Ukrainian men face sexual torture in Russian detention centers: UN | Russia-Ukraine War News

Sexual violence against Ukrainian men detained in Russia is largely underreported due to the “stigma and perceived castration” that comes with the crime, a United Nations agency has warned.

The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) says the official Ukrainian figure of 114 men who have been subjected to sexual violence since Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022 is likely an underestimate.

The Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine registered those cases, as well as those of 202 female survivors.

UNFPA says it is likely that for every incident recorded, there were between 10 and 20 more cases that went unreported.

In September, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine, established by the UN Human Rights Council in March 2022, revealed the systematic use of sexual violence as a method of torture, often directed at men, in detention centres. arrest by Russian authorities.

The findings of their investigation included detailed testimony from inside detention centers in the occupied zones of Ukraine and Russia, with reports that high-ranking Russian personnel “ordered, tolerated or took no action” against such treatment.

Detained men face sexual torture

UNFPA told Al Jazeera that although the vast majority of victims of this crime were women and girls, this type of violence was also commonly used against men, boys and people of various gender identities.

All survivors of conflict-related sexual violence face significant barriers when seeking support, Massimo Diana, UNFPA representative in Ukraine, told Al Jazeera.

This can include structural barriers such as limited resources and systems that are still developing during the ongoing war, but also others that are “deeply personal, rooted in stigma, shame and fear,” Diana said.

“For male survivors, these barriers are often compounded by concerns about being labeled or misunderstood, including fear of being associated with sexual minorities,” she said.

Mental health professionals working with a UNFPA-supported survivor center in Ukraine, which provides free and confidential services to communities along the front lines, say many victims carry a sense of shame after having been abused.

Psychologists have also faced challenges in building trust and ensuring survivors’ anonymity when digital tools are used to amplify images and photographs of sexual torture.

UNFPA, citing psychologists who work with victims, has reported that Russian forces have sent videos of male Ukrainian detainees being raped to their relatives to blackmail them or simply humiliate them.

In July, Oleksandra Matviichuk and her Nobel Prize-winning Center for Civil Liberties, a kyiv-based human rights group, told Al Jazeera that in interviews with hundreds of survivors of Russian captivity, many had already told her his colleagues who had been beaten. , raped and electrocuted.

Sexual violence and armed conflict

In recent years, the world has seen high levels of conflict-related sexual violence fueled by armed conflict, according to the UN.

Al Jazeera has reported on the use of rape as a weapon in the ongoing war between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and its rival, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which broke out in April 2023.

In March, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, said that rape had been used as “a defining – and despicable – feature of this crisis from the beginning.”

There have also been reports of rape against male Palestinian prisoners in Israel.

In August, a video emerged of a gang rape of a Palestinian prisoner by guards at the Sde Teiman detention center in the Negev desert in southern Israel.

In November, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, said that Dr Adnan al-Bursh, one of Gaza’s most prominent doctors, was “probably raped to death” while detained in Israel.