Systematic Silencing: Addressing Sexual Violence Against Men and Boys in Conflict and Post-Conflict Settings

Key information

Date
Time
5:00 PM to 6:30 PM
Venue
Russell Square: College Buildings
Room
Kamran Djam Lecture Theatre (DLT)

About this event

Chloe Lewis

Responding to sexual violence in conflict is now an established key priority within the international community. Such efforts, however, tend to presuppose and reproduce assumptions of the perpetrators and their victims, systematically neglecting male victims/survivors. While feminist analyses have long destabilised the prevailing emphasis on female (sexual) vulnerabilities within mainstream accounts of and responses to armed conflict, they rarely, if ever, critically examine concomitant (assumptions of) male subjectivities on which restrictive representations of women rely. Against this backdrop and to help us understand how, why and with effect sexual violence against men and boys is neglected, this presentation traces three recurring male figures of international sexual violence discourse: ‘The Perpetrator’, ‘The Strategic Ally’ and the elusive ‘Male Victim Subject’. Overall, I seek to demonstrate how these restrictive tropes function to limit the conceptual, legal and programmatic spaces available to men and boys within conflict and peacekeeping contexts.

Chloé Lewis is a DPhil candidate in International Development at the University of Oxford where she is exploring sexual violence in conflict, with a focus on men and masculinities. In particular and through the case of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, her research focuses on the marginalisation of male survivors within responses to sexual violence at the level of discourse, policy, and practice. Chloé’s fieldwork has so far taken her to New York, where she completed a Policy Research Fellowship with the NGO Working Group on Women, Peace and Security, as well as to the Great Lakes Region. Alongside her doctorate, Chloé is also working with a remarkable team at the Human Rights Center Sexual Violence Program at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, conducting a system analysis of judicial and health sector responses to sexual violence in North and South Kivu.

Organiser: Dr Gina Heathcote

Contact email: gh21@soas.ac.uk

Contact Tel: 020 7898 4367