Abstract:
As many as 50,000 women suffered sexual violence during the Bosnian war, 250,000 in the Rwandan genocide and 200,000 in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) conflict zones since armed conflict began. Yet, the number of men targeted often remains unknown due to the little material on conflict-related sexual violence against men. However, recent limited reports show that sexual violence against men in conflict is a frequent occurrence; the case of Iraqi male prisoners in Abu Ghraib military detention, being one example. The over-simplistic gendered representation of women-as-victims and men-as-perpetrators present in debates on gender, violence and security, does not account for the thousands of men sexually abused during conflict or indeed the role of women in some of these attacks. Drawing largely on the work of International Relations poststructuralist feminist Laura Shepherd, this paper will explore how such gendered expectations are produced and reproduced across a variety of United Nations (UN) documents. Through a critical discourse analysis, with a specific focus on UN Security Council Resolutions 1325 (2000) and 2106 (2013), I argue that the UN’s policy response on the issue of conflict-related sexual violence is riddled with tensions and inconsistencies. The marginalisation of male victims in academic and policy discussions dangerously constructs a perpetrator class of all men and a victim class of all women.
