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A Story that Can(not) be Told: Sexual Violence against Men in ICTR and ICTY Jurisprudence

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International Law's Collected Stories

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in International Relations ((PSIR))

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Abstract

This chapter considers the stories of sexual violence against men that have been told (or not been told) by the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia and their potential consequences. Arguing from a poststructuralist position that legal language is constitutive rather than reflective of reality, it contends that the record of the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda/Yugoslavia on sexual violence against men is characterised by ambiguity. Legal definitions of sexual violence vary in their capacity to adequately cover male victims, and individual violations are variously prosecuted as sexual violence or as non-sexual torture and cruel or inhuman treatment. This ambiguity, the chapter argues, risks suppressing the possibility of telling alternative narratives and stories in future prosecutions.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Lara Stemple, ‘Male Rape and Human Rights’, Hastings Law Journal 60 (2009): 626.

  2. 2.

    See, for example, Sandesh Sivakumaran, ‘Sexual Violence Against Men in Armed Conflict’, European Journal of International Law 18, no. 2 (2007); Marysia Zalewski et al., eds., Sexual Violence against Men in Global Politics (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018); Dubravka Zarkov, ‘The Body of the Other Man: Sexual Violence and the Construction of Masculinity, Sexuality and Ethnicity in Croatian Media’, in Victims, Perpetrators or Actors: Gender, Armed Conflict and Political Violence, ed. Caroline O. N. Moser and Fiona Clark (London: Zed Books, 2001), 69–82.

  3. 3.

    Hilmi Zawati, ‘Impunity or Immunity: Wartime Male Rape and Sexual Torture as a Crime against Humanity’, Journal on Rehabilitation of Torture Victims and Prevention of Torture 17, no. 1 (2007).

  4. 4.

    Dustin Lewis, ‘Unrecognized Victims: Sexual Violence Against Men in Conflict Settings Under International Law’, Wisconsin International Law Journal 27, no. 1 (2009): 1.

  5. 5.

    Rosemary Grey, Jonathan O’Donohue, and Leonard Krasny, ‘Evidence of Sexual Violence against Men and Boys Rejected in Ongwen’, Human Rights in International Justice (blog), 10 April 2018, https://hrij.amnesty.nl/evidence-sexual-violence-men-boys-rejected-ongwen/.

  6. 6.

    Kelly Askin, ‘Sexual Violence in Decisions and Indictments of the Yugoslav and Rwandan Tribunals: Current Status’, The American Journal of International Law 93, no. 1 (1999): 102.

  7. 7.

    Solange Mouthaan, ‘International Law and Sexual Violence against Men’ (Warwick: University of Warwick School of Law, 2012), 3.

  8. 8.

    Sivakumaran, ‘Sexual Violence against Men in Armed Conflict’, 256–57.

  9. 9.

    Janet Beavin Bavelas and Linda Coates, ‘Is It Sex or Assault? Erotic Versus Violent Language in Sexual Assault Trial Judgements’, Journal of Social Distress and the Homeless 10, no. 1 (2001); John M. Conley and William M. O’Barr, Just Words: Law, Language, and Power, Second Edition (University of Chicago Press, 2005); Brenda Danet, ‘Language in the Legal Process’, Law & Society Review 14 (1979); Peter Goodrich, Legal Discourse: Studies in Linguistics, Rhetoric and Legal Analysis (Springer, 1990).

  10. 10.

    Lucinda M. Finley, ‘Breaking Women’s Silence in Law: The Dilemma of the Gendered Nature of Legal Reasoning’, Notre Dame Law Review 64 (1989): 887.

  11. 11.

    Brenda Danet, ‘“Baby” or “Fetus”?: Language and the Construction of Reality in a Manslaughter Trial’, Semiotica 32, no. 3–4 (1980).

  12. 12.

    Linda Coates, Janet Beavin Bavelas, and James Gibson, ‘Anomalous Language in Sexual Assault Trial Judgements’, Discourse & Society 5, no. 2 (1994): 189, emphasis in original.

  13. 13.

    Lene Hansen, Security as Practice: Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War (London: Routledge, 2006), 18.

  14. 14.

    David Howarth, Discourse (London: Open University Press, 2000), 135.

  15. 15.

    Laura J. Shepherd, Gender, Violence, and Security: Discourse as Practice (London: Zed Books, 2008), 31.

  16. 16.

    Shepherd, 30.

  17. 17.

    Shepherd, 30.

  18. 18.

    Shepherd, 30.

  19. 19.

    Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, Routledge Classics (London: Routledge, 2002), xxiv.

  20. 20.

    Ernesto Laclau, ‘Discourse’, in A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, ed. Robert E. Goodin, Philip Pettit, and Thomas Pogge, Second Edition (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2007), 541, emphasis in original.

  21. 21.

    The Prosecutor v. Jean-Paul Akayesu (Judgement), ICTR-96-4-T (International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda 1998), para. 597–598.

  22. 22.

    Akayesu, para. 688.

  23. 23.

    Prosecutor v. Anto Furundžija (Judgement), IT-95-17/1-T (International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia 1998), para. 185–186.

  24. 24.

    Furundžija, para. 176–177.

  25. 25.

    Suzanne Chenault, ‘And Since Akayesu? The Development of ICTR Jurisprudence on Gender Crimes: A Comparison of Akayesu and Muhimana’, New England Journal of International and Comparative Law 14, no. 2 (2008); Caleb J. Fountain, ‘Sexual Violence, the Ad Hoc Tribunals and the International Criminal Court: Reconciling Akayesu and Kunarac’, ILSA Journal of International and Comparative Law 19 (2012): 253.

  26. 26.

    Laura Sjoberg, Women as Wartime Rapists: Beyond Sensation and Stereotyping (New York: New York University Press, 2016).

  27. 27.

    Furundžija, para. 177–178; Prosecutor v. Dragoljub Kunarac et al. (Judgement), IT-96-23-T (International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia 2001), para. 443–456.

  28. 28.

    Prosecutor v. Miroslav Kvočka et al. (Judgement), IT-98-30/1-T (International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia 2001), para. 177, emphasis added.

  29. 29.

    The Prosecutor v. Sylvestre Gacumbtsi (Judgement), ICTR-2001-64-T (International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda 2004), para. 321.

  30. 30.

    Prosecutor v. Radovan Karadžić (Judgement), IT-95-5/18-T (International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia 2016), para. 991.

  31. 31.

    Karadžić, para. 2506.

  32. 32.

    Karadžić, para. 2506.

  33. 33.

    The Prosecutor v. Théoneste Bagosora et al. (Judgement), ICTR-98-41-T (International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda 2008), para. 1908.

  34. 34.

    Prosecutor v. Zdravko Mucić et al. (Judgement), IT-96-21-T (International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia 1998), para. 1066.

  35. 35.

    Mucić et al., para. 1038–1040.

  36. 36.

    Eric Stener Carlson, ‘The Hidden Prevalence of Male Sexual Assault during War: Observations on Blunt Trauma to the Male Genitals’, The British Journal of Criminology 46, no. 1 (2006).

  37. 37.

    Zarkov, ‘The Body of the Other Man’.

  38. 38.

    Prosecutor v. Milan Simić (Sentencing Judgement), IT-95-9/2-S (International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia 2002), para. 4.

  39. 39.

    The Prosecutor v. Ildephonse Hategekimana (Judgement), ICTR-00-55B-T (International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda 2010), para. 186.

  40. 40.

    Prosecutor v. Radoslav Brđanin (Judgement), IT-99-36-T (International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia 2004), para. 516.

  41. 41.

    Catherine MacKinnon, Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 17.

  42. 42.

    Grey, O’Donohue, and Krasny, ‘Evidence of Sexual Violence against Men and Boys Rejected in Ongwen’.

  43. 43.

    Furundžija, para. 186.

  44. 44.

    Furundžija, para. 162.

  45. 45.

    Janine N. Clark, ‘Masculinity and Male Survivors of Wartime Sexual Violence: A Bosnian Case Study’, Conflict, Security & Development 17, no. 4 (2017): 291.

  46. 46.

    Sivakumaran, ‘Sexual Violence against Men in Armed Conflict’, 257.

  47. 47.

    Sivakumaran, 257.

  48. 48.

    Sivakumaran, 256–57.

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  1. University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

    Thomas Charman

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  1. Thomas Charman
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  1. T.M.C. Asser Instituut / University of Amsterdam, The Hague, The Netherlands

    Sofia Stolk

  2. VU Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Renske Vos

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Charman, T. (2020). A Story that Can(not) be Told: Sexual Violence against Men in ICTR and ICTY Jurisprudence. In: Stolk, S., Vos, R. (eds) International Law's Collected Stories. Palgrave Studies in International Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58835-9_4

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