Africa

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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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