Individual agency and social support in healing from conflict-related sexual violence: A case history from eastern DRC.

Examining the experience of a male survivor of rape through the salutogenic model and ecological theory, this case study explores how he imoved towards the direction of health after an atrocious experience of sexual violence perpetrated by members of an armed group. The study illustrates how he was able to deploy agency by undertaking a number of health-promoting actions to recover from the physical, mental, and social effects of conflict-related sexual violence. Initiatives in the process of improving one's health include self-care practice, searching for specialised care when self-care seems inefficient, relocation to new a setting post-rape, starting a business, testing one's reproductive capacities, marrying, taking care of the way he dressed, learning a new language, developing public speaking skills, owning a piece of land, having regular medical check-ups and ascending to power and decision-making bodies. His narrative shows how these initiatives are mirrored by both opportunities and setbacks. While more traditional survey-based studies focus on identifying which practices might be helpful in a healing context, this study sheds light on how an individual healing process might be complex and nuanced and is an important starting point towards our efforts to theorise resilience for male survivors.

A man never cries: barriers to holistic care for male survivors of sexual violence in eastern DRC.

While we know that most male survivors of conflict-related sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) do not have access to care, little attention has been devoted to a systematic analysis of why this is so. Drawing from semi-structured interviews with staff of service providers and male survivors of sexual violence, as well as from focus group discussions with community members in eastern DRC, this article sets out to explore challenges and barriers related to meeting the needs of male survivors of sexual violence with respect to their medical, psychological, socioeconomic and legal needs. Our findings suggest that local framings of masculinity can both negatively and positively influence support-seeking behaviour depending on how survivors themselves engage with masculinity ideals. Based on these findings, a conceptual framework including seven levels of barriers to care for male survivors has been developed. Although service providers strive to provide high-quality care to male survivors, we show that existing responses to sexual violence have mainly been designed to address sexual violence against women and need to be re-adapted to male survivors.