The Rape of Men

via The Guardian, by Will Storr

Sexual violence is one of the most horrific weapons of war, an instrument of terror used against women. Yet huge numbers of men are also victims. In this harrowing report, Will Storr travels to Uganda to meet traumatised survivors, and reveals how male rape is endemic in many of the world's conflicts.

Of all the secrets of war, there is one that is so well kept that it exists mostly as a rumour. It is usually denied by the perpetrator and his victim. Governments, aid agencies and human rights defenders at the UN barely acknowledge its possibility. Yet every now and then someone gathers the courage to tell of it. This is just what happened on an ordinary afternoon in the office of a kind and careful counsellor in Kampala, Uganda. For four years Eunice Owiny had been employed by Makerere University's Refugee Law Project (RLP) to help displaced people from all over Africa work through their traumas. This particular case, though, was a puzzle. A female client was having marital difficulties. "My husband can't have sex," she complained. "He feels very bad about this. I'm sure there's something he's keeping from me."

Owiny invited the husband in. For a while they got nowhere. Then Owiny asked the wife to leave. The man then murmured cryptically: "It happened to me." Owiny frowned. He reached into his pocket and pulled out an old sanitary pad. "Mama Eunice," he said. "I am in pain. I have to use this."

Laying the pus-covered pad on the desk in front of him, he gave up his secret. During his escape from the civil war in neighbouring Congo, he had been separated from his wife and taken by rebels. His captors raped him, three times a day, every day for three years. And he wasn't the only one. He watched as man after man was taken and raped. The wounds of one were so grievous that he died in the cell in front of him.

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Rape not just a women's issue

via guardian.co.uk, by Michael Amherst

"Homophobic obsession with anal sex arguably has less to do with the act itself – increasingly acceptable in heterosexual discourse – than the perception that a man is denigrating himself by taking on what is perceived to be the passive, feminine role."

Published last Monday, the Stern Review sets a new benchmark in discussions of rape and sexual assault by describing victims in gender-neutral language. Male rape was only recognised by English and Welsh law in 1994 and as a result there is little statistical history, with what there is varying wildly. According to the Stern Review, the victim is male in around 8% of all recorded rape cases. The unrecorded figure is thought to be far higher. UK charity Mankind suggests that three in 20 men are victims of sexual violence – a figure that corresponds with statistics in the United States. Neither takes into account instances of rape within prisons – to which there is a collective state of denial in the UK relative to the US.

Rape and sexual assault are seen as women's issues – the victims are female, the perpetrators male. But it is no longer acceptable to pretend, as some do, that rape and sexual assault are only committed by men against women. The proportion of men who go on to report sexual assault is extremely low and the number of victims greater than the government or media coverage would suggest. Male rape victims face an enormous amount of social prejudice in coming forward. One organisation working with male victims told the Stern Review: "Very few men will access the police to report a rape, they don't want to feel less of a man, don't want to be regarded as gay."

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