Gay Forced Dark: Incredible Gay Experiences of Straight Guys

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There are people among the staff at humanitarian service providers who think that sexual violence against men and boys does not exist or men can only be perpetrators,” said a social worker handling cases of torture survivors. Ensure that health care workers and police are trained to work with traumatized victims and witnesses, including in clinical management of rape of male survivors and identification of male survivors of sexual violence.

Case workers interviewed by Human Rights Watch suggested that more emotional support groups should be established for men, so that male survivors could have a safe space to talk. A 2014 Syria COI report states: Men were tortured and raped on the grounds of their sexual orientation at government checkpoints in Damascus. Some continued to experience physical symptoms resulting from injuries or physical trauma sustained during attacks.

They had a stick inside my anus, and they started saying, ‘This is what you like, don’t you like it? She said: A week later they took me to a collective prison [central prison] where I was raped almost every night.

Heterosexual men and boys are vulnerable to sexual violence in Syria, but men who are gay or bisexual—or perceived to be—and transgender women are particularly at risk. Another false assumption is that only GBT individuals are targets of rape and other forms of sexual violence. Men and boys, transgender women, and non-binary survivors of sexual violence told Human Rights Watch that they did not seek any medical or mental health services in Syria for a range of reasons, including shame, fear of stigma, and a lack of trust in the health care system. We had the lights and cameras tested but nothing came back – but forensic tests 30 years ago were not nearly as thorough as they are now. Two interviewees told Human Rights Watch that some humanitarian staff, including the security guards, did not treat them properly.

Five interviewees said that officers would threaten to rape their mothers or sisters during interrogations at detention centers and civil prisons or during stops at checkpoints. Interviewees told Human Rights Watch that survivors of sexual violence face challenges receiving survivor-centered medical and psychological health services in Lebanon. A case worker who works with torture survivors told Human Rights Watch that even men who access psychosocial services can take a very long time to build trust and disclose rape or other sexual abuse they have experienced.

GBT survivors who served in the Syrian military were subject to rape and other forms of sexual violence by other army members and in military prisons. Sabah, 40, a transgender woman, was detained in Sednaya, a military prison in Damascus, before the Syrian conflict started.Some of the survivors interviewed by Human Rights Watch said that they do not see any future and have no hope in life after what they went through. While this report focuses on GBT survivors, people with non-normative sexual orientation and gender identity are not the only targets of conflict-related sexual violence. While many of the Syrian survivors interviewed by Human Rights Watch have also experienced sexual violence in Lebanon, we did not include those incidents in this report. Interviewees told Human Rights Watch that in Syrian detention centers, security forces would force detainees, regardless of their sexual orientation, to take off their clothes, leaving them only in their underwear or totally nude.

Yousef told Human Rights Watch: “They said, ‘We are going to bring here your dad to see that you are gay and they will disown you and you are disgusting.In Syrian intelligence branches, officers have used rape as a means of torturing men and boys during interrogation sessions or torture sessions . On April 23, 2019, the UN Security Council adopted resolution 2467 on conflict-related sexual violence, which recognizes that men and boys are also targets of sexual violence in both conflict and post-conflict settings. Gather data on patterns of sexual violence against men and boys, with a view to assessing the scope of sexual violence committed against men and boys and establishing prevalence of sexual violence against men and boys in the Syrian conflict. Interviewees said that they or their friends who served in the army were taken to Tadmur Prison and Palestine Branch because they were GBT. Some referred to this as acting like “real men” or suppressing behaviors that might be perceived as “soft.