Abstract
Although wartime sexual violence against men occurs more frequently than is commonly assumed, its dynamics are remarkably underexplored, and male survivors’ experiences remain particularly overlooked. This reality is poignant in northern Uganda, where sexual violence against men during the early stages of the conflict was geographically widespread, yet now accounts of those incidents are not just silenced and neglected locally but also widely absent from analyses of the war. Based on rare empirical data, this book seeks to remedy this marginalization and to illuminate the seldom-heard voices of male sexual violence survivors in northern Uganda, bringing to light their experiences of gendered harms, agency, and justice. “Schulz offers a nuanced frame for understanding the dynamic and varied lived experiences of male survivors. Essential reading for anyone who wants to better comprehend conflict-related sexual violence as well as political violence more generally.” MARIA ERIKSSON BAAZ, author of <i>Sexual Violence as a Weapon of War? Perceptions, Prescriptions, Problems in the Congo and Beyond</i> “This extraordinary book opens new conceptual pathways in and beyond the field of transitional justice. A rich exploration of justice as a survivor-led praxis and a generous methodological offering for conducting ethical research.” ERIN BAINES, author of <i>Buried in the Heart: Women, Complex Victimhood and the War in Northern Uganda</i> “In his ethnographically nuanced study, Schulz charts a more grounded approach to international justice. The Ugandan men who have survived wartime rape have a lot to teach us—about constructing non-oppressive masculinities, creating mutual support, and building gender-aware sustainable peace.” CYNTHIA ENLOE, author of <i>The Big Push: Exposing and Challenging the Persistence of Patriarchy</i> PHILIPP SCHULZ is a Postdoctoral Researcher at University of Bremen’s Institute for Intercultural and International Studies.
Highlights
Male Survivors’ Experiences in ContextOne night in April 1987, while Okwera was asleep, rebels of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) camped against his will in his homestead in rural northern Uganda
There often is “an overlap between these categories,” and the terms “slip and slide across one another” (Gray, Stern, and Dolan 2019: 3), thereby complicating the “simplistic assumption that gender norms will call men to frame their experiences as ‘torture,’ and women, theirs as ‘sexual violence’”. In these authors’ study of refugee survivors of sexual violence in Uganda, they found that “many male participants . . . deliberately spoke about the violences to which they have been subjected as ‘sexual’—in contrast to the prevalent assumption that men are more likely to describe their experiences under the label of ‘torture’”. This mirrors my own observations from northern Uganda, where Acholi male survivors explicitly described their experiences as rape and sexual violence
A preliminary study by Chris Dolan and Refugee Law Project (RLP) screening 447 male refugees residing in settlements in western Uganda, of which the vast majority originated from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), revealed that “13.4 percent had experienced an incident of sexual violence in the preceding 12 months, rising to 38.5 percent if looking at their whole lives’ (Dolan 2014: 2)
Summary
Displacement from Gendered Personhood: Sexual violence and masculinities in northern Uganda. Navigating Vulnerabilities and Masculinities: How Gendered Contexts Shape the Agency of Male Sexual Violence Survivors. Acholi War Debt Claimants Associations Beyond Juba Project Central African Republic Comisión para la Verdad y Reconciliation Civil Society Organization Democratic Republic of the Congo Gender-Based Violence Government of the Republic of Uganda Holy Spirit Movement Holy Spirit Mobile Forces Inter-American Commission on Human Rights Institute for African Transitional Justice International Criminal Court International Crimes Division (of the High Court Uganda) International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia Internally Displaced Person Justice, Law and Order Sector Justice and Reconciliation Project Local Council Lord’s Resistance Army Men of Courage Men of Hope (Refugee Association Uganda) Men of Peace x.
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