Sexual and gender-based violence includes acts that inflict physical, sexual or mental harm or suffering, threats of such acts, coercion and other deprivations of liberty whether in public or in private.
This term is used synonymously with gender-based violence, violence against women and girls, intimate partner violence and includes child physical and sexual abuse, child neglect and maltreatment.
Women and girls are disproportionately affected by SGBV, however, this does not exclude men and boys from violence perpetrated against them, by both male and female offenders.
When I started working as a police doctor in 2012, I would attend to victims of sexual and physical abuse on a daily basis. The majority of cases occur in the domestic setting, where fathers, stepfathers, mothers’ boyfriends, uncles and grandfathers top the list of offenders.
Ninety per cent of the victims I attended to were children. Initially, I would attend to three to five victims of sexual violence a day.
By 2018, this number had risen steadily to 10-15 victims a day. Of all the cases, about one in 20 were males, with the number having risen through the years, such that by 2019 I would attend to not fewer than five boys per week.
I have also examined numerous adult male victims of sexual abuse that occurred in their childhood, and even in adulthood. Most of these offences are drug-facilitated, where the offender used alcohol to incapacitate the victim before initiating abuse.
Sometimes, violence is used to render the victim immobile and unconscious, only to wake up and find himself in pain, bleeding, confused and in a strange unfamiliar location.
Offenders are mostly male, however, I have received reports from distressed persons, either on WhatsApp, or other social media platforms where the male victim alleges that he has been abused, even gang-raped by women.
Many wonder how a man can be raped, or even be upset when this happens (where females are the offenders). Well, rape occurs when sexual relations take place without consent.
Consent must be explicit and not assumed or gotten by coercion, and definitely not when an individual is intoxicated or under the influence of any drugs/substances.
Secondly, the human body can respond to sexual stimulation involuntarily, meaning, the body, and organs, may respond to sexual stimulation even if the mind does not want this arousal. This explains why a man can be sexually abused by a woman.
Further, sexual abuse of males by males, or what is referred to loosely as sodomy, can also result in an involuntary response by the victim (arousal and ejaculation).
This is a physiological response and has nothing to do with one’s desire or lack of it.
When this occurs, many victims question their sexual orientation and their identity, and wonder if they may be homosexual and don’t know it.
This is particularly troubling for men who identify as heterosexual and not homosexual.
The forensic doctor and SGBV adviser to the Chief Justice spoke to the Star