He wears a scarlet high-buttoned shirt and holds himself with his neck lowered, his eyes cast towards the ground, as if in apology for his impressive height.
I meet Jean Paul on the hot, dusty roof of the RLP's HQ in Old Kampala. Slowly, more victims began to come forward. In a burst of candour, one attendee admitted: "It's happened to all of us here." It soon became known among Uganda's 200,000-strong refugee population that the RLP were helping men who had been raped during conflict. Keen to gain a fuller grasp of its depth and nature, he put up posters throughout Kampala in June 2009 announcing a "workshop" on the issue in a local school. Dolan first heard of wartime sexual violence against men in the late 1990s while researching his PhD in northern Uganda, and he sensed that the problem might be dramatically underestimated. In the words of Owiny: "They are despised."īut they are willing to talk, thanks largely to the RLP's British director, Dr Chris Dolan. They are wounded, isolated and in danger. They will probably be ostracised by friends, rejected by family and turned away by the UN and the myriad international NGOs that are equipped, trained and ready to help women. In Uganda, survivors are at risk of arrest by police, as they are likely to assume that they're gay – a crime in this country and in 38 of the 53 African nations. I've come to Kampala to hear the stories of the few brave men who have agreed to speak to me: a rare opportunity to find out about a controversial and deeply taboo issue. A study of 6,000 concentration-camp inmates in Sarajevo found that 80% of men reported having been raped. In El Salvador, 76% of male political prisoners surveyed in the 1980s described at least one incidence of sexual torture. Twenty-one per cent of Sri Lankan males who were seen at a London torture treatment centre reported sexual abuse while in detention. Her study Male Rape and Human Rights notes incidents of male sexual violence as a weapon of wartime or political aggression in countries such as Chile, Greece, Croatia, Iran, Kuwait, the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia. One of the few academics to have looked into the issue in any detail is Lara Stemple, of the University of California's Health and Human Rights Law Project. It's not just in East Africa that these stories remain unheard. "There are certain things you just don't believe can happen to a man, you get me? But I know now that sexual violence against men is a huge problem. "That was hard for me to take," Owiny tells me today. The wounds of one were so grievous that he died in the cell in front of him. He watched as man after man was taken and raped. His captors raped him, three times a day, every day for three years. During his escape from the civil war in neighbouring Congo, he had been separated from his wife and taken by rebels. Laying the pus-covered pad on the desk in front of him, he gave up his secret. He reached into his pocket and pulled out an old sanitary pad. The man then murmured cryptically: "It happened to me." Owiny frowned. I'm sure there's something he's keeping from me." "My husband can't have sex," she complained. A female client was having marital difficulties. This particular case, though, was a puzzle. For four years Eunice Owiny had been employed by Makerere University's Refugee Law Project (RLP) to help displaced people from all over Africa work through their traumas. This is just what happened on an ordinary afternoon in the office of a kind and careful counsellor in Kampala, Uganda. Yet every now and then someone gathers the courage to tell of it. Governments, aid agencies and human rights defenders at the UN barely acknowledge its possibility. It is usually denied by the perpetrator and his victim. O f all the secrets of war, there is one that is so well kept that it exists mostly as a rumour.
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