It is a weapon of massive humiliation. The sexual violence exercised in wartime are considered a “war crime, a crime against humanity or an act likely to constitute a crime of genocide”, according to a resolution of United Nations. While the majority of victims are generally women, in some conflicts, it is men who suffer the most abuse.
This is for example the case in Russia and in the occupied areas of Ukraine where the captured Ukrainian soldiers are victims of sexual violence such as “rapes, electric shocks and blows on the genitals and the buttocks, forced nudity and strokes worn as they were naked”, details a report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights on Ukraine published in late 2023. The entity had counted since the start of the Russian invasion, “370 cases of sexual violence against 252 men, 106 women, 10 girls and 2 boys”. 68 % of victims are therefore men.
Prisoners of the First World War to the captured by Russia
These acts which constitute torture, are however rarely put forward. If The world Recently shed light on these bruised Ukrainian soldiers, the rape of men by men in time of conflict remains taboo. However, it has been widespread and for decades. A practice already used “by executioners during the First World War against prisoners,” notes the historian and research director at CNRS Fabrice Virgili.
But also in Algeria during the War of Independence, east of the Congo especially from 2009, or more recently in Israeli prisons, in the Syrian jails of Bashar al-Assad, against migrants in Libya and therefore in Russian prisons and centers of torture.
The silence of shame
Already difficult to assess in peacetime on women, the number of victims of male sexual violence is even more complicated to estimate in wartime. “You have to pass beyond the shame that is based on the victims, it is as hard for women as for men, there is a feeling of exposing yourself, of revealing immense weakness,” underlines Fabrice Virgili. With the difference that, for men, take into account gender stereotypes imposed by society, making even more difficult to express themselves.
The executioner’s objective is to “feminize prisoners, to humiliate them sexually” and to break masculinity, explains in an article devoted to the question Marc the Pope, researcher at CNRS and EHESS. In addition to having been captured, therefore against the battlefield, “they are beaten a second time through the body, while they carry the responsibility for the fight, the confrontation, we break what was expected of them,” adds Fabrice Virgili. And beyond the only prisoner individual, it is a message sent to the adversary with the desire to “provoke a kind of dread”, he develops.
A taboo that invisits
From this silence, the invisibilization of the facts is born. To the point that in a medical aid NGO in Ukraine, a former prisoner quoted by The world faced the absence of a proctologist or an urologist. These rapes and sexual violence, especially in the 1990s, “were initially the subject, only rare special studies and were only exceptionally recognized by journalists,” recalls Marc the Pope.
Our file on sexual violence
NGOs dealing with sexual violence in wartime and political crises took time to seize the subject. In 2002, out of 4,076 organizations, only 3 % had mentioned an interest in victims, reports the researcher. If progress is made, the care to collect their testimony remains less organized, limiting the release of speech and now taboo. “Be careful not to add pain by stigmatizing them, putting them aside,” warns Fabrice Virgili.
