SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This thesis examines how the societal, cultural, religious, and political contexts in which humanitarian actors operate influence the understandings, values, and assumptions underlying their professional decisions. It asks how humanitarian organisations and practitioners construct, work with, and understand their obligations towards displaced Syrian adult male survivors of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) living in Jordan. Mobilising theories of gender and recognition, it argues that humanitarian actors identify and frame adult male survivors in onedimensional gendered and decontextualising ways, as strategically silent, inherently political, and at times as disrupting an implicit hierarchy of victimhood. Sexually violated men unsettle humanitarian actors’ assumptions about a “pure” victim, defined a priori as an innocent female victim of patriarchal domination (Golubović 2019: 1175; Meger 2015). This makes men “uncomfortable subjects” in the humanitarian services for SGBV survivors (Eriksson Baaz and Stern 2009). In response to the presence of male survivors of CRSV in existing programmes or needing care, humanitarian actors blend their understandings, values, and assumptions with humanitarian principles and respond in ways that decontextualise, medicalise, psychologise, and desexualise both the event of sexual violence and the male survivor subject. In consequence, humanitarian responses to male survivors are ad hoc across humanitarian sectors and contingent upon diverse paradigms, ideologies, and agendas that often misrecognise the needs of men and perversely may silence rather than advocate for them.