On a cold winter evening two years ago, in the middle of what had appeared to be a smooth relationship, Kabir Kazi was raped by his partner.
Twenty nine year old Kabir (not his real name) was living abroad then and hadn’t realised what happened until long after. “It took me almost a year to acknowledge it,” he says. “Right after it happened, I was very disoriented. I felt sick in my stomach and thought I was going to throw up.”
Kabir, who now lives in Dhaka, has spoken up about it among his peers as part of processing the incident in his life. But it has been challenging, given the global understanding of “rape” often is that it can only happen to women. While he has found support among many friends and closed ones, he says it’s also been difficult to explain the immediate question “But how?” that most people ask when they hear about it.
‘But how?’: A culture knee-deep in ignorance “The first thing most people would say is ‘But how is that possible?’ which would require me to proceed to expose the uncomfortable details of the situation, sometimes willingly and sometimes because I felt that I had to defend myself,” says Kabir.
“A lot of the times the question made me feel that they were thinking I must be making it up because they believed it wasn’t possible for a woman to rape a man,” he adds.
This adds salt to the wound, given it requires him to go through the entire incident – over and over again.
Kabir says one of the worst responses was from a girl who considered her own incident of being raped at 11-year-old as “actual rape.”
“I felt empathy for her story but obviously felt very dehumanised by it as well,” he says. “She had turned it into a competition, and I think she somehow felt insulted or threatened by my account of being assaulted.”
Denial – and often outright dismissal through questions such as “but how?” – of sexual violence against men is common in our culture. This stems from a variety of factors including our perception of masculinity, the definition of rape as solely consisting of penetration, and our idea of a heteronormative society wherein certain roles are assigned to people based on their gender.
“In the end, [this issue] comes down to our conceptualisation of sexuality and who can be a victim and who cannot be a victim,” says Dr Shuchi Karim, Gender and SRHR Specialist at Institute of Educational Development (IED) of BRAC University. “We live in a culture that promotes the idea that unless it’s a full penetration of a woman it’s not “rape.” Men can’t be penetrated – that’s how we understand it.”
Globally, there exists a much broader definition that allows us to identify sexual abuse against men. The World Health Organisation defines sexual violence as “acts that range from verbal harassment to forced penetration, and an array of types of coercion, from social pressure and intimidation to physical force.”
Kabir was raped by a partner – who had verbally harassed and manipulated him and coerced him to participate in sexual activity. While this falls under the definition of rape as mentioned above, it is difficult for many in our culture to acknowledge it as rape.
And researchers say it is largely because of our perception of masculinity.
“Sexual violence against men often go unreported mainly because it is related to one's prestige and image as a man,” says Saad Khan, Senior Research Associate at the James P Grant School of Public Health, of BRAC University. “It is seen as great humiliation when a man is sexually abused because it is read as an attack to his own masculinity, or emasculation.”
A middle-class secret The denial is not only attributable to our perception of masculinity but is part of a much bigger – and more complex – issue: the hierarchy of age and class.
Our society’s latent acceptance of abuse against children has often pushed us to accept various forms of abuse of children.
“There’s a very prominent line between abusing your child and just spanking your child,” says Shahana Siddiqui, founder of Maya Apa Ki Bole, an online platform that offers health, legal and psycho-social support to women and men across the country. “And that very prominent line is something our societal and familial culture crosses all the time in the name of ‘raising a man’.”
However, given that male children are often victim of physical abuse – and it is so widely accepted – it is often ignored when the abuse crosses the line to sexual abuse. Last year, when the cases of Rajon and Rakib, two separate cases of child abuse went viral, the sexual assault aspects of the situations were ignored. That is almost a reality that we’ve accepted as a society.
“Even if we somehow come to terms with the fact that male children can be subjected to sexual assault or abuse, we tend to be very classist about it,” says Dr Karim. “We try to put all this into compartmentalised ideas of vulnerable children versus protected ones.”
The middle class’s perception of how its children are “moral” and “protected” leads the larger part of the society to deny the existence of sexual abuse against men in middle class families while casually accepting that sexual abuse against street children – male or female – is prevalent, she adds.
This means that the resources available for those from middle-class background are even more limited, given there are no helplines for male rape survivors. Given that various NGOs work with street children – and inevitably face cases of sexual abuse against boys – there’s been a growing awareness about it.
But for the families who hold their prestige and familial “honour” high in society, it’s difficult to acknowledge – let alone deal with – a case of an attack on a male family member.
“When we were growing up, there were no support systems to talk about it,” says 32-year-old Arman (not his real name) a sexual abuse survivor. “My first step was self-acknowledgment. Then I spoke to a friend, who said acknowledging it only makes us stronger.”
A lack of conversation in the society or in one’s household regarding these issues further increases the silence – and means the abuse continues.
“When it starts at a very early stage, the abuser tells you that it’s a normal thing to do,” says Arman. “So you grow up thinking that it was normal.”
Female lovers, male abusers This kind of normalisation may mean it takes longer for the survivor to acknowledge the case as sexual abuse. While Kabir acknowleded his case as rape within a year, it took Arman 15 years to acknowledge that his incident was a case of sexual abuse. This may be due to a difference in the time of the abuse – while Arman was abused in his pre-adolesent years, at a time when conversations on sexual abuse were absent around him, Kabir’s rape took place in his late twenties, when he was aware of these issues. Kabir has been able to process it and share it publicly relatively faster.
“It can take someone a year, a day, ten years, or never,” says Siddiqui. “But one should not be again victimised when one comes out. The process of acknowledging something like this takes time for everybody.”
While the process is long, our perception of masculinity and femininity also defines what one chooses to acknowledge as abuse, according to Dr Karim.
While doing her research on gay men, lesbians, and unmarried women above the age of 25, Dr Karim found a stark difference in how sexual abuses were acknowledged by women and men, and in cases of male versus female perpetrators.
While many women had identified their cases as sexual assault, the men were hesitant to do so.
“The men had learned not to associate their incidents with abuse, but the women had,” says Dr Karim. Furthermore, those who were sexually abused by men had acknowledged it as a case of sexual violence whereas those who were abused by women termed them as “lovers.”
“Because we’re not socialised to see women as perpetrators or even sexual human beings,” adds Dr Karim. “They remain assigned with the “mother-sister” identity and their attack is termed as ‘love’ whereas the attack by men is termed ‘abuse’.”
A space for parity Sexual violence against men is as much a reality in our society as is sexual violence against women. Just because it is not as heard of does not mean it doesn’t exist – or that it exists to a lesser extent. And while the world is pledging for equality across all genders for International Women’s Day, it is of utmost importance to remember the stories that are denied and dismissed just so that the society can continue in its patriarchal bubble.
“While of course women’s empowerment and eradication of violence against of women are extremely important, in all of our talks about gender parity, we have put the entire focus on women,” says Siddiqui. “But we don't talk about masculinity. And we can never understand, deconstruct and eventually break patriarchy if we don’t deconstruct masculinity.”
Siddiqui says this at a time when conversations on gender fluidity and deconstructing masculinity are increasing around the world. But the conversation is much needed here at home, where there are no laws to protect sexual violence against men, very little support system for them to open up, and almost no room for our men to come out of the shell of masculinity that has been enforced on them since birth.
As Arman says: “I talk about my story to support other peoples’ voice – because we’re not isolated beings. Other people’s experiences shape us.”
Through his story, almost two decades since his sexual assault, Arman is, in his way, making his pledge to parity. One that lets our men have an equal space in society to share their story of sexual abuse. It’s time we start to have this conversation openly – to ensure the parity that’s been denied to our male survivors of sexual abuse for years.