“Disrupting peace at home”? Narrating connections between sexual violence perpetrated by armed men and intimate partner violence in (post-)conflict settings

ABSTRACT

While much is now known about the multiple forms of gender-based violence (GBV) to which people are subjected in (post-)conflict spaces, there remains a relative lack of knowledge about how those experiencing such forms of violence perceive the interconnections between them, as well as about how these perceived interconnections are enmeshed in gendered power relations. This article analyzes group interviews carried out with male and female refugees living in Kampala, Uganda, to scrutinize the complex interweaving between GBV and heteropatriarchal gender norms and power relations in (post-)conflict spaces. Participants repeatedly drew causal connections between sexual violence perpetrated by enemy armed men against women and men, and subsequent intimate partner violence. Our discussion of the logics underpinning these perceived causal connections enables close analysis of the shifting and contingent ways in which various forms of GBV are understood as imbricated in one another and implicated in shifting gender norms. This enables us to examine some of the complex ways in which GBV reverberates through gender norms and power relations in (post-)conflict contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Intimate partner violence
• conflict-related sexual violence
• gender norms
• gender-based violence
• (post-)conflict

Introduction

(Post-)conflict¹ settings are characterized by multiple, interconnected forms of violence including, in many instances, various forms of gender-based violence (GBV). But how do survivors of conflict understand the linkages between the different forms of violence to which they are exposed? And what can the logics underpinning these perceived connections tell us about how experiences of violence are shaped by and reverberate through gendered norms and power relationships that structure societies, in war and also in “peace”?

This article analyzes qualitative interview narratives that discuss two types of GBV in (post-)conflict settings: sexual violence perpetrated by enemy armed men against civilian women and men in a conflict environment (henceforth referred to as outsider sexual violence²) – and intimate partner violence (IPV).^3,4 A key theme that arose from the interviews was the idea of a causal connection between these two types of violence; multiple participants saw outsider sexual violence as the cause of subsequent IPV.

Our methodological approach is not to assess or to endorse participants’ causal claims, but rather to unpack the shifting gendered logics that underpin them. In brief, in these claims, outsider sexual violence disrupts victims’ ability to live up to the heteropatriarchal social norms, expectations, and power relations structuring families, and thereby also disturbs the gendered power relations between spouses. IPV occurs – in complex, multiple, and sometimes contradictory ways – in response to these disruptions. Paying close attention to these logics, we suggest, enables us to scrutinize the fluid and complex relationships between GBV and gender norms in (post-)conflict spaces.

Our analysis here adds to, fleshes out, and complicates existing knowledge in two main ways. First, while much of the literature on (post-)conflict IPV assumes that perpetrators are all male and victims only female, in this study, participants described IPV perpetrated by and against both men and women. This allows us to explore the different yet interdependent ways in which heteropatriarchal norms shape both men’s and women’s experiences of violence. Second, our analysis advances our understanding of how GBV and gender norms are woven together in (post-)conflict contexts by providing an in-depth examination of how survivors perceive the complex and sometimes contradictory relationships between outsider sexual violence and IPV. Building on the understanding that violent acts do not have stable meanings, but, rather, that their meanings shift with their social circumstances – that rape can be “both an expression and an aberration of sociocultural beliefs and norms” (Porter 2017, 57) – our focus on survivors’ perceptions of the relationship between their own experiences of outsider sexual violence and IPV allows us to unpack some of the complexities of how GBV reverberates through and interacts with existing norms and relationships.

In this article, we analyze 15 group interviews conducted with male and female refugees at the Refugee Law Project (RLP) in Kampala, Uganda, in 2016. Clients at the RLP are supported in organizing themselves into peer support groups around particular experiences, and the interview groups were recruited from these pre-existing groups.⁵ Four of the group interviews had 15 participants, while the rest had between four and six. Most participants arrived in Uganda as refugees fleeing conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), while smaller numbers came from Rwanda and Burundi. Two of the interview groups were made up of men, two of women, and the rest were fairly evenly balanced. The explorative interviews provided space for open and wide-ranging discussion broadly related to GBV, and engaged with several other topics not covered in this article.⁶ When we raised the issue of IPV, in addition to debates on its definitions, perhaps the most dominant theme that emerged from participants’ discussions was the question of whether and how IPV is related to war and its impacts, particularly to outsider sexual violence. This article is an attempt to unpack the connections that participants perceived and described to us.

Participants spoke both about their own experiences and about their understandings of violence more broadly. All participants in this study were victim-survivors of outsider sexual violence; however, when it came to IPV specifically, the lines between victim-survivor and perpetrator became somewhat blurred in participants’ narratives. Several spoke of their experiences of both victimization and perpetration; the lines between victimization and perpetration experiences were sometimes complicated and leaky. As we note above, we do not seek to assess or endorse participants’ claims about what IPV is, how it is caused, or where the lines should fall between victimization and perpetration; indeed, in some cases, we would strongly disagree with their assessments (we would argue strongly, for example, that refusing sex is not abuse). Our methodological approach here is not, however, to make assessments of the “correctness” of participants’ claims, but rather to unpack the logics that underpin them.

All participants assumed a heterosexual context when discussing IPV. Our discussions were carried out in multiple languages. Where possible, interviews were interpreted by members of the research team, though most were interpreted by translators working for the RLP. The translators, all refugees themselves, were already known to participants, and some were themselves survivors of GBV. When quoting participants, we have made some minor language edits for clarity.

We approach gender as performative, starting from the assumption that gender identity is neither stable nor coherent, and that the illusion of a cohesive gendered identity is created through a “stylized repetition of acts” that “congeal over time” (Butler 1999, 191, 45). This performative process is not undertaken in a vacuum, but enacted in conversation with the dominant gender norms to which people are “held accountable” (West and Zimmerman 1987, 136; see also Butler 1999). The performative construction of one’s gendered identity is never finished or complete; it is both perpetually ongoing and inevitably a failure, in that no one can fully embody any idealized subject position (Eriksson Baaz and Stern 2009, 497).

The African Great Lakes region – defined here as the DRC, Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi – is large and diverse, with multiple ethnic and cultural groups and relatedly heterogeneous norms. Despite this, while gender orders are always in flux and contested, and multiple models of masculinity and femininity exist (Connell 1987, 183–188), scholars have argued that the hegemonic norms to which people are held accountable in the region are broadly “heteropatriarchal” (Schulz 2018, 1114).⁷ Heterosexual marriage holds a central place, expectations of masculinity revolve largely around economic provision and dominance in decision making, and expectations of femininity center dependence, deference, obedience, and care (Dolan 2002, 61–62; Dolan 2010; Eriksson Baaz and Stern 2009, 507–508; Lwambo 2011). We want to emphasize that these heteropatriarchal norms are not, in general, oriented around the violent or “militarized” dominance of men (see critiques raised by Myrttinen, Khattab, and Naujoks 2017), but rather around a paternalistic responsibility for women and children: “a ‘real’ man in the traditional sense earns his position of authority through sound, non-violent leadership and the capacity to provide” (Lwambo 2011, 13).

As the term “heteropatriarchal” implies, this is a heteronormative context. Indeed, we use the term “heteropatriarchal” rather than simply “patriarchal” to emphasize the heteronormativity upon which patriarchy depends. This reminds us that patriarchal gender orders rely not only on the oppression of women but also on the denigration and marginalization of many men, particularly those labeled homosexual. This is important for our analysis, as male victims of sexual violence perpetrated by men often experience the fear, and the very real harms, of being labeled homosexual. This is particularly so in the Ugandan context where sex between people of the same sex is illegal, whether or not consent is given (Edström and Dolan 2019). Focusing on heteropatriarchy allows us to highlight how both men and women are impacted by sexual violence in specifically gendered ways, and yet, as we explore below, both remain rooted in, and interpret their sometimes markedly different experiences from within, the same shared and overarching heteropatriarchal normative framework.

The article proceeds as follows. First, we briefly map the literature on (post-)conflict GBV, focusing on how scholars have understood the relationship between GBV and gender norms in (post-)conflict spaces. This sets the scene for our empirical analysis, in which we sketch out how participants define IPV, and explore the gendered logics through which they envisage its interconnections with outsider sexual violence. To conclude, we discuss how our participants’ narratives enable us to identify the complexity and fluidity characterizing relationships between GBV and heteropatriarchal norms.

Mapping the literature on (post-)conflict GBV and heteropatriarchal norms

The literature on conflict-related GBV, in particular on that perpetrated against women, is large, dynamic, and multifaceted, and we could not hope to do justice to it here in its entirety. As it is the part of the literature to which we most directly contribute, we limit our discussions below to sketching the contours of scholarship about the multiple and fluid relationships between such violence and heteropatriarchal norms – literature that is rooted in the understanding that intimate relations are political constructions, deeply intertwined with global politics. Our discussion of this literature proceeds as follows. First, we discuss “outsider” rapes that disrupt victim-survivors’ ability to conform to hegemonic gender norms. Next, we consider forms of GBV that discipline their victims into more rigid performances of these norms. Finally, we sketch the literature on IPV as a form of violence rooted in the “repatriarchalization” of gender norms brought about by conflict.

Hegemonic academic, policy, and legal discourse on conflict-related GBV positions outsider sexual violence as a “weapon of war,” effective as a weapon because it violates established norms around marriage and family in both symbolic and practical ways (Mackenzie 2010). “Weapon of war” texts suggest that, by destroying individuals’ ability to achieve particular kinds of status that are underpinned by conforming to these patriarchal and heterosexist norms, outsider rapes symbolically dishonor the targeted collective: “By dishonoring a woman’s body, which symbolizes her lineage, a man can symbolically dishonor the whole lineage … Thus, sexual violence against women became a tool of genocide for destroying the enemy’s honor, lineage, and nation” (Snyder et al. 2006, 190; see also Mackenzie 2010; Sjoberg and Peet 2011; Trenholm et al. 2016, 485). Within this discourse, outsider rapes of women symbolize domination and collective emasculation, as they reveal that the men of a community have failed to protect “their” women (Card 1996; Sivakumaran 2007, 268). Similarly, outsider rapes of men emasculate not only individual victims but also the collective (Auchter 2017, 1349; Sivakumaran 2007, 268–269). On a practical level, “weapon of war” texts suggest that, in violating heteropatriarchal norms that reserve sex for marriage, outsider rape leaves both male and female victims subject to ongoing shame, stigma, and social isolation (Auchter 2017, 1340; Mackenzie 2010; Ohambe, Muhigwa, and Mulyumba Wa Mamba 2005, 39–44; Onyango 2012; Sivakumaran 2005; Trenholm et al. 2016).

While this discourse positions outsider sexual violence as something that harms its victims in part through disrupting their ability to conform to dominant gender norms, scholars have also explored how some enactments of GBV function to discipline victims into a more rigid performance of these same norms. For example, Kamp (2011) details how in Uzbekistan violence against women who had embraced the Soviet occupiers’ efforts to change women’s status in the 1920s served to discipline them back into their traditional roles. Such violence, which included the murder of an estimated 2,500 women, was an “attempt to restore a rapidly eroding social order, by terrorizing other women back into submission” (Kamp 2011, 59). Similarly, Baines (2014, 406) argues that the Lord’s Resistance Army’s institutionalization of forced marriage among its members, along with its restriction of other forms of sexual behavior including outsider sexual violence, was an important part of their attempt to create a “new moral order” in northern Uganda through strengthening heteropatriarchal norms of marriage and family (see also Boesten 2014; Moffett 2006).

It is worth noting here that, while these different forms of GBV are understood in the literature to interact differently with gender norms and power relations (“weapon of war” rapes cause harm in part by preventing individuals from conforming to hegemonic norms; certain other forms of GBV may serve to discipline their victims into more rigid adherence to these norms), neither of these enactments undermines heteropatriarchal normative frameworks themselves. Rather, both serve to reinforce heteropatriarchal frameworks by re-centering their desirability.

Scholars have explored the relationship between (post-)conflict IPV and gender norms in a variety of ways. (It is worth noting again that, in contrast to our study, the existing literature largely assumes male perpetrators and female victim-survivors.) Some have argued that conflict can result in the (post-)conflict “retraditionalization” (McLeod 2016, 81–83) or “repatriarchalization” (Albanese 2001) of gendered norms and power relationships (see also Dolan 2002, 77–78), and that this can be reflected in an increase in IPV. Albanese (2001) suggests that the rise of ethnic nationalism and militarism during the Balkan conflicts was coupled with institutionalized attempts to reinvigorate patriarchal social relations. Among other things, Albanese suggests that this encouraged male control over (female) intimate partners, often acted out and enforced through IPV. Similarly, McLeod (2016, 119) argues that in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, war reshaped ideas about masculinity and femininity and enabled a rise in a “toxic” masculinity enacted in part through violence against intimate partners. In these understandings, men’s perpetration of IPV expresses a particular form of dominating masculinity encouraged by the (post-)conflict context.

Several other studies identify men’s sense of emasculation in the face of increasingly rigid gender norms as a possible explanation for the (post-)conflict rise in IPV; that is, men perpetrate IPV not simply because they are compelled to embody a dominating form of masculinity, but because they feel compelled and yet fail to do so. While we remind ourselves that all performances of gender are ultimately failures to fully embody an idealized subject position (Eriksson Baaz and Stern 2009, 497), numerous studies have suggested that, concurrent with the narrowing of the scope of idealized masculine performance that repatriarchalization implies, conflict may also make it harder for men to live up to expectations of (heteropatriarchal) masculinity. Loss of economic opportunities, for example, makes it difficult for many men to successfully perform a breadwinner role (Dolan 2010, 7; Lwambo 2011, 8). Studies in the African Great Lakes region have suggested that men whose attempts to perform hegemonic masculinity are “thwarted” may perpetrate IPV in an attempt to reassert their masculine authority (Dolan 2002, 72; see also Cash 2011; Lwambo 2011, 4; Slegh, Barker, and Levtov 2012; Wako et al. 2015). While we would caution that it is important not to reify “failed masculinity” as a cause of IPV – because doing so risks framing such violence as a natural or excusable effect of male disempowerment (Moffett 2006, 134) – “emasculation” analyses generally posit that IPV can occur when men attempt to reinstate a previous position of dominance lost through war.

As the above discussion demonstrates, the existing literature has theorized the relationship between GBV in conflict spaces and heteropatriarchal gender norms relating to marriage and family in multiple ways. Our discussions below contribute to and further complicate this debate by exploring in detail some of the tensions and internal contradictions in how heteropatriarchal norms structured our participants’ narrations of the relationship between outsider sexual violence and IPV.

Fieldwork narratives: connecting outsider sexual violence and IPV

Defining IPV: disrupting peace, reinstating authority

Participants offered a broad definition of IPV through which to narrate its connections to outsider sexual violence. Their descriptions of physical, sexual, emotional, and financial abuse, as well as controlling behavior, reflect much of the contemporary theoretical literature, which approaches IPV not as isolated incidents but, rather, as a pattern of violent and controlling behaviors that come to characterize an abusive relationship (Anderson 2009; Stark 2007; Westmarland 2015, 20–46).

While they stated that IPV can be perpetrated by both men and women, most participants assumed that the typical perpetrator is male, and that IPV perpetrated by men and women differs. Physical violence perpetrated by men against their wives was considered fairly common: “When there is misunderstanding, you can easily beat your wife without control” (male participant). In contrast, the idea of women’s physical violence against their husbands, while possible, was considered a joke: “[Laughter] [Y]ou will find that [some] women are stronger than men and they beat their men” (male participant). The distinction that participants drew between the IPV perpetrated by men and women echoes the theoretical literature, which notes that violent acts have both different meanings and different effects when perpetrated by women and by men (Anderson 2009, 1455). The consequences of these differences are not necessarily obvious; laughter engendered by the idea that women might “beat their men,” for example, may mean that women’s use of physical violence has less power to generate fear and exert control or, on the other hand, it could make it more difficult for men experiencing dangerous situations to seek help. Either way, these differences are inescapably shaped by gender.

A key element of participants’ definitions arose in relation to the “rights and duties” (male participant) that family members are understood to bear. Participants echoed dominant trends in the existing literature when suggesting that the enforcement of gendered expectations in a context of heteropatriarchy could constitute IPV. However, participants also suggested that a failure to perform one’s expected duties could disrupt “peace” in the home, and, in the words of one participant, IPV was “any act, any harmful act that can disrupt peace at home” (male participant). That is, participants had certain expectations of the social contract between spouses, and they experienced the violation of this contract as (potentially) violent. As feminist scholars have long demonstrated, the rights and duties that structure the social contract of heterosexual marriage – the “peace” that normatively characterizes the home – have deeply gendered and unequal roots (Pateman 1988). The fact that participants described both the enforcement and the violation of normative family roles as potentially violent was a central tension in participants’ descriptions of IPV, one that we unpack below.

Several participants suggested that male perpetrators in particular were likely to be motivated by a desire to (re)gain or maintain control within the relationship:

[Men] really want to be authorities. And this leads them to commit these acts of domestic violence just to restore that authority. To restore the power in the home. (male participant)

A man … will always feel that [he is] a man as long as [he uses his] power against women … They use it against women in the house. A man [uses violence so that] the woman will [be] quiet in the house. (male participant)

This understanding – that men in particular use abusive behaviors to control their female partners, holding them accountable to gender norms to establish themselves in a position of dominance within their relationship – animates much of the literature on IPV in peacetime (Anderson 2009; Kwagala et al. 2013; Stark 2007; Wandera et al. 2015). Of particular interest to us here, Anderson (2009, 1447) explores how male perpetrators who exercise “coercive control” in abusive heterosexual relationships often “require victims to perform a particular type of femininity” through the “microregulation” of elements of their everyday lives. Following West and Zimmerman (1987), Anderson (2009, 1448) argues that abusers seek to hold their female partners accountable to norms of submissive femininity, punishing them for failures to live up to these norms and/or for resistance to them. In some instances, participants told how abusive behavior occurs in response to the victim’s failure to live up to the gendered expectations placed upon them as a spouse. For example, participants suggested that a wife who fails to act with sufficient subservience toward her husband may find herself disciplined back into her “proper” role, and that a husband who is unable to provide for his family financially may be faced with verbal/psychological abuse for failing in his masculine duties. In these examples, a person’s failure to live up to normative roles assigned to them was positioned in participants’ narratives as a cause of IPV, now framed as aimed at disciplining its recipient toward correctly gendered behavior in general, and the performance of heteropatriarchal norms of marriage and family in particular.

Interestingly, however, while many of the descriptions of IPV pointed to a perpetrator holding their spouse accountable to gender norms, others, in contrast, suggested that failing to live up to one’s idealized role as a spouse – as well as being a potential cause of IPV perpetrated by one’s partner – could itself be a form of IPV. Participants spoke, for example, about men who failed to provide financially for their families as perpetrating IPV: “[Y]ou have some money – let’s say 5,000 shillings – on you; instead of giving it to your wife to make food for everybody, you prefer to keep it somewhere for your own interests” (male participant). Similarly, “not managing your time well. Coming late, coming back late to home … [and managing] your time without your wife’s consent” (male participant) was also described as IPV.

Likewise, women’s failure to live up to expectations of wifely behavior was also seen as IPV:

[Domestic violence is a wife] not serving her husband well. You know, here in Africa a wife is supposed to serve the husband food on time when he comes back from work or wherever he has been … Maybe the wife is not cooking what the husband wants to eat. For instance, your husband desires to eat meat; for her, she cooks vegetables. This is also a form of domestic violence.⁸ It can affect the soul of the husband. (male participant)

Participants’ narratives around sexual forms of IPV clearly portray the tensions inherent in framing both enforcement and violation of normative family roles as IPV. In line with biblical notions of “conjugal rights,” participants suggested that both men and women have a duty to provide sex to their spouse: “[Y]ou don’t have any choice … because you are a woman in the house, a wife to him” (female participant). Consequently, women who refuse to fulfill their duty of providing sex to their husbands were understood to be violent: “A woman that denies her husband sex in bed is [perpetrating] a form of domestic violence” (male participant). Women’s sexual needs, which husbands have a duty to satisfy, were also recognized: “[I]f you are married and you cannot satisfy your wife … that’s not marriage” (male participant). Concern about male victims of sexual violence who find themselves unable to “satisfy” their wives sexually was an urgent topic of discussion for several participants, both male and female. It is worth noting, however, that none described men’s refusal or other failures to provide sex as a form of IPV against their wives.

While participants pointed to violation of norms around sexual access as IPV, forcing one’s spouse to have sex was also recognized as violence – a form assumed to be specifically perpetrated by men. Some framed a spouse’s right to sex as contingent upon the fulfillment of other marital duties (see also Cash 2011, 34; Eriksson Baaz and Stern 2009, 507). Specifically, a husband who failed to provide financially for his family might forfeit his conjugal rights. One participant, for example, told of a neighbor whose husband did not provide financially for the family, yet still returned home expecting sex. She noted that the man had “turned the wife to become someone who, if you want sexual pleasure, you just go there and do it. So in that case, really, the guy turns to be a rapist” (female participant). Another explained that a husband who expects his wife to provide sex even when she is tired from acting as the main breadwinner (that is, from fulfilling the normatively male role as well) can be a perpetrator of sexual violence:

In the Congo, and even here, there is no work [for the men], so the women are doing all the work, and the work in the morning, and going to the fields, and cooking and taking care of the kids, and they come home and they cook and all this, and in the evening they are tired, and the men just sit around. And then he says “Now you have to [have sex with me]” as well, and maybe you are just so tired and you don’t really feel like it, and the consent is not really there but he forces you to do it anyway. So that is also a form of [IPV]; husbands can also be perpetrators. (female participant)

These examples reveal the contingency of one’s gendered rights within a marriage. In participants’ narratives, such rights are not unequivocal; they are at least in part reliant upon the performance of one’s duties. As such, where gender norms, roles, and power relations are in flux, what “counts” as violence may become correspondingly more complex and fluid.

Participants talked unequivocally about “brutality in bed and … sex without consent” (male participant) as forms of IPV. Some stated that, for a man to have sex with his wife, he must ensure that she is a willing participant at that particular moment in time. They felt that husbands who disregard this, saying “‘Oh, I married you and I gave my dowry money to your father, so you come here’” (male participant), are perpetrating sexual violence. It is worth noting, however, that while participants did recognize that a husband forcing his wife into sex could constitute IPV, they nonetheless perceived significant differences between outsider sexual violence and violence perpetrated by husbands – differences that were connected to ideas about the rights and duties of marriage. This indicates the centrality of heteropatriarchal norms in defining violence; whether and how an incident is recognized as violence is refracted through the ways in which it disrupts or reinforces the dominant gender order. In a distinction that reflects, to some extent, that drawn between “lust rapes” and “evil rapes” by soldiers of the FARDC (armed forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo) interviewed by Eriksson Baaz and Stern (2009), as well as that between rapes that do and do not significantly threaten “social harmony” described by Porter (2017), participants explained how, in contrast to outsider sexual violence, violence perpetrated by husbands is likely to be motivated by sexual desire rather than by a wish to harm, less likely to involve serious levels of physical violence, and is therefore more understandable and justifiable:

[Husbands can perpetrate] sexual violence but there is a difference between what the solders are doing and what is happening at home … [F]or the soldiers, the rebels, that is just to harm … In some instances, they can come like two, three to you, or even ten … [I]t can reach a level where you [do not] have consciousness anymore. But … they still continue even if you have fainted. But at home, your husband is just expressing a desire. (female participant)

Indeed, several participants suggested that wives are likely to “give in” to sex with their husbands even when they do not want to, because they understand that their husbands need sex. While participants recognized this as sexual violence, they largely framed it as an unfortunate but expected part of being a wife: “Even if you are tired, even if you don’t consent, … you will reach a moment you understand each other with that, you know, he was just in need of it” (female participant).

This section has discussed participants’ descriptions of what IPV is. It has painted a complex picture, in which the relationship of IPV to normative roles and relations of power within a family is multiple and shifting, and at times contradictory. In some circumstances, participants narrate IPV as a failure to respect the rights and duties assigned to family members, which can “disrupt peace at home.” In others, IPV is narrated, in line with academic literature on “coercive control,” as a form of violence that disciplines family members into abiding by their normative duties. In addition, men’s and women’s perpetration of IPV is described differently – differences that, again, we can explain by looking at the different normative expectations applied to men and women respectively (Anderson 2009). Against this complex background, we move, in the next section, to discuss participants’ narratives positioning outsider sexual violence as a causal factor in IPV.

Causal connections: “you find that war enters the family”

Despite the undeniable reality that IPV does not begin with war but exists globally across “peacetime,” participants in this study overwhelmingly drew direct causal connections between conflict-related outsider sexual violence and IPV. One male participant, for example, stated that, following outsider sexual violence, “[Y]ou find that war enters in the family: you fight in the family, because there is a misunderstanding between me and my wife.” Another described IPV as “the outcome of the sexual violence which happened to us.”

Turning to how participants framed these causal connections, we find that, reflecting the differing definitions of IPV as perpetrated by men and by women outlined above, participants drew related but different causal connections between these forms of violence, depending on whether the victim of the outsider sexual violence was husband or wife. We focus in turn on three key pathways through which participants described outsider sexual violence as causative of IPV: emotional response, material hardship, and sexual and reproductive life.

Emotional response

Participants discussed a range of emotional responses to sexually violent victimization and explained how these might cause IPV. Where a woman has been subjected to outsider sexual violence, participants suggested, her husband might lose trust in her, perhaps believing that she did something to encourage the rape, and this might lead him to feel angry and ashamed, and to behave violently toward his wife to punish her. For example:

It was really shocking to know that my wife was raped. And I blamed her, I was really annoyed, actually – I wanted to, you know, slap her. (male participant)

[Rape] reduces the value of a woman. Because it brings shame. It brings suspicion. Distrust. Because there is that doubt … that this rape happened to you, it seems you maybe arranged … it, you know. You agreed with that man. (female participant)

In these narratives, the rape of a woman by someone other than her husband transgresses social norms requiring women to be monogamous and men to be able to protect their families. Men’s shame, anger with, and distrust toward their raped wives is framed as a natural response to this provocative challenge to their normative dominance over, and protection of, their wives. Equally, the wives of men who had been raped were described as losing respect for their husbands due to the question mark posed over their masculinity by such rapes. That is, while female rape victims were at risk of being judged as “bad women,” male rape victims were likely to be seen as not really “men” at all (Gray, Stern, and Dolan 2020).

Echoing studies that posit feelings of emasculation as causative of IPV cited above, the idea of loss of manhood emerged repeatedly in our interviews. Multiple male survivors of rape said that, having been “used like a woman,” they felt that they were “no longer a man.” Interlinked with this, several male participants also explained that, having disclosed their victimization, they were labeled as homosexual: “[W]hen you go and say ‘I am a male survivor, I was raped,’ they say you are a homosexual” (male participant). In this heteropatriarchal context, this could lead to criminalization and social stigmatization: “So if I came and said I’m a male survivor [I would lose] my dignity in the community, and [lose] my friends” (male participant) (see Edström and Dolan 2019; Sivakumaran 2005).

In these narratives, male victim-survivors are understood to lose their pre-existing social status as (heterosexual) men as a result of sexual violence. Specifically, several participants suggested that they had lost status in relation to their wives because their manhood, which usually guaranteed them this familial power, had been called into question. Let us pause here for a moment to emphasize that we are not suggesting that “emasculation” entails the wholesale “loss” of a coherent “thing” (McCarry 2007; see also Schulz 2018), or that such an emasculation would necessarily lead to perpetration of violence (Moffett 2006). Following Connell (1987), the performance of gender is always relational; men and women negotiate their gendered identities not in a vacuum but in relation to norms, ideologies, and other people. As such, participants in this study explored how outsider sexual violence could lead to what they experienced as a change in the relational power within a marriage, and discussed how the realignments of power in the wake of this shift could be experienced as violence.

Participants suggested that, sometimes, women might take advantage of and reinforce their husband’s loss of relative power by perpetrating (verbal/psychological) IPV against him:

As a survivor of sexual violence, sometimes at home we suffer lack of respect from our partners. Something may happen at home, the way she reacts, she actually goes back to what you went through. She reminds you that you are just a woman who has put on trousers. (male participant)

We as women, wives, we don’t respect our husbands sometimes. And you know because of what happened to them … when you have a clash, you want to express your position, you try to use that sexual violence they went through as a … point of weakness. (female participant)

In these narratives, women’s responses to their husbands’ sexual victimization further undermine their husbands’ normatively dominant position as heads of household. Participants perceived this behavior as IPV not only because of the psychological cruelty of the women’s words toward their husbands (although this cruelty is important in how it is perpetrated and experienced) but also because they undermine heteropatriarchal power relations.

In addition, participants suggested that the loss of status experienced by male victim-survivors of outsider sexual violence could lead them to perpetrate IPV against their wives in an attempt to reclaim some relative power: “Sexual violence in conflict can cause domestic violence, it is inevitable. And a raped man is morally unstable. It takes time for him to renormalize” (male participant). Here we link back to participants’ explanations of men’s perpetration of IPV as being about enforcing power and authority over their wives cited above: that men use IPV against their wives to “restore the power in the home” (male participant). That is, men who are raped may seek to restore their status in relation to their wives by using violence to exert control and dominance within their relationships.

Material hardship

The emotional responses discussed above, moreover, may be compounded by the material consequences of outsider sexual violence for a family’s standing in the community. These can include social stigmatization, physical injury, or forced relocation. As noted above, all participants in this study were refugees in Kampala, and several male participants tied the financial difficulties that they faced in Uganda with their feelings of emasculation following rape. In particular, several felt that their inability to provide for their families as before compounded their emasculation: “I don’t feel like a man … I have no job … I have responsibilities but I can’t fulfil them” (male participant).

This loss of a man’s – and therefore his family’s – social and financial status was identified by several participants as a factor that can cause women to perpetrate IPV against their husbands:

Most of our husbands, here in Uganda, they don’t have jobs. And because they lack, as a woman I will come and present my needs, sometimes I don’t consider that he earns nothing. When he tells me that he’s not able to provide that, I will [lose] my temper. (female participant)

As refugees here, we suffer serious economic problems … For [some women in the refugee community], men are just men because they put on trousers, but they don’t fulfil their responsibilities as men. And that’s why you find that many wives become unfaithful … [T]his can really torture you morally. (male participant)

In these narratives, a man’s inability to live up to his assigned familial role as provider can cause his wife’s anger and also, in some cases, her infidelity – both of which were framed by participants as verbal/psychological IPV. These narratives provide examples of IPV as punishment for failing to fulfill one’s assigned role; a man who, following his own experiences of violence, “fails” to perform hegemonic masculinity is met with punishments.

Sexual and reproductive life

Participants explored multiple ways in which outsider sexual violence has impacted upon their sexual and reproductive lives as victim-survivors. In speaking about female infertility caused by rape, several narrated their inability to have children as a kind of failure, and discussed the sadness and insecurity that this has engendered in their marriages. While participants clearly placed a premium on biological reproduction (partially, we suggest, reflecting the importance of publicly performing adherence to heteropatriarchal norms as a way of recovering social status in the aftermath of outsider sexual violence), some of the female participants who had been victims of rape explained that they no longer wanted to have sex after this experience. A female participant, for example, said that after she was raped, she felt “disgusted with men.” Another stated that, after she was raped at the age of 13, “I could hate men, you know, not thinking about having a future husband, just hating men.” Others reported that male survivors often became impotent, or that victim-survivors and their partners could both be reminded of the violence when they had sex. In some cases, participants told us that the tensions that these sexual problems cause could lead to IPV. A female participant, herself a survivor of sexual violence married to a male survivor, told us that if a husband is unable to satisfy his wife, this could lead to a cycle of frustration and revenge within the marriage in which partners deny each another’s needs. For her, this constituted IPV:

When you need your husband for sex [and] he doesn’t satisfy you, that can cause domestic violence – when you denied him sex and then when the time comes you yourself you want sex, he will also deny you. It becomes like a conflict between you, because when one needs the other, that one refuses, and vice versa. (female participant)

As such, refusal of sex emerges in some of the participants’ narratives as a form of IPV that can catalyze repeated cycles if the frustrated party seeks to frustrate their partner in return. In such cases, the normative rights and duties that usually structure relationships are reshaped, and the implications of this are experienced as IPV.

Conclusion

In this article, we have explored the gendered logics through which participants drew connections between sexual violence perpetrated during conflict by enemy armed men and IPV in (post-)conflict settings. Despite the fact that IPV is prevalent across the globe even in “peacetime” settings, participants overwhelmingly traced causal relationships between outsider sexual violence and IPV. While participants highlighted the impact of war as causing IPV, however, our analysis of their narratives has examined how the logics that underpin these causal connections rely upon the gendered logics of identity and family that pre-exist conflict itself – that while war does create “something new (and exceptional),” what it creates does not “come from nowhere” (Porter 2017, 57). We have discussed participants’ descriptions of IPV as characterized by a central tension, in which both the enforcement and the undermining of dominant heteropatriarchal gender norms and relationships can be seen, under particular circumstances, as IPV. In their narratives, we suggest, participants pointed to the multiple and shifting ways in which outsider sexual violence disrupts normative gendered roles and relations within a marriage. These shifts, and attempts to compensate for them, emerge as IPV.

The existing literature has already identified multiple relationships between GBV and gender norms in (post-)conflict spaces. This article has pushed this debate further by offering a close analysis of the fluid and contingent ways in which outsider sexual violence and IPV are understood by survivors to be imbricated in one another and implicated in shifting gender norms. Our key contributions are twofold. First, we have demonstrated the context-specific ways in which, although female and male victims of GBV are impacted by it differently, there is a shared underpinning to these experiences in the form of heteropatriarchal gender norms. That is, while the experiences of our male and female participants differ from one another, the meanings attributed to the violence to which they were subjected, and the ways in which they made sense of its aftermath, were rooted in a shared heteropatriarchal normative framework.

Our second key contribution lies in highlighting the complex and sometimes contradictory ways in which participants narrated the relationship between GBV and gender norms. In particular, we have demonstrated how outsider sexual violence is understood to disturb the gender norms and power relationships that structure an intimate relationship. In participants’ narratives, the IPV that occurs in response to that disturbance is simultaneously characterized by both the enforcement of hegemonic norms and their further disruption. These discussions illustrate that the processes through which the violences of war might be related to, or even causative of, violence in intimate relationships is complex, contingent, and refracted through pre-existing structural and ideational factors. That is, while IPV might be framed as a response to the extraordinary violence of war, in many ways it is not, itself, extraordinary; on the contrary, it is deeply rooted within, and understood in relation to, the “normal” violences and inequalities that structure everyday life. As such, to make sense of the ways in which sexual violence perpetrated by armed men might become a cause of IPV, we need to look at how this sexual violence reverberates and refracts through the power relations, roles, and expectations that already structure communities, families, and identities. As Porter (2017, 57) argues, we need to pay attention to how sexual violence can be both a manifestation of and a deviation from social norms. Moreover, in seeking to make sense of the relationship between GBV and gender norms, scholars must keep in mind that as these norms shift around in (post-)conflict spaces, so too do the meanings of violence. As such, claims to understand how particular forms of violence may undermine or prop up existing gender orders will always rest on slippery and highly politicized ground. More broadly, we suggest, our discussions in this article highlight the contingency of the ways in which particular forms of violence are defined and made sense of, and this has broader implications for research into multiple forms of violence in (post-)conflict spaces and beyond.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the participants who took part in this study for sharing their experiences with us. We would also like to thank the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences and the Swedish Research Council for providing funding for the research that underpins this article. Maria Eriksson Baaz and Maria Stern were an integral part of the research team that designed and conduced the interviews on which we draw here. We would like to thank the staff at the RLP for their assistance, in particular in interpreting interviews, as well as Sara de Jong, Jacob Eriksson, Elisabeth Schweiger, and the editors and reviewers at the International Feminist Journal of Politics for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Riksbankens jubileumsfond: [Grant Number P14-0795:1]; Vetenskapsrådet: [Grant Number 2014-3519].

Notes on contributors

Harriet Gray

Harriet Gray is a Lecturer of International Relations in the Department of Politics at the University of York, UK. Her research interests fall within the overlapping fields of critical military studies, critical war studies, and feminist international relations, and her research focuses primarily on gender-based violence in military and conflict spaces. Her work has been published in journals including the European Journal of International Relations, Feminist Studies, Security Dialogue, and Gender, Place and Culture. She is an Associate Editor of Critical Military Studies.

Chris Dolan

Chris Dolan is the Director of the Refugee Law Project at Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda. He has worked extensively with refugee and internally displaced survivors of sexual violence in conflict settings, as well as conducting research, training, and global advocacy on the need for inclusive and non-binary understandings of and approaches to gender-based violence and victimization. He has long been at the forefront of creating awareness of conflict-related sexual violence against men, and of the deep (gendered) interconnections that this has with conflict-related sexual violence against women.

Notes

1 Drawing on feminist work articulating interconnections between multiple forms of violence across the war–peace and public–private continua of violence (see for example Boesten 2014; Cockburn 2004; Sjoberg 2013, 248–278), we use the term “(post-)conflict” to reflect the fluidity of violent experiences across conflict and post-conflict spaces. This term, however, is imperfect, not least because, at the time of the interviews, participants were technically living in a space of neither conflict nor post-conflict but of asylum, in which their lives continued to be shaped by the conflicts from which they had fled. Participants remained unable to return home. The conflicts from which they had fled remained geographically proximate. Sightings in Kampala of security personnel from countries of origin highlight the threat that this poses. Several participants had experienced IPV while living through the conflicts from which they had fled, and several also continued to experience violence as refugees. While an imperfect term, then, “(post-)conflict” highlights not only the span of violence across conflict and what comes after but also that the “post-” is, in this context, a qualified term.

2 There is complexity and fluidity to any “insiders”/“outsiders” division. However, we use this term to highlight the contrast between IPV, perpetrated by someone in a close relationship with the victim, and violence perpetrated by armed men who are understood to be outside both the sphere of intimacy and the wider community.

3 While participants used the term “domestic violence” in our interviews, we use “intimate partner violence” (IPV) here, largely due to the difficulties of translating the idea of “the domestic” as it is understood in the West (and, therefore, in much of the relevant literature) into our context of study. Specifically, much of the literature assumes a nuclear family model within a particular imagining of “the home” as a private physical space, which does not necessarily translate well into non-Western contexts (Meth 2003). The term “IPV” avoids confusion over the meaning of “the domestic” in our context of study, and clarifies that we focus specifically on violence between (common-law) spouses rather than within the broader family. IPV, already hugely prevalent in peacetime, increases further in (post-)conflict spaces (Janko, Bloom, and Spencer 2014; Kidman, Palermo, and Bertrand 2015; Rehn and Sirleaf 2002, 14–15; Saile et al. 2013, 18; Slegh, Barker, and Levtov 2012), and indeed is likely to be the most prevalent form of violence experienced by women in crisis situations, including in active conflict zones (Peterman, Palermo, and Bredenkamp 2011; Stark and Ager 2011, 130). Studies within the African Great Lakes region specifically have suggested that rates of IPV may be higher in conflict-affected regions (Saile et al. 2013, 17–18; Slegh and Kimonyo 2010, 11–12; Stark et al. 2010; Wako et al. 2015).

4 For a discussion of IPV as “conflict-related,” see Gray (2019).

5 For discussion of the benefits and drawbacks of accessing participants through an institutional setting, see Gray, Stern, and Dolan (2020, 201).

6 Further publications drawing on these interviews include Gray, Stern, and Dolan (2020) and Dolan, Baaz, and Stern (2020).

7 We are not seeking to imply that heteropatriarchal norms or IPV are “cultural” in the sense of being specific to spaces and groups of people within the Global South; on the contrary, the norms that we describe here are reflected in various ways in many other parts of the world.

8 As we note above, while we use the term “IPV” in our analysis, participants themselves talked about “domestic violence,” and we have kept their original language in the quotations.