against men and boys in armed conflict’ (Paper presented at the UN OCHA Research Meeting on the Use of Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict: Identifying Gaps in Research to Inform More Effective Interventions, 26 June 2008), p. 1.
It is important to note that until the 1990s, concrete data on sexual violence perpetrated against women and girls in armed conflicts was similarly sparse. As noted by Carol Harrington, 1989 marked a ‘striking change in documentation and analysis of the problem’: C. Harrington, The Politicization of Sexual Violence: From Abolitionism to Peacekeeping (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), p. 1. Susan Brownmiller remarks that ‘serious historians have rarely bothered to document specific acts of rape in warfare’:
S. Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975), p. 40.
See, for example, C. Clark, ‘Gender-based violence research initiatives in refugee, internally displaced, and post-conflict settings: Lessons learned’ (Rosemarie Rogers Working Paper No. 17, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, April 2003), p. 23;
F. Roth, T. Guberek and A.H. Green, ‘Using quantitative data to assess conflict-related sexual violence in Colombia: Challenges and opportunities’ (Corporación Punto de Vista and Benetech, 2011), p. 56.
K. Johnson, J. Asher, M. Kisielewski, L. Lawry, R. Ong, B. Rughita and J. Scott, ‘Association of sexual violence and human rights violations with physical and mental health in territories of the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo’, Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol. 304, No. 5 (2010) 553, p. 557.
For further quantitative data on levels of male sexual violence in conflict and post-conflict settings, see, for example, M. Nagai, G. Burnham, U. Karunakara and E. Rowley, ‘Violence against refugees, non-refugees and host populations in Southern Sudan and Northern Uganda’, Global Public Health, Vol. 3, No. 3 (2008) 249; Stemple, ‘Male rape and human rights’; and Conflict-Related Sexual Violence: Report of the Secretary-General, UN Doc. A/66/657-S/2012/33 (13 January 2012).
M. Christian, G. Burnham, N. Glass, S. Octave and P. Ramazani, ‘Sexual and gender based violence against men in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: Effects on survivors, the families and the community’, Medicine, Conflict and Survival, Vol. 27, No. 4 (2011) 227, p. 242.
A. Mack (ed.), Human Security Report 2012: Sexual Violence, Education, and War — Beyond the Mainstream Narrative (Vancouver: Human Security Press, 2012), p. 44.
S. Rothkegel, E. Engelhardt-Wendt, R. Hennig, J. Papy, J. Poluda, B. Weyermann and C. Wonani, ‘Evaluation of UNHCR’s efforts to prevent and respond to sexual and gender-based violence in situations of forced displacement’ (UNHCR, 2008), p. 8.
UNHCR, ‘Working with men and boy survivors of sexual and gender-based violence in forced displacement’ (Need to Know Guidance No. 4, UNHCR, 2012).
V. Munro, Law and Politics at the Perimeter: Re-Evaluating Key Feminist Debates in Feminist Theory (Oxford: Hart, 2007), p. 12, quoted in
A. Edwards, Violence against Women under International Human Rights Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 2–3.
See, for example, N.E. Dowd, ‘Masculinities and feminist legal theory’, Wisconsin Journal of Law, Gender & Society, Vol. 23, No. 2 (2008) 201;
N. Levit, ‘Feminism for men: Legal ideology and the construction of maleness’, UCLA Law Review, Vol. 43, No. 4 (1996) 1037;
D. Otto, ‘Disconcerting “masculinities”: Reinventing the gendered subject(s) of international human rights law’, in D. Buss and A. Manji (eds), International Law: Modern Feminist Approaches (Oxford: Hart, 2005) 105.
D. Otto, ‘Lost in translation: Re-scripting the sexed subjects of international human rights law’, in A. Orford (ed.), International Law and its Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) 318, p. 354.
R.W. Connell, The Role of Men and Boys in Achieving Gender Equality, UN Doc. EGM/Men-Boys-GE/2003/BP (17 October 2003), p. 11.
See, for example, A. Barrow, ‘UN Security Council Resolutions 1325 and 1820: Constructing gender in armed conflict and international humanitarian law’, International Review of the Red Cross, Vol. 92, No. 877 (2010) 221;
and P. Scully, ‘Vulnerable women: A critical reflection on human rights discourse and sexual violence’, Emory International Law Review, Vol. 23, No. 1 (2009) 113, p. 118.
Connell, The Role of Men and Boys in Achieving Gender Equality. See also A. Greig and J. Edström, ‘Mobilising men in practice: Challenging sexual and gender-based violence in institutional settings — Tools, stories, lessons’ (Institute of Development Studies, January 2012);
M. Kaufman, ‘Sexual violence in conflict and post-conflict: Engaging men and boys’ (Advocacy Brief, MenEngage and United Nations Population Fund, July 2012); and Buscher, ‘Masculinities’.
A. Guedes, ‘Men and Boys’ (Knowledge Module, United Nations Development Fund for Women and Men Engage, January 2012), p. 4.
S. Sivakumaran, ‘Lost in translation: UN responses to sexual violence against men and boys in situations of armed conflict’, International Review of the Red Cross, Vol. 92, No. 877 (2010) 259, p. 267. For an alternative analysis, see Engle, ‘The Grip of Sexual Violence’.
E. Pirovolakis, Reading Derrida and Ricoeur: Improbable Encounters between Deconstruction and Hermeneutics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), p. 88.
G.C. Spivak, ‘Translator’s preface’, in J. Derrida, Of Grammatology (G.C. Spivak trans., Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997) ix, p. xvi [trans. of De la grammatologie (first published 1967)].
J. Derrida, Writing and Difference (A. Bass trans., London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1997), p. 69 [trans. of L’écriture et la différence (first published 1967)].
Term borrowed from T. Shand, M. Herstad, P. Pawlak, T. Paine, J. Khanyile and S. Tall, Good Practice Brief on Male Involvement in GBV Prevention and Response in Conflict, Post-Conflict and Humanitarian Crisis Settings in Sub-Saharan Africa (Cape Town: Sonke Gender Justice Network, 2013), p. 19.
H. Durham and K. O’Byrne, ‘The dialogue of difference: Gender perspectives on international humanitarian law’, International Review of the Red Cross, Vol. 81. See, for example, V. Oosterveld, ‘Prosecution of gender-based crimes in international law’, in D. Mazurana, A. Raven-Roberts and J. Parpart (eds), Gender, Conflict, and Peacekeeping (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005) 67, p. 73.
R.C. Carpenter, ‘Innocent Women and Children’: Gender Norms and the Protection of Civilians (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), p. 2. See also Sivakumaran, ‘UN responses to sexual violence against men and boys in situations of armed conflict’, p. 270.
N.N.R. Quénivet, Sexual Offenses in Armed Conflict & International Law (Ardsley: Transnational Publishers, 2005), p. 15. See also, for example,
T. Gillespie, ‘Rape crisis centres and “male rape”: A face of the backlash’, in M. Hester, L. Kelly and J. Radford (eds), Women, Violence and Male Power: Feminist Activism, Research and Practice (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1996) 148.
D. Lewis, ‘Unrecognized victims: Sexual violence against men in conflict settings under international law’, Wisconsin International Law Journal, Vol. 27, No. 1 (2009) 1, p. 48.
S. Sivakumaran, ‘Male/male rape and the “taint” of homosexuality’, Human Rights Quarterly, Vol. 27, No. 4 (2005) 1274.
Discussions beginning to address some of these questions include, A. del Zotto and A. Jones, ‘Male-on-male sexual violence in wartime: Human rights’ last taboo?’ (Paper presented at the Annual Convention of the International Studies Association, New Orleans, 23–27 March 2002); Sivakumaran, ‘Male/male rape and the “taint” of homosexuality’; and Sivakumaran, ‘UN responses to sexual violence against men and boys in situations of armed conflict’.
R. Kapur, ‘The tragedy of victimization rhetoric: Resurrecting the “native” subject in international/post-colonial feminist legal politics’, Harvard Human Rights Journal, Vol. 15 (2002) 1, p. 32, cited in Otto, ‘Lost in translation’, p. 356.
C. Enloe, The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), pp. 19–42.
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© 2014 Chloé Lewis
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Lewis, C. (2014). Systemic Silencing: Addressing Sexual Violence against Men and Boys in Armed Conflict and its Aftermath. In: Heathcote, G., Otto, D. (eds) Rethinking Peacekeeping, Gender Equality and Collective Security. Thinking Gender in Transnational Times. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137400215_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137400215_11
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