Navigating vulnerabilities and masculinities: How gendered contexts shape the agency of male sexual violence survivors

Abstract

In dominant global conceptions of conflict-related sexual violence, the experiences of male survivors, if attended to at all, have thus far almost exclusively been analysed in terms of vulnerabilities. Drawing on empirical evidence from two different cases (Uganda and Croatia), in this article we argue that essentializing and static generalizations of ‘emasculation’ fail to do justice to the complexity of male survivors’ experiences. We show that, in the two cases we examine, male survivors exercise agency and find different ways of engaging with their harmful experiences. Survivors’ agency is shaped and conditioned by different opportunity structures, and thus largely dependent on local gender relations and constructions of masculinity. To build our argument, we take inspiration from feminist international relations scholarship highlighting the active roles of women and girls as agents within the context of armed conflict, extending such analysis to the experiences of male survivors of sexual violence. By systematically analysing the forms and conditions of the agency of male survivors of sexual violence, we offer a more holistic examination of the dynamics of wartime sexual violence, contributing conceptually and empirically to research both on local/civilian agency in wartime and on conflict-related sexual violence.

Keywords

Agency conflict gender masculinity sexual violence violence

Introduction

Attempts to address wartime sexual and gender-based violence around the world recently reached new heights in terms of international attention when the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Nadia Murad and Dr. Denis Mukwege. This high-level international recognition of their efforts to prevent sexual violence mirrors the growing political and scholarly attention paid to sexual and gender-based violence, which is often framed as a ‘weapon of war’ (Eriksson Baaz and Stern, 2013). Most of the existing research examines sexual violence against women and girls, who are disproportionately affected by such violence (Cohen, 2016). Such a focus, however, arguably neglects other forms of structural gender-based violence and discrimination against women, as well as sexual violence against men and boys (Féron, 2018; Zalewski et al., 2018).

Indeed, although wartime sexual violence against men occurs more frequently than is often assumed (Sivakumaran, 2007), little is known about its dynamics, and male survivors’ experiences remain of peripheral concern to academics and practitioners alike (Touquet and Gorris, 2016). Despite this prevailing marginalization of sexual violence against men, studies have begun to explore how socially constructed masculinities render men vulnerable to gender-based violence in the first place (Carpenter, 2006) and how sexual violence impacts upon male survivors’ gendered identities as men (Myrttinen et al., 2016; Schulz, 2018a; Touquet, 2018). If and when attention is paid to male-directed sexual abuse, however, most studies examine such crimes almost exclusively through the frame of vulnerabilities, portraying male survivors as passive, humiliated, and indefinitely stripped of their manhood (see Sivakumaran, 2007). The existing yet limited body of literature on the topic thus falls into a tendency to represent ‘survivors as victims without a voice’, resulting in a victimizing and ‘disempowering . . . narrative of silenced, isolated, and wholly marginalized male survivors’ (Edström and Dolan, 2018: 176) without agency (Edström et al., 2016).

Yet, despite their gendered harms, male survivors of sexual violence across different contexts also actively engage with and respond to their vulnerabilities, thereby refuting stereotypical portrayals of the ever-vulnerable and passive victim and exercising myriad forms of agency. Indeed, it should come as no surprise that male survivors also carve out pockets of agency for themselves given that there is ‘an elusive balance which people try to strike between being acted upon and acting . . . of choosing their own fate’ (Jackson, 2000: 123). Throughout the growing literature on this topic, however, the different dimensions of male survivors’ agency thus far remain insufficiently explored, despite recent exceptions (Gray et al., 2020), and this has resulted in incomplete and essentialist portrayals of the dynamics of sexual violence against men. Seeking to engage with this, in the present article, we specifically examine the agency of male survivors, drawing on empirical evidence from Northern Uganda and the former Yugoslavia.

Rather than simply making visible multiple instances of male survivors making deliberate choices to engage with their experiences, however, we also more broadly investigate the opportunity structures that shape survivors’ possibilities for acting in an agentive fashion, as well as the sociopolitical and gendered spaces in which these acts of agency occur, which necessitates a situational and relational understanding of agency (Baines, 2017; Menzel, 2018). We argue that local political conditions and gender relations, and particularly constructions of masculinities, can both prevent male survivors of sexual violence from exercising agency and simultaneously enable them to do so. Through our cross-country examination, we thus demonstrate the role that different opportunity structures play in the exercise of agency in the two contexts. Such opportunity structures include (semi-)institutional frameworks, survivors’ masculinities, and the specific post-conflict sociopolitical context, with different structures facilitating different possibilities and spaces for the exercise of agency by male survivors.

We accordingly draw inspiration from feminist international relations scholarship that in recent years has begun to ‘collapse the often gendered opposition of agency and victimhood that typically characterizes the analysis of women’s coping strategies in war zones’ (Utas, 2005: 403; see also Åhäll, 2012; Baines, 2015; Björkdahl and Mannergren-Selimovic, 2015), and we extend insights from this literature to the dynamics of sexual violence against men. Our analysis thereby complexifies common understandings regarding the lived realities of male survivors of sexual violence by arguing that ‘one’s vulnerability in one relationship does not define the person as ever vulnerable’ (Baines, 2017: 14). While much of the existing literature on sexual violence against men is underdeveloped empirically and conceptually, consisting primarily of single case study examinations, our cross-case examination allows us to contrast and juxtapose survivors’ experiences across contexts. By bringing these cases together, our intention is not to conduct a rigid and systematic comparison, but instead to tease out differences and similarities with regard to the agency of survivors and its underlying opportunity structures across two diverse contexts.

The article proceeds as follows. We first review the growing literature on local agency in times of war before critically exposing the misrepresentation of survivors’ experiences throughout the existing scholarship. We then put forward a broadened conceptualization of agency – including its structural and gendered dimensions – that will guide our analysis. Following methodological reflections, the core of the article then draws on empirical evidence from two case studies and analyzes different instances of how and under what conditions male survivors actively engage with their experiences, thereby exercising agency.

Gendered victimhood, vulnerabilities, and agency

Within the context of the so-called local turn in peacebuilding research (Mac Ginty and Richmond, 2013), feminist security studies and critical international relations scholars increasingly emphasize the importance of recognizing the agency of conflict-affected communities (Alison, 2004; Mannergren-Selimovic, 2018; Menzel, 2018). This recognition comes in response (and contrast) to much of the existing literature on conflict studies, peacebuilding, and transitional justice, which frequently constructs an ‘ideal’ type of victim as an ever-vulnerable person without agency (Baines, 2015). Such representations of victimhood, in turn, risk obscuring the complexities of violence, harms, and vulnerabilities in situations of mass violence, while (re)constructing essentialist representations of victim- and survivor-hood (McEvoy and McConnachie, 2013). Specifically, such representations reduce victims to the status of apolitical subjects in need of external (mostly white, masculine, and patriarchal) protection, rather than actors with the potential to engage with and respond to their experiences on their own terms. Victimization and agency are thereby often conceptualized in relation to each other, as ‘mutually exclusive states’ (Connell, 1997: 121). Conceptions of victimhood and agency during times of war are also heavily gendered (Baines, 2015; Björkdahl and Mannergren-Selimovic, 2015), and frequently based upon dichotomous constructions of male perpetrators and female victims. All too often, such an approach (re)-produces an unreconstructed view of gendered victimhood, ignoring masculine vulnerabilities in conflict settings – including the widespread empirical reality of sexual violence against men – and obscuring women’s agency during and after war.

As noted by Baines (2015: 320), however, the study of gender-based violence ‘would do well to incorporate a conceptualization of victim agency, and to avoid reducing men’s and women’s experiences of sexual and gender-based violence to acts solely done to them’. Seeking to dismantle these essentialist views on gendered victimhood and guided by feminist curiosity to challenge the heteropatriarchal manifestations of gender violence (Enloe, 2004), feminist scholars in particular (Alison, 2004; Coulter, 2009; MacKenzie, 2012) have sought to ‘collapse the often gendered opposition of agency and victimhood that typically characterizes the analysis of women’s coping strategies in war zones’ (Utas, 2005: 403). Various studies thus began to bring specific attention to women’s agency, focusing on how women and girls resist, subvert, and navigate the opportunities and constraints that characterize their everyday lived realities of war and coercive relationships (Baines, 2017). This body of literature reveals that female experiences and roles during war cannot be reduced to the passive and vulnerable status of ‘bush wives’ or ‘sex slaves’ (Coulter, 2009), and that women and girls instead frequently actively resist or take on active combat roles (Alison, 2004; MacKenzie, 2012), thereby operating as ‘active agents’ (Utas, 2005).

For men in conflict settings, gendered assumptions about agency, vulnerabilities, and victimhood operate in ways that differ from the dynamics described above. Agency is typically categorized as an essentially masculine trait (Åhäll, 2012), and such a characterization is further exacerbated in conflict situations, where the focus often rests on men’s active roles as combatants, leaders, and (perceived) protectors of women, children, and the nation (Yuval-Davis, 1997). For men as victims, however, there is a discrepancy between heteropatriarchal constructions of masculinities and their incompatibility with victimhood (Carpenter, 2006; Dolan, 2017). As a result, male survivors of sexual violence – judged as having been unable in their masculine role to defend themselves – are depicted as ‘emasculated’ and ‘feminized’, as well as silenced and deprived of their manhood and agency (Schulz, 2018a). Such assumptions recur prominently throughout most of the existing research and journalistic accounts on male survivors of sexual violence, where masculinities (and by association agency), on the one hand, and vulnerabilities, on the other, have largely been represented as dichotomous and mutually exclusive (see Clark, 2014). Yet, whereas it is true that, in some cases, survivors have expressed ‘not feeling man enough’ (Group discussion, Uganda, 12 March 2016) as a result of sexual violations, these experiences are not generalizable across individuals or contexts, nor are they fixed in time.

Conceptualizations of male survivors as ‘emasculated’, ‘feminized’, and perpetually silenced are based on static and monolithic views of masculinity.¹ Yet, as argued by Coulter (2009: 13–14), ‘caution must be exercised when making [such] generalizations, as they may vary over time and have different cultural connotations in different contexts’. Indeed, masculinities are fluid and dynamic, and ‘ways of doing male’ are highly variable across contexts and time, going beyond one homogenized idea(l) of (hegemonic) masculinity that resonates across and within different spheres. In particular, work by Connell and Messerschmidt provides particularly useful theoretical frameworks for understanding the pluralities of masculinities and conceptualizing the inherent power relations within and between masculinities and gender identities. Within heteropatriarchal gender relations, a hegemonic conception of masculinity stands at the top of the gender hierarchy (Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005; Messerschmidt, 2019), situated above various other complicit, subordinated, and marginalized masculinities, and certainly above femininities, let alone gender non-conforming identities.

As a result of these constructions and assumptions, and although agency is considered inherently masculine, male survivors who are perceived to have been robbed of their masculinity as a result of sexual violence (Myrttinen et al., 2016) are by association also seen as deprived of their agency. Throughout existing research, male survivors are thus commonly ‘cast through the dichotomy of victim and agency’ (Walker, 2010: 9) that obscures the complexities of their lived realities. Yet, how male survivors, in spite of their gendered vulnerabilities, also engage with their experiences and thereby exercise myriad forms of agency thus far remains insufficiently analysed, with only a few noteworthy exceptions. This, in turn, results in incomplete representations of the dynamics of wartime gender-based violence in general, and of male survivors’ lived realities in particular. In response to these shortcomings, recent work with both male and female refugee survivors of sexual violence has begun to examine how survivors ‘invest in, refuse, or reconfigure the subject positioning allocated to them, and thus how they make a “claim to politics” as subjects who can become, who can exercise agency’ (Gray et al., 2020: 204; see Schulz, 2019). Through our case studies, we aim to further investigate different ways in which male survivors act in an agentive manner, and to explore the underlying factors and conditions that shape survivors’ possibilities for exercising agency – as analysed further below.

Theorizing (gendered) agency

In its broadest sense, agency refers to the ‘modality of action’ (Mahmood, 2001) and a human capacity to act, which ‘is not exercised in a vacuum but rather in a social world in which structure shapes the opportunities and resources’ to act (Björkdahl and Mannergren-Selimovic, 2015: 170). In this reading, agency is centrally composed of autonomy (Shepherd, 2012) and intention, and understood as ‘a capacity to subvert’ (Ketola, 2020: 1) that is conditioned by structural factors. As famously argued by feminist scholar Saba Mahmood (2001: 203), agency should be understood not simply as ‘a synonym for resistance to relations of dominance, but as a capacity for action that specific relations of subordination create and enable’. Indeed, disentangling agency from resistance allows us to ‘fruitfully rethink agency in post-conflict contexts’ (Ketola, 2020: 2), broadening the range of agency in a more holistic manner.

In employing a widened perspective on agency, we are broadly interested in different forms of agency that emerge not just at the macro level, but instead more widely in a myriad of phenomenological interactions among and between persons (Baines, 2017). As specified by Björkdahl and Mannergren-Selimovic (2015: 171), ‘agency . . . may also be enacted through “life projects” that may not necessarily be formulated as intentional (political) acts of resistance but that still have transformative effects in the gendered everyday’. This widened conception of agency expands the neoliberal treatment of agency seen in much of the international relations and conflict studies literature, where it is equated with resistance or resilience (Mahmood, 2001; Ketola, 2020). Instead of such an approach, it recognizes a wide array of choices, actions (or non-actions), and strategies within the public and private realms, employed by individuals and communities seeking to remake a world and reconfigure their lives and relationships, as well as to reassert their personhood, identities, and self (Baines, 2015), in the aftermath of violence and harms.

At the same time, however, it is important to reiterate that ‘agency [is] not a general characteristic which actors either have or lack, but a quality that actors’ doing may have in a specific context’ (Menzel, 2018: 4), which in turn demonstrates the existence of spatially and temporally contingent as well as structural conditions for agency and its situational character (Menzel, 2018). Across different contexts, social and political constraints, expectations, and dynamics thus create ‘choice architectures . . . that structure the possibility space for agency’ (Haslanger, 2016: 117).

As demonstrated by feminist scholarship, these structural conditions for agency are heavily gendered (Åhäll, 2012; Coulter, 2009; Mahmood, 2001), and access to them is rendered even more complex as agency is commonly coded as a masculine trait, whereas femininities are equated with a lack or absence of agency. To tease out the intersections between agency, vulnerabilities, and gender that shape possibilities for and limitations on the exercise of agency by male survivors of sexual violence, we thus pay particular attention to wider gender relations in general and survivors’ masculinities in particular.

Sexual violence against men across contexts

Drawing on the conceptual frame of agency outlined above, the remainder of this article analyses differential gendered and contextual dynamics that shape the ways in which male survivors exercise agency across the two case study sites: Northern Uganda and Croatia. The modes of agency exercised include navigating silence and disclosure, accessing services, and grappling with their status as survivors of sexual abuse. We identify and subsequently analyse two broader patterns of male survivors’ agency, relating to (a) navigating silence and disclosure and (b) engaging with masculine vulnerabilities. We demonstrate that survivors’ possibilities for exercising agency are contingent upon local opportunity structures or ‘choice architectures’ that both constrain and shape the forms that the agency of male survivors takes. Central to these opportunity structures are the interlinked elements of masculine identities, the gendered positioning of the men in the sociopolitical context, and the (in)availability of (non)governmental services and safe spaces.

Methodological framework

The data from Northern Uganda were collected during nine months of research, conducted primarily between January and July 2016 and between June and September 2018. Insights about survivors’ experiences specifically derive from a total of four participatory workshop discussions with male survivors of sexual violence, which were conducted in collaboration with the Refugee Law Project (RLP) and triangulated with a total of 79 key-informant interviews, two focus group discussions with male elders, and ethnographic participant reflection. Through the collaboration with RLP, the study was situated within an ongoing and sustainable process of working with male survivors and conducted in the presence of two experienced psychosocial service-providers. For the purpose of our analysis, we focus specifically on one survivor’s in-depth story, as well as the experiences of several members of a survivors’ association, discussed below.

The Croatian case study is based on empirical research conducted in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina over seven non-consecutive weeks between 2015 and 2019, including 35 key-informant interviews and ten interviews with male survivors. The core focus of the analysis relies on four pseudonymized interviews with male survivors in Croatia, conducted under the guidance of a psychiatrist at a trauma center in Zagreb in September and November 2018 and January 2019.² The interviewed men had all applied to the reparations scheme for sexual violence survivors in Croatia and were all former combatants and ethnic Croats. The data are thus not necessarily representative for all male survivors of conflict-related sexual violence in Croatia, among whom are also civilians and Serbs.

We acknowledge that there is a measure of self-selection inherent in this sample, as we only spoke to survivors who disclosed their experiences. The data were not originally collected with the aim of conducting a comparative study, yet combining stories and elements from these very different contexts allows us to tease out explanatory factors and important insights on the intersections of sexual harms, agency, and masculinities. As emphasized in the introduction, by bringing these cases together, our intention is not to conduct a systematic comparison but rather to present empirical material that teases out differences and similarities with regard to survivors’ agency and its underlying opportunity structures.

To ultimately analyse how conflict-affected communities exercise agency, Baines (2015: 321) argues that ‘stories provide insight into a set of historical truths that otherwise slip from view in empirical and general theories . . . enabling a more complex analysis of the living subject and opening space for consideration of the workings of power in the counters of life’. Through stories, ‘people locate themselves as agents in the various social words they identify with . . . or inhabit’ (Fujii, 2018: 3), offering meaningful interpretations of the complexities of harms and agency in wartime. As emphasized by anthropologist Michael Jackson (2002: 245), storytelling provides possibilities for subjective experiences to become social: ‘Stories make it possible for us to overcome our separateness, to find common ground. . . . To relate a story is to retrace one’s steps . . . reworking reality to render it more bearable.’ For the purpose of this article, storytelling therefore plays a crucial methodological role, and so we draw on stories articulated by male survivors in order to analyse their respective forms of agency.

Sexual violence against men in Uganda and Croatia

In Northern Uganda, sexual violence against men was perpetrated in the context of a civil war between the Lord’s Resistance Army rebel group and the Ugandan government that lasted for more than two decades. During the early years of the conflict, government soldiers of the National Resistance Army (NRA) unleashed a violent campaign – as punishment and retaliation for previous episodes of violence – against the civilian Acholi population. Within this context of systemic and strategic military operations, government soldiers also committed widespread sexual violence against men (Schulz, 2018b). The vast majority of survivors in Northern Uganda are therefore civilian Acholi men, victimized by government soldiers and aspiring to a hegemonic notion of Acholi masculinity that in many ways is subordinate to the government soldiers’ militarized masculinity (Tapscott, 2018) – a different context from the Croatian one examined below.

In Northern Uganda’s heteropatriarchal society, crimes of sexual violence entail immediate effects on male survivors’ gender identities. Previous research has demonstrated that ‘the impact of wartime male rape is a dynamic and compounded process, perpetuated over time through social interactions, health implications and a lack of gender-sensitive medical service provision’ (Schulz, 2018a: 1103). Numerous survivors therefore reported feeling less of a man as a result of the rape, describing how – as a result of a myriad of intersecting sexual and gendered harms – they saw themselves ‘as having failed in their manhood’ (Workshop, 12 March 2016).

Despite being geographically widespread, however, crimes of sexual violence against men in Northern Uganda remain largely marginalized on various levels. Unlike in the Croatian case, in the current sociopolitical climate in Uganda there are virtually no avenues through which to pursue criminal accountability for these human rights abuses, nor are there any concrete mechanisms for reparations available for (male or female) sexual violence survivors. Crimes of male rape are also frequently equated with homosexuality, which is socially stigmatized and criminally punishable in Uganda. These local conditions function as an opportunity structure that profoundly shapes, or rather restricts, the choices available to male survivors in terms of the exercise of agency. In this context, where the vulnerabilities and experiences of male survivors of sexual violence are subjected to various layers of externally imposed silences, male survivors nevertheless also engage with their violent and stigmatized experiences and thus exercise varying forms of agency, as examined below.

The conflict in Croatia started in 1991, after the republic declared independence from Yugoslavia. Serb leaders in Croatia who wanted to remain part of Yugoslavia responded by establishing the Republika Srpska Krajina. During the war, sexual violence against men was perpetrated by all sides to the conflict and often took place in camps, against civilians and prisoners of war, but also in police stations, as part of ethnic cleansing operations and in contexts of forced labour. The patterns of violence were quite similar across the territory of the former Yugoslavia, which suggests that, if not a strategy, the use of sexual violence was at least a common practice.

Even though sexual violence against men was documented during the war (see International Educational Development, 1995; UN Security Council, 1994), the topic was largely silenced in the postwar context. While male survivors in Croatia are also stigmatized, disclosure involves no legal repercussions as homosexuality is not criminalized (unlike in Uganda) and the law on rape is formulated in a gender-neutral way. In 2015, a law on reparations for victims of sexual violence was adopted, which allowed for male victims to apply. However, in line with the dominant (nationalist) postwar narrative of the Homeland War, the law only recognizes victims of Croat background, ignoring Serb victims of Croat perpetrators.

Most of the men who have applied for reparations are Croat war veterans. They have moved from a position of belonging to a group that attained many of the features of wartime hegemonic masculinity as military men during the war to a postwar context in which this former conception is under challenge. War veterans in Croatia find themselves in an ‘indeterminate state between publicly acknowledged heroes and social oblivion’ (Schäuble, 2014: 239). They are considered to be a privileged group in society (i.e. they have political influence and receive many benefits), but many of them are disillusioned with the postwar situation (Pupavac and Pupavac, 2012). One element of their frustration is the fact that many men who did not fight in the war also received the status of branitelj (defender) (Dolenec, 2017). While they are rhetorically celebrated by nationalist political parties, not much was done to advance their reintegration in postwar society (Sokolic, 2019). They receive pensions that are relatively high in comparison with what civilians receive, which is perceived by some of them as an attempt to buy their silence.

Exploring male survivors’ agency

The different local sociopolitical and gendered conditions across the two case sites discussed in this article function as opportunity structures that profoundly shape the choices for exercising agency available to male survivors in each case. In Northern Uganda, civilian Acholi men arguably embody a subordinated masculinity in comparison to the militarized masculinity of the Ugandan soldiers who perpetrated these crimes (Tapscott, 2018) and in comparison to the Croatian survivors, who are mostly ex-combatants. The Croatian sociopolitical sphere also offers more avenues for accessing assistance and support, such as reparations measures, which remain virtually absent in Uganda. However, while the position of Croatian men in terms of their ability to perform (hegemonic) masculinity may in general differ from that of their Ugandan counterparts, gendered experiences of male survivors within Croatia vary considerably across individuals. These different gendered positionings of survivors and differences in the availability of services and spaces make up opportunity structures that shape how and in what ways survivors across both contexts can engage with their experiences and thus exercise agency.

Taking these local factors and conditions into account, we now turn to analyse two particular patterns of male survivors’ agency across the two cases, referring to (I) processes of navigating silence and disclosure, and (II) engaging with vulnerabilities and accessing assistance.

Agency Pattern I: Navigating silence and disclosure

Throughout the existing literature on gender, silence, and conflict (Thomson, 2019), it is commonly acknowledged that, when externally imposed, silencing can further entrench gendered harms (Schulz, 2018b). Here, however, we want to focus on how (and under what conditions) silence can be agentive, how it can become a powerful political tool for survivors to deploy strategically and an act of conscious agency. We therefore draw on work by Jane Parpart (2010), who critiques ‘the notion that silence is considered a symbol of powerlessness and passivity’ (Parpart and Parashar, 2018: 2). To examine the role of silence as a form of agency, a distinction between being silenced (externally, involuntarily) and voluntarily choosing to be silent is necessary (Baines, 2015). We thus specifically employ feminist scholar Christine Keating’s (2013) framework of ‘engaged silences’ – which include silent refusal, silent witness, and deliberative silence – in order to tease out the multiple forms and functions of silence. For Keating (2013), silences can constitute (collective and individual) forms of resistance to power and must therefore be understood as agentive when deployed by politically marginalized groups. Susan Thomson (2013) further emphasizes that voice and silence, respectively, must be understood as situated along a continuum of agency, deployed strategically depending on context. In line with the broader conceptualization of agency offered above, what characterizes engaged silences as agentic is their intentional and strategic components.

To illustrate how silence can be(come) agentive, we first refer to the Ugandan context, and specifically to the case study of Okidi, a male survivor from the northeastern part of Acholiland. This example reflects the lived realities of numerous other male survivors across the two case sites with whom we engaged and who employ similar strategies of navigating silence. Okidi was arrested and taken captive by NRA soldiers in March 1986, at the beginning of the war in the north. Like many other male survivors, owing to the stereotypical gendered and ethnicized assumptions that portray all Acholi men as warriors (Finnström, 2008), Okidi, who was a teacher at the time, was accused of being a former soldier fighting the newly instated Museveni regime. He was taken from the school compound to an NRA army barracks, where he was severely beaten, stabbed in the testicles with a bayonet, and anally raped by two soldiers. After two days of interrogation and torture, and while being transported to another army base, Okidi managed to escape and return home. Following the violent incident, however, he did not tell anyone about what happened to him. Owing to shame and social stigma – coupled with the unavailability of medical services in rural Northern Uganda during this time of the war – he did not seek any professional medical treatment. Instead, he nursed his wounds with warm water and traditional herbs by himself and chose to remain silent about his experience. Only more than two decades later, in 2013, did he report the incident to the Justice and Reconciliation Project (JRP) – which conducted a study on what had happened in this part of Acholiland during the war – and later to the Refugee Law Project, which offered medical treatment through rehabilitative support measures.

Following his much-needed medical recovery, Okidi also decided to break the silence and report what had happened to him by seeking out a broader audience in order to get wider recognition for his so far silenced experience. In 2014, at a press conference in Gulu town supported by JRP and RLP, Okidi offered a 30-minute account of his experiences during the war, including the incident of sexual violence in 1986. This account ultimately resulted in a newspaper report in the Acholi Times – an online newspaper published in English that focuses on sociopolitical developments in the Acholi subregion and that regularly features stories about the war and contemporary post-conflict challenges. The article – published in September 2014 and thus 27 years after the assault – described what had happened to Okidi in NRA custody and included his full name, his location and even a picture of him. In his home village and within his family, however, nobody knows about his experience. He explained:

From 1986 to 2013, I only disclosed it to JRP and to RLP and later to the newspaper. But here I don’t talk about it. I keep it confidential because, from the people here, I feel stigmatization. When people here are drunk, they will stigmatize me and undermine me and that will undermine my dignity as a human being.

Okidi explained that because the press conference was held in Gulu – located about 150 kilometers from his home village – and because the newspaper is published online and in English, he is not afraid that community or family members in his village will ever get to know about it. The newspaper is primarily read by an urban-based, young, and educated elite or by Acholi diaspora communities in Kampala, other Ugandan cities or abroad, but remains largely unknown in rural parts of Northern Uganda. Okidi thus broke the silence on a more abstract level in the public sphere, to attain a sense of social recognition of his otherwise silenced and marginalized experience. By narrating his experience, he therefore initiated an agentic process of demanding recognition and ‘remaking’ his subjectivity and self (see also Gray et al., 2020: 208). At the same time, however, in an agentive capacity, he maintains the silence within his private sphere, for fear of negative repercussions – such as stigma, shame, and humiliation – that would potentially arise from breaking the silence. Okidi therefore navigates interrelated questions of silence and disclosure, which can be seen as being situated along a continuum (Thomson, 2013), refuting the stereotypical representation of the ever-vulnerable survivor without a voice. This example poignantly illustrates the spatial-geographic dimensions of silence, as well as the ways in which survivors can exercise agency by choosing which stories to narrate in which spheres and where to maintain what could be referred to as a ‘protective silence’ (Baines, 2017; Keating, 2013).

In contrast to the Ugandan context, all of the Croatian survivors included in this study chose to disclose their experiences to the commission on reparations for survivors of sexual violence, as well as to a psychiatrist. Both of these spaces are aimed specifically at survivors of sexual violence and can guarantee their safety and privacy. However, much like their counterparts in Uganda, all of the interviewees were very strategic about where and how they revealed themselves as survivors. The men’s choices and behaviors were thus similar to Okidi’s, in terms of how they chose to remain silent in particular spaces and to break the silence in others. The survivors’ strategies of navigating between a choice for protective silence and a conscious disclosure of harms stand in contrast to simplistic assumptions that treat disclosure as a linear and straightforward process and argue that ‘revealing is healing’ (Ross, 2003). These assumptions are reflected, for example, in the commission on reparations, where people were repeatedly asked why they had remained silent until that point of narrating their testimonies (Interview, Zagreb, May 2019).

The case of T, a Croatian survivor, seems most similar to that of Okidi in terms of the spatial-temporal aspects of choosing when and how to remain silent. T – from a small village close to the Bosnian border in the south of Croatia – became a policeman when the war began. After his town fell, he joined a column of refugees on the way to Bosnia, where upon arrival they were stopped and the able-bodied men were taken out. He was subsequently detained in Stara Gradiška detention center, where he was repeatedly anally raped by Serb soldiers. After a few months, the Red Cross managed to arrange his release from detention. Like all prisoners of war, he was given a medical examination following his release. It was during this examination that he told a police officer about what he had gone through in the camps. This was perceived as a positive experience for T, since the policeman was empathetic and understanding.

It was only long after the war, in 2005, when he was laid off by the army, that he broke his silence again, after realizing that he needed help in the wake of a divorce. He approached several psychiatrists, none of whom wanted to treat him. One even ‘laughed in his face’. Eventually, T enrolled in a group therapy program for survivors, where he met another male survivor. Not long after that, he also disclosed at a roundtable on male survivors (behind closed doors) and gave an (anonymized) interview to a news website, together with a fellow survivor. Unlike in the case of Okidi, people in his town had access to the internet and visit the news site and thus might come across his name – which thus necessitated an anonymized story. Similar to Okidi, however, T strategically maintains his silence within his family, even though both of his brothers were also soldiers and his father spent two years in a detention camp. He emphasized that he took care not to talk to anyone in his hometown, fearing stigma and worrying that ‘people would talk behind my back’. The psychiatrist and the group therapy program he attends are located in the Croatian capital, more than 100 kilometers from where he lives. Comparable to the Uganda situation, these accounts offer insights into how male survivors of sexual violence in Croatia navigate complex intersections of silence and disclosure within different spheres. The strategies we discuss are not specific to male survivors or to a particular context; as Jouhanneau (2016: 305) notes about former camp detainees in Bosnia, survivors generally avoid speaking of their experiences of violence and harm when they perceive (private or public) situations and spaces as a threat to the integrity of the self.

Taken together, both cases illustrate how (im)possibilities related to the sharing of their experiences shapes when, where, and how survivors remain silent and disclose, and how these impossibilities function as an opportunity structure shaping male survivors’ spaces for agency. Whereas Okidi in Northern Uganda had no real opportunities to access services and to immediately report his experience, and indeed only broke his silence two decades after the event, one of the survivors in Croatia, T, disclosed at the first opportunity after the rape – to the policeman who was present at his medical examination. His possibilities for sharing were further shaped by his status as a combatant in Croatia, who upon release met with a doctor and a police offer – something that was not generally available to civilians, either in Croatia or in Uganda.

Conditioned by shame and social stigma, which are linked to constructions and expectations of masculinities in both contexts, most survivors chose to remain silent within their private spheres, however, in order to protect themselves from possible negative implications regarding their masculine identities. Rather than portraying silence as ubiquitously negative and passive (Parpart and Parashar, 2018), these examples illustrate protective, strategic, and agentive silences (Keating, 2013; Thomson, 2019) that ‘can aid in the development of more agentic and contextually sensitive ways of dealing with the past’ (Clark, 2019: 1), including gendered harms and vulnerabilities.

Agency Pattern II: Engaging with vulnerabilities and accessing assistance

While generalizing narratives that are prevalent throughout the literature suggest that male survivors are unlikely to disclose or seek help owing to shame and stigma (Clark, 2014), our findings from the two case sites discussed in this article indicate that men do access certain services available to them, thereby actively engaging with their vulnerabilities and exercising different forms of agency. As indicated above, the availability of services for male survivors varies significantly across the two cases, depending on the respective sociopolitical contexts: whereas male survivors in Croatia have been able to apply for reparations at the state level, services at the macro level for sexually violated men are virtually non-existent in Northern Uganda, with the result that male survivors have to engage with their vulnerabilities on the micro level, for instance in the context of survivors’ groups. The men’s gendered positioning and their masculine identities play another role in shaping how to engage with their vulnerabilities and which, if any, services to access.

The four men from Croatia included in the study presented here were all former combatants. Their disclosures of sexual vulnerability would seem at odds with stereotypical and rigid masculinity norms proscribing stoicism, silence, and invulnerability. However, even though the Croatian men embodied certain notions of militarized and at times hegemonic masculinities as former combatants, they disclosed to a psychiatrist and for the commission for reparations, rather than in the hyper-masculine environment of the veterans groups they were members of. Additionally, the ways in which they had performed and embodied hegemonic masculinity in other domains of life in turn enabled them to be open about their experiences of harm and to perform masculinity while doing so. The former soldiers did not seem to experience shame for seeking help: they felt they had fulfilled their duties as soldiers, defended the fatherland, and had the right to get compensation. The sexual violence against them had also occurred in combat and not in civilian life, in an ‘unusual’ context of extreme violence. Several of them spoke about the many injuries they had sustained. Another important factor was their age: they indicated that they had come to a point at which they had become less concerned about threats to their masculinity. This was corroborated by the psychiatrist, who said that he had seen a steep increase in disclosures by men now in their 50s and 60s.

J, a former special forces soldier, is perhaps the most remarkable example of a survivor performing masculinity as a professional soldier and member of a special forces battalion and speaking of his sexual abuse openly and publicly. J had been captured during an operation on Croatian territory and taken to Manjača camp on Bosnian territory. During the interview, he came across as very masculine and controlling, thereby performing a hegemonic notion of masculinity – for example, by insisting several times that the interviewer and translator should ask questions in a different order. J had been sexually abused by multiple perpetrators for several months. Apart from the sexual violence, he had also experienced various instances of physical violence, which had left him with (among other visible injuries) a partially smashed cheekbone, as a result of which he could not see very well. J clearly drew a lot of pride from his status as a special forces soldier and talked in detail about the operations in which he had taken part. He told us that he had never thought of himself as a man who would seek help for trauma or access mental health services, but that he was glad that he had ‘had the guts to take that decision’.

The case of J also points us to one of the strategies some of the Croat former combatants used to navigate their vulnerability, namely, by presenting themselves and their choices using signifiers traditionally coded as masculine. The Croatian interlocutors often presented themselves as leaders, as truth-tellers and witnesses, and as representatives of comrades who were less fortunate or less well off. In his work on Western males who access online self-help groups, Gough (2018: 13) argues that

while some men may open up . . . display vulnerability, seek help, and offer support to peers, in doing so they may frame their accounts with traditional notions of masculinity in mind. . . . The ways in which such acts are framed, rationalised, and contextualised may well invoke more traditionally masculine signifiers, such as pragmatism, rationality, and action orientation.

J, the special forces soldier, saw himself as a witness whose testimony could help in telling the truth about the war. He had given his detailed testimony to an NGO that also published it as part of a book, and had even testified openly in a documentary about sexual violence. He said that the perpetrators of his rape were still walking around freely in Zagreb, adding that he felt that the Serb minority had more rights than he did. Echoing this prevalent Croatian rightwing narrative (Baker, 2019), he showed his frustration with his new status in the postwar society: it was no longer the military that could decide what happened to Serb perpetrators.

Notably, the gendered circumstances of the war and their positions as soldiers also often put men in roles they identified in terms of masculine sacrifice and defending the weak (women and children). For instance, J said that he had sacrificed himself when he was captured: ‘They forced us to surrender, they threatened to kill all women, children, and elderly if we didn’t.’ Another example is that of F, a policeman and former combatant who had been captured as he volunteered to get his wife’s young cousin across the border into safe territory. The adoption of roles as leaders is another way of exercising agency: not only do they seek to control and change their own situation, some male survivors also see themselves as agents more broadly – as witnesses and defenders of the truth, even defenders of the nation. M, who had been gang raped in a particularly violent way and had never told his wife, positioned himself as a leader who spoke for other branitelji (defenders). He was also utterly disappointed with the Croatian state, which he said did not care for those who had fought for it. When asked why he was so disappointed, even though he had a good pension and other privileges, he made clear he was not talking about himself, but about other defenders whom he knew and who lived in poverty.

Whereas survivors in Croatia thus mostly engage with their masculine vulnerabilities individually, by accessing the services that are available to them, male survivors in Northern Uganda also exercise agency through their membership and participation in survivors’ groups, primarily by renegotiating gender identities and through storytelling within intragroup settings. These groups thus constitute avenues for male survivors to collectively engage with their gendered harms and vulnerabilities and remake their life worlds, in the absence of state and non-state provisions.

In post-conflict Northern Uganda, this unavailability of state and non-state services, specifically in rural areas, has required survivors across the subregion to construct their own forums through which to advocate for their demands and access services. A variety of victims’ and survivors’ groups exist, in different forms and with diverging mandates, objectives, and foci. In addition to several associations of female survivors of sexual and gender-based violence in Acholiland, and alongside two other groups of male refugee survivors in other parts of Uganda (Edström et al., 2016), one group of male survivors of sexual violence exists in Northern Uganda, called the Men of Courage, composed of three subgroups located across the Acholi subregion (Schulz, 2019). Unlike in the Croatian case, the relational and collective elements of such groups are particularly important in Acholiland’s sociocultural context.

The groups carry out a variety of activities, including psychological peer support and organized income-generating activities. At the same time, the groups constitute a support network by enabling survivors to collectively deal with and respond to different socio-economic and psychosocial challenges, such as social stigmatization and poverty (Schulz, 2019). While initially formed as safe spaces for healing and recovery (Edström and Dolan, 2018), here we argue that these groups also enable male survivors to exercise agency, to come to terms with their experiences and engage with their gendered harms and vulnerabilities (see Schulz, 2019).

On the one hand, the groups can be seen as aiding their members in a process of renegotiating their gendered identities, thereby responding to survivors’ perceivably compromised masculinities as one of the most prevalent harms resulting from their sexual violations (Schulz, 2018a). RLP’s Director Chris Dolan explained that ‘those groups allow survivors to re-establish a sense of social identity and a sense of being respected again. . . . Being in a group helps to give back a sense of being recognized as an adult and as a man’ (Select Committee on Sexual Violence in Conflict, 2015). Survivors themselves similarly attested that the groups help them to engage with the violations’ gendered effects and to renegotiate their identities as men: ‘before we came together, we had a lot of feelings of being less of a man, but since being in a group, these feelings have reduced’ (Group discussion, Uganda, 20 May 2016). These dynamics unfold in part because of the numerous benefits associated with being in the groups, such as peer support and collective economic activities (Schulz, 2019). Because of the groups’ income-generating activities, for instance, several survivors are re-enabled to work and to contribute to the provision of their families, in accordance with the social expectations made of them as men and the dominant model of masculinity (Tapscott, 2018). The groups thereby re-enable the male survivors to live up to hegemonic masculinity constructions in ways in which individual men were unable to in this sociopolitical context. This then begins to address survivors’ gendered harms, experiences, and needs, while re-enabling them to (re)connect with their previously impaired gendered identities as men.

In addition to this process of retrospectively repairing previously compromised gender identities, research with a male survivor support group in Kampala has also found that ‘the collective consciousness-raising within the group has also begun to challenge many members’ stereotypical ideas around masculinity and manhood, as well as gender equality and their views on women’ (Edström et al., 2016: 40). The sensitization and awareness-raising through the collective sharing of experiences within the groups thereby facilitates a process of forming new understandings of gender. In the case of Men of Hope in Kampala, for instance, ‘several members appear to reject many traditional inadequate norms and ideas’ related to masculinity (Edström et al., 2016: 40). Accordingly, the groups’ activities ‘can potentially lead to a more open-ended (re)building of . . . new identities, communities and norms. They may well prove more gender-equitable than those from which the victims were excised’ (Edström and Dolan, 2018: 188). Several survivors from Northern Uganda similarly rejected traditional and often restrictive conceptions of masculinities. In one discussion, a survivor explained that ‘being a man in our culture means that you cannot be weak. This meant that we could not admit to what happened to us and could not seek any support, which really made it worse for us’ (Workshop, Uganda, February 2016). Several survivors therefore emphasized that the ideals of manhood they were socialized into proved harmful in relation to their experiences of sexual violations, and that they therefore aspired to less restrictive ideals of masculinity. Through the engagements within the groups, some male survivors thus begin to renegotiate their own gendered identities.

At the same time, the groups can also be seen as creating safe spaces in which survivors can share their stories among themselves and voice their concerns, thereby exercising agency. Reflecting on RLP’s work with these associations, Dolan describes how ‘with the groups we are able to create platforms for them to speak for themselves’ (Select Committee on Sexual Violence in Conflict, 2015). One central concern for the growing field of peacebuilding processes is that the professionalization of the field leads to the emergence of various external actors and so-called post-conflict entrepreneurs (Madlingozi, 2010) who are ‘speaking on behalf of victims’, implying the risk of ‘re-silencing victims, negating their potential for agency and reproducing the sense of powerlessness’ (McEvoy and McConnachie, 2013: 498). The groups in many ways stand in contrast to these developments, by offering survivors a platform in which they can articulate their voices and concerns for themselves and tell their stories (Schulz, 2019).

During their regular group meetings, survivors sit together and talk about their experiences in an environment in which they feel safe and protected, which facilitates storytelling. As one survivor said of the gatherings, ‘when we meet and sit together, we can talk freely about what happened to us, because everyone understands and had the same experience’ (Group discussion, Uganda, 24 February 2016). In the sociocultural context of Northern Uganda, oral traditions and storytelling play an important role, as the ‘Acholi communal practice of wang-o (telling stories around the fire pit) is an everyday practice of inviting discussion of social life’ (Baines and Stewart, 2011: 248), constituting a culturally resonating space in which to voice one’s stories and concerns. For the survivors’ groups, the meetings do not necessarily take place within the context of wang-o, but for their gatherings, survivors often choose the comforting shade of a mango tree or the seclusion of a grass-thatched hut as equally culturally familiar venues (Schulz, 2019). Within this context, stories are not told for external purposes, such as breaking the silence, but more so for ‘those who tell them, for survivors to testify to other survivors’ (Baines and Stewart, 2011: 260; see also Schulz, 2019: 182). Situated within the absence of any formal avenues or spaces at other residual levels in which assistance might be sought and/or concerns voiced, survivors getting together in groups thereby qualifies as what anthropologists Das and Kleinman (2001: 3) refer to as the ‘creation of alternate spheres for articulating and recounting experiences silenced by officially sanctioned narratives’. As per these dynamics, the survivors’ groups therefore open up spaces in which survivors can exercise multiple mundane forms of agency in the midst of vulnerabilities.

While in both cases survivors have found spaces for recounting experiences, veterans’ experiences (in general) are part of a state-sanctioned narrative in Croatia, whereas the experiences of Acholi are generally silenced in Uganda (Schulz, 2018b). Nevertheless, these diverse spaces at different levels facilitate active ways for male survivors to begin engaging with their experiences and gendered harms, thereby exercising agency.

Conclusion

Although wartime sexual violence against men and male survivors’ experiences remain a peripheral concern for policymakers and scholars, recent years have seen important political, empirical and conceptual in-roads into recognizing men and boys as survivors of conflict-related sexual violence (Touquet and Gorris, 2016; Zalewski et al., 2018). Much of the existing scholarship on wartime sexual violence against men, however, predominantly examines these crimes with a focus on gendered vulnerability, thereby falling into a tendency to represent male survivors in essentialist terms, as emasculated victims without a voice and without agency (Edström and Dolan, 2018). This critique was the point of departure for our analysis. Drawing on empirical data from Northern Uganda and Croatia, we have sought to critically engage with the ways in which male survivors’ lived experiences are perceived and portrayed. Our examples have shown that male survivors exercise myriad forms of agency, often situated within the quotidian, thereby refuting essentialist and infantilizing portrayals of the ever-vulnerable and passive victim, indefinitely stripped of both their manhood and agency. These forms of agency include, for instance: processes of engaging with gendered vulnerabilities by seeking out assistance or services or joining a survivors’ support group and strategically navigating interrelated processes of silences and disclosure. Our analysis reveals that, in both cases, male survivors of sexual violence take intentional and strategic steps that enable them to respond to and make sense of the tensions between their vulnerabilities and expectations of masculinity.

Our cross-case examination also allowed us to contrast and juxtapose survivors’ experiences across contexts, evidencing how their agentic choices are to a large extent governed by the ‘opportunity structures’ of the local gendered and sociopolitical context. Not only constructions of gender – and in particular expectations of masculinities – and local cultural contexts (the significance of the individual versus the collective), but also (semi-)institutional frameworks that are available to male survivors (psychiatrists and a reparations commission versus a local NGO) and the position of their (ethnic) group within the local hierarchy of masculinities in the post-conflict context (hegemonic ex-combatant masculinities versus civilian subordinated masculinities) shape how male survivors can exercise agency. Recognizing male survivors’ agency as situated and relational to their gendered harms and vulnerabilities thereby contributes to more nuanced and holistic examinations of the gender dynamics of armed conflicts in general, and of the lived realities of survivors of sexual violence in particular. More specifically, our analysis aimed to break open the dichotomy of victim or agents through which the experiences of specifically male survivors of sexual violence are usually viewed.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

A previous version of this article was presented at the ‘Complexifying Gendered Victimhood’ workshop at the University of Bremen, organized by Philipp Schulz and Caterina Bonora, in February 2019. Many thanks to Caterina Bonora, Anne-Kathrin Kreft, Lewis Turner, Henri Myrttinen, Sarah Martin and the other participants for their helpful and constructive comments. Thanks also to Klaus Schlichte for comments on a previous draft. Heleen Touquet thanks Dr Mladen Lončar for providing psychosocial assistance for interviewees during and after interviews as well as generously sharing his views and providing access to his archives. Thomas Osorio played an invaluable role during fieldwork in Croatia, not only in assisting with interpreting and interviewing but also as a source of unique knowledge on the Bassiouni Commission and the conflict. Heleen also thanks Marijana Toma, Ana Kvesić, Paul Stubbs, Jasmina Papa, Sven Milekić, Nela Pamuković and Milena Calić-Jelić for all of their time and the conversations, invitations and ideas they were willing to share. Philipp Schulz extends his appreciation to the Refugee Law Project (RLP), and in particular Chris Dolan, Benard Okot Kasozi and Fred Ngomokwe, and to the Men of Courage survivors group. The authors would also like to express appreciation for the extremely helpful, generous and constructive comments offered by the anonymous reviewers, and to the Security Dialogue editors for the great process and communication.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Philipp Schulz received fieldwork funding from the British Institute in Eastern Africa (BIEA) and the Social-Legal Studies Association (SLSA) for fieldwork in Uganda. Heleen Touquet received funding from KU Leuven (C22/18/003 project ZKD4583) and the Fulbright Commission Belgium and Luxembourg. Part of the desk research for this article was done with a Fulbright Fellowship at the Centre for European Studies at Harvard University in 2018.

ORCID iD

Philipp Schulz

Notes

Heleen Touquet is the chair in European values at the University of Antwerp and a research fellow at the University of Leuven, where she is the principal investigator on the project ‘Masculinity, Vulnerability and Agency: Male Victims of Conflict-Related Sexual Violence in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia’. Email: Heleen.touquet@uantwerpen.be.

Philipp Schulz is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Intercultural and International Studies at the University of Bremen. He obtained his PhD in December 2017 from the Transitional Justice Institute at Ulster University. His research focuses on the gender dynamics of armed conflicts, and has previously been published in International Affairs, International Feminist Journal of Politics and International Journal of Transitional Justice. Email: pschulz@uni-bremen.de.

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