The Hidden Prevalence of Male Sexual Assault During War
Observations on Blunt Trauma to the Male Genitals
- *Eric Stener Carlson is an official with the International Labour Organisation (United Nations) in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he specializes in issues of gender equality. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Santa Barbara and is the author of numerous articles on sexual assault during war and other human rights violations that have appeared in The Lancet, The Human Rights Review and the Journal of Low Intensity Conflict and Law Enforcement. From 1995 to 1997, Dr Carlson was seconded to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia by Physicians for Human Rights, where he worked as analyst for the Sexual Assault Investigation Team. The opinions expressed in the following article are entirely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policies or prescriptions of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, the International Labour Organisation or any other agency for which the author has been employed. For responses to this article, please contact Dr Carlson at eric_stener_carlson@hotmail.com.
Introduction
In the Fall of 1995, I was seconded to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague by the US-based non-governmental organization, Physicians for Human Rights. In this capacity, I worked for the next two years for the ICTY’s Sexual Assault Investigation team, where I analysed hundreds of cases of sexual assault that were committed in a conflict that has since become synonymous with the use of mass sexual assault as a weapon of war. It is from that experience that this current article arises.
As I shall mention below, the ICTY was a pioneer in the way it conceived of and investigated sexual assault in the mid-1990s. That it investigated mass sexual assault against women was a major advancement, for this is a human rights violation to which investigators, historically, have turned a blind eye. Of further note was that the International Tribunal considered that men, too, could be victims of sexual assault. (If the topic of sexual assault against women in times of war has been uncomfortably pushed to the side of the agenda, then the topic of sexual assault against men has been treated as particularly taboo.)
As I reviewed the many witness statements my colleagues had gathered and as I interviewed medical experts in the field, I was overwhelmed by the repeated mention of sexual assault against male prisoners. Indeed, the reports were so frequent and so consistent, that I began to contemplate the possibility that sexual assault against men (soldiers, prisoners and non-combatants) was, perhaps, not only widespread in war, but that it was also an almost integral part of war-making itself. Because of the ‘novelty’ of the subject, there was a great deal of interest in the academic community.
As a result, I wrote a short article for The Lancet …
