Le 26 février 2026 à 17 heures à la bibliothèque du campus Malesherbes, 108, boulevard Malesherbes, 75017 Paris
- Agenda / Région parisienneThe next ordinary meeting of the Subcommittee on Human Rights is scheduled to take place on 18-19 March 2026 in Brussels.
Dr Busingye Kabumba is a law professor at Makerere University. He said there is a misconception about sexual violence against men. Credit: Wambi Michael/IPS
By Wambi Michael
KAMPALA, Feb 26 2026 (IPS)
When people ordinarily think about sexual violence, it’s of the rape of women by men. In Uganda, as in other countries, activists say men are also victims of sexual violence perpetrated by women, though males remain silent.
The UNFPA 2022 gap analysis of population-related indicators and issues in Uganda report gives details of sexual violence experienced by men and women.
“Similar to physical violence, women are reported to be more exposed to sexual violence than men, although the trend shows a decline over time. The incidence of sexual violence decreased from 27.8 percent in 2011 to 17 percent in 2022 but remains significantly higher than the 6 percent recorded for men in 2022. In the 12 months preceding the 2022 survey, 11 percent of women reported experiencing sexual violence, compared to 4 percent of men.”
The perpetrators of sexual violence against women include current husbands/intimate partners, strangers, friends, and acquaintances. For men, the identified perpetrators are current or former wives/intimate partners, the study says.
Section 110 of Uganda’s penal code describes rape as having unlawful carnal knowledge of a woman. Under that provision, only a male can be found guilty.
Lawyer Ivan Kyazze conducted an exploration study of the sufficiency of the existing international conventions and statutes in Uganda against rape that protect male victims from female perpetrators.
“I want to pose a question. Do you believe that men are raped by women? Think about it,” he asked an audience at Makerere University’s law school auditorium.
“Sexual violence against men has existed but has received relatively little attention. Because in Uganda and elsewhere, men are considered strong and dominant.”
He said for many, it is physically impossible for a woman to rape a man, and in law, it is a more serious offence to forcibly penetrate someone than to force them to penetrate you.
Kyazze, a senior State Prosecutor, suggested that Uganda’s law on rape is biased and that it needs to be changed to protect men who are raped by men.
He said rape is an international crime that is not just growing but is also highly contested and without a joint legal definition.
Rape is an act of sexual assault and a violation of bodily integrity and sexual autonomy, defined as the “non-consensual [invasion of] the body of a person by conduct resulting in penetration, however slight, of any part of the body of the victim or of the perpetrator with a sexual organ.
Kyazze explained that, typically, society imagines men as the perpetrators and women as the victims of rape.
“We need to acknowledge that there are other stories. Stories of men who experience rape, sometimes at the hands of female perpetrators. This is a reality that many men face,” he argued.
He said this abuse is rarely discussed openly.
“In part, this is due to societal stereotypes that make it difficult for male survivors to come forward.”
Being a state prosecutor, Kyazze said some men told him that they were sexually abused by their spouses, workmates, and employers, but the cases don’t get to the courts.
“Today, male victims continue to face physical and psychological harm, including anxiety and depression, and denial of justice. Such a gap within our law leaves our country with no effort to prevent sexual violence against men, in particular rape, and it encourages the harmful stereotypes that exist in our society,” said Kyazze.
According to Kyazze, the rape of men by women happens when the female abuser uses emotional, sexual intimidation tactics and drugs to facilitate the rape.
He explained that when a woman has power or authority over a man, such as in a workplace, she may use that influence to coerce or manipulate a man into a sexual act.
Dr Daphine Agaba, a lecturer at the Department of Gender Studies, Makerere University, believed at one time that a man could not be raped by a woman.
“I asked myself this question several times. How are men raped by women exactly? So to find answers to this question, I polled my male friends,” she said.
In the poll, she discovered that men were willing to relate their experiences with women who had perpetrated sexual violence. In one case a man said he felt “raped and violated” by his wife, who wanted to have a third child.
From that and other testimonies that Agaba heard from her male colleagues, she said she started understanding something that she had earlier doubted.
However, Agaba was not fully convinced by Kyazze’s suggestion about the need to redefine rape under the penal code.
“That assertion decontextualises rape from its societal position. Rape doesn’t happen in the abstract. Rape is a manifestation of how power operates, and this power is still very largely neocentric. This power play not only affects women, but it also hierarchises men into those who are powerful and those who are not,” she said.
Being a woman and a gender activist, Agaba said she felt the debate could help both women and men survivors of sexual violence.
“Finally, men are going to start taking seriously our (women’s) concerns,” she said.
For over sixty years, Uganda has not had a definition for marital rape — the act of one spouse having sexual intercourse without their spouse’s consent.
Women have attempted to include it in the laws enacted over the past 30 years. But each time they have been defeated. In 2021 President Yoweri Museveni declined to assent to a marital rape law, reportedly because it was a duplication of other laws, but activists saw it as a setback for women’s rights.
“In the domestic relations bill, activists said marital rape is a very big challenge. When this bill was put before parliament, the male legislators essentially laughed the women legislators out of parliament,” Agaba commented.
“They said, if you’re my wife and I married you, under what circumstances would you say that I raped you?’ By talking about marital rape, this time perpetrated against men, it is my hope and prayer that now that men want to be written into the law, to be included in the law, they will now start to understand the real plight that we’ve been facing. So my question is, now that men want to be included in the rape law, will we see marital rape in our laws?”
Agaba explained that statistics about conviction rates for female rape victims remain too low in Uganda.
“Which means, even as we are talking about men, it’s not yet Uhuru (not yet Independence) for women, not even close. If Uhuru is here, women are about 100 years away from that. Is that a law that is working for its people?” she asked.
The low conviction rates aside, Agaba told IPS that the elephant in the room was the reality that men are being raped by fellow men, but this issue has been side-stepped in Uganda as elsewhere on the continent.
“In DRC, one in four men has experienced sexual violence. Yet, despite these statistics, few people have asked where this violence comes from. While women are disproportionately affected by sexual and gender violence, its prevalence does not make it exclusive to women. SGBV against men is most often perpetrated by men. It occurs outside the household; the perpetrators are often their acquaintances, their neighbours, and family members.”
She explained that the kind of abuse faced by men in the Congo includes rape, genital mutilation, enforced nudity, and involuntary sterilisation, all of which are perpetrated against both men and women.
Why have men not sought legal action when raped?
Dr Busingye Kabumba, a Senior Law Lecturer at Makerere University’s Law School, said rape has been defined as a crime that leaves the person alive but with a real cost in terms of life.
“That, when someone mentions rape, there’s really no questioning of what is being talked about. One can also think of the rape of men by men, and in those situations, again, there is no questioning what is being spoken of. In some cases, it’s even seen as worse,” adds Kabumba.
Kabumba explained that, like female rape victims, men who are sexually abused by women fear being further traumatised during the court trial.
“I know it’s a very traumatic experience, but then you are in this courtroom, you have a judge, what happened was traumatic, but you’re now being asked to describe it, there’s a transcriber, there’s a court clerk, and they’re just interested in the details, they’re not really interested in what you went through. It’s just, yes, ‘what happened?'” said Kabumba
He explained that under Uganda’s case law, there is already a challenge for women who are raped by men. Now, the idea that men could be the victim of sexual violence by a woman would be even more difficult to prosecute.
The survivor may not even be taken seriously if he does decide to report the crime.
“Is it the incredulity about the idea that a man is too powerful to be powerless? “Are we saying men are so powerful that they can never be overruled or violated?” he asked.
IPS UN Bureau Report
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Ino Afentouli, Senior Policy Advisor; Head of the Geopolitics and Diplomacy Observatory, ELIAMEP
The return of fear
If anything changed in Europe after 24 February 2022, it was the conviction that our continent had seen a definitive end to war. In the eight decades since the end of World War II, European leaders had done everything they could to consolidate the peace which they won in 1945, with American help. “Never again” was the driving force behind the founding of the European Economic Community, NATO, and other organizations created to eliminate conflict and establish a framework for peaceful coexistence motivated by a supranational interest that would be the sum of all national interests.
The columns of Russian tanks wresting territory away from Ukrainian metre by metre brought that historical era to an end, reanimating the old demons that had wreaked destruction across the continent for centuries. Objectively speaking, the institutions have held firm. Neither NATO nor the European Union has collapsed. Fortunately, because without them, Russia would not have stopped at Ukraine and broadened the European front; many countries would now be occupied, as they were between 1914 and 1944.
Still, Europe does not feel—and is not—secure. Worse still, in many countries, an alarming proportion of Europeans have begun to doubt whether these supranational institutions can protect them better than a return to national supremacy. This shift is the result of a fear which, if it becomes generalized, will erode the European unity that is already being tested by the war in Ukraine. Unity will be further undermined by the desire of certain EU member states to return to business as usual with Russia if peace is achieved. But Russia does not want peace. It wants Europe to remain in a state of perpetual insecurity, forever awaiting the next blow. It envisions a European Union divided into Moscow’s friends and enemies, rendered incapable of addressing its threats effectively. Russia wants a Europe unable to select its future members and forced to rearm at the expense of other policies, whose downgrading will drive segments of its population towards pro-Russian choices. This is the existential dilemma facing the EU. If it fails to address it, the bloc will indeed face the risk disintegration.
Jens Bastian, Senior Policy Advisor, ELIAMEP
As Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine enters its fifth year, two new strategic parameters of the war have come into focus. The first is that the dictator in the Kremlin is deliberately targeting energy infrastructure in order to force Ukrainian citizens to surrender. With the help of Iranian-manufactured Shahed drones and incessant missile attacks, power grids and energy pipelines are being destroyed in the middle of a brutal Ukrainian winter.
The other development relates to Donald Trump’s request for a so-called “peace deal”. To the extent that we know what this entails (and its elements are fluid at best), Trump’s “acrobatic” negotiating tactics appear set to reward the aggressor in Moscow. The envoys Trump has despatched to Geneva, Qatar and Istanbul for trilateral “negotiations” are not acting as neutral mediators between Kiev and Moscow. The US administration has made its hostility to the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, absolutely clear, while welcoming Putin with full honours in Alaska.
So, on the one hand, Russia’s winter bombing campaign is seeking to create a rift between Ukraine’s resilient civil society and its courageous army. And, on the other, the stance adopted by the US administration is pushing for the imposition of a “peace agreement” that will eviscerate Ukraine’s sovereignty and gravely jeopardize European security.
Both developments are perilous. The Trump administration and some EU governments want to re-establish trade agreements with Russia, particularly in the energy sector. The political groundwork for the policy of appeasing Putin is being laid in Washington, Budapest, Bratislava and Prague.
For more than four years, Putin has made it quite clear he does not speak the language of diplomacy. This sombre anniversary of Russia’s aggression obliges Europe to do ‘whatever it takes’ to help Ukraine survive. Kiev’s leverage at the negotiating table needs to be bolstered through increased military aid, sustained funding, and the restoration of civilian infrastructure. Ukraine’s citizens and soldiers will one day remind us who stood within the alliance of solidarity to defeat the Russian invaders—and who did not.
Spyros Blavoukos, Professor at the Athens University of Economics and Business, Head of the “Ariane Contellis” European Programme at ELIAMEP
Four years on, is there a realistic exit from the war in Ukraine?
As we enter the fifth year of the war in Ukraine, international fatigue has become palpable. One has only to glance at the scarce media coverage of developments on the battlefield or of the ongoing (?) negotiations. After all, the change of leadership in the White House has provided ample fodder for discussion and reflection, from the unilateral dismantling of the post-war regulatory framework governing the international economic system to the blatant challenging of the concept of state sovereignty in instances ranging from Greenland to Venezuela, with Iran potentially next in line. Amidst this onslaught of (violent) changes, who still focuses on the drama playing out in Ukraine? This explains why calls for Ukraine to embrace pragmatism have intensified, urging Kiev to search for a realistic exit strategy from the war.
There is no doubt that our insights into the battle-readiness of the Ukrainian army and the fighting spirit of Ukraine’s civilian population come to us filtered and second hand. But, at the end of the day, only the Ukrainian people has the right to decide on when and if to end hostilities, bearing the consequences of their choices. However, there is a fundamental prerequisite linked to the feasibility and, above all, the viability of any agreement. A settlement born of pressure or exhaustion that fails to establish a stable equilibrium and condemns Ukraine to a state of (semi)permanent vulnerability, is no more than a temporary fix with no realistic prospect of long-term implementation. Consequently, any discussion on ending the war must encompass elements to consolidate Ukrainian security and provide a robust deterrent against a new round of hostilities. Otherwise, the “realism” of today may well become synonymous with disastrous “appeasement” in the future.
Triantafyllos Karatrantos, Research Associate, ELIAMEP
Can peace be made sustainable?
February 24, 2022 was one of those days that changed our world. Its impact on security, international relations, and national and supranational policies can only be compared to that of the September 11 attacks. For four years now, interstate war and invasions by revisionist powers and totalitarian regimes has no longer been a hazy memory of World War II, but the difficult everyday reality for a European country and its citizens as they bravely defend themselves in the face, too, of a significant asymmetry of power.
Since taking office in January 2025, the US President has been working to craft a peace plan that could serve as a foundation for an agreement. Over the intervening 13 months, we can discern two primary strategic manoeuvres: overtures to Russia and the exertion of pressure on Ukraine. The latter, and its President, have shown themselves willing to make difficult decisions and bear the cost of peace. Russia, the invader, has yet to show the same willingness. This disparity is crucial when addressing the question of how realistic a prospect peace truly is. Even the most difficult peace can be realistic; however, it is not necessarily just and—most crucially—it is exceedingly difficult to sustain. That is the big question and the issue here. Will the peace be sustainable? The experience of 2014 has shown us how extremely hard this can be to achieve. We should not forget, either, that the pressure being put on Ukraine to agree to terms may become a highly problematic factor in the future.
Finally, there are two more parameters to take into account: The first is how Russia is punished for its invasion. That cost, across multiple levels, is what could render the use of hard power a non-option in the future. Yet, there is little room for optimism here, given our ongoing drift towards a world governed by force, rather than international law and rules. The second parameter is the threat Russia poses to European security, a point I feel needs no further elaboration here.
Panagiota Manoli, Associate Professor at the University of the Peloponnese; Senior Research Fellow, ELIAMEP
Fluctuating Deadlines
Russia’s “special military operation” against Ukraine, which was initially only supposed to last a few days, has stretched into its fifth year of full-scale war. The two sides began negotiating a ceasefire accord during the “Istanbul Talks” less than a month after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. These talks failed, but left a foundation for a potential ceasefire. Under Trump’s term in office, diplomacy has restarted with fluctuating peace objectives, timelines, and places of negotiations. Trump has set June 2026 as the latest date for an agreement. Despite the growing cost of the conflict on both sides, negotiations appear to be moving slowly. The same slow pace is observed on the battlefield. Russia’s daily gains on the ground are measured in meters. It appears that Kyiv is also unable to mark a decisive advancement. Is it possible that a cease-fire agreement will be concluded any time soon? The territorial issue appears to be the most challenging one on the table. Russia wants Kyiv to surrender all territories that have officially (and illegally) annexed, but Moscow does not control. Kyiv calls this an unacceptable capitulation. In an effort to alter the situation on the ground, military activities are anticipated to step up alongside diplomatic efforts. However, there is another, equally significant political issue on the table, and that is nothing less than Ukraine’s sovereignty as an independent state. Moscow’s objectives for Ukraine’s political subjugation remain unchanged, and on multiple occasions, Kremlin spokespersons have said that the “special military operation” will continue until “its goals are achieved”. Concerningly, US mediation focuses too much on the need for Ukraine to make concessions. Trump stated on 28 May 2025, that he would find out in two weeks if Putin was “tapping us along” or genuinely interested in ending the war. Since then, nine months have gone by, but Kyiv is instead held responsible for the lack of peace. “Ukraine better come to the table fast,” Trump repeated once again ahead of the latest round of talks in Geneva. Unless a major development happens, mainly on the battlefield, the prospects for a ceasefire, let alone a peace agreement, are grim.
Cover photo: publicdomainpictures.net