Over the last few decades, increasing policy and scholarly attention has been directed towards documenting and examining the pervasiveness of sexual and gender-based violence in conflict settings. This report highlights the experiences of men who have been subjected to conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) in South Sudan and are now living in refugee settlements in Adjumani District in Uganda. The report centres the experiences and perspectives of some of these refugees to highlight how they navigate multiple challenges in the aftermath of experiencing sexual violence, their ways of remembering the violence and its impact, and how they deal with the precarity of the intersection of refugee life and struggles as CRSV survivors.
The report is situated within the context of ongoing and worsening gender backlash globally, defined as ‘an attack on gender equality, its institutions, and those that seek to advance gender justice’ (Lewin 2024: 142). Recent years have witnessed increasing attacks on gender justice, intersecting with multiple crises of rising authoritarianism, growing polarisation, widening inequalities, and entrenched forms of violence and impunity.
Gender backlash further compounds vulnerabilities for male survivors of sexual violence living as refugees. This report, therefore, is presented as an urgent intervention that brings the experiences of male survivors of CRSV – who are also refugees – to the fore and calls for increasing policy and humanitarian attention for a comprehensive and inclusive approach to address their needs.