Screams Without Words: How the White Settler Weaponized Sexual Violence Against Men

21 Aug 2024

Settler colonial states always include sexual violence as a function of their domination over the colonized population. The genocide in Gaza by Israel and the sadism it inflicts on the Palestinian people is an example. While Israel lobs unverified accusations of sexual violence at the Palestinian resistance, we know every accusation is an admission.

Originally published in Jon Jeter.

And we know what happened and we know who had the whip and so it was not my grandmother who raped anybody.

James Baldwin

In the wee morning hours of August 9, 1997, a melee erupted outside a popular nightclub in Brooklyn’s East Flatbush neighborhood. Among the throng of NYPD officers dispatched to the scene was a 26-year-old white officer, Justin Volpe, who was hit in the head and knocked to the ground while trying to handcuff a Haitian immigrant named Abner Louima. In the fog of battle, Volpe mistook Louima for his assailant and joined with other officers who beat and taunted Louima as he sat handcuffed in the back seat of a patrol car.

But when Volpe spotted Louima standing at the front desk of the 70th precinct later that night, it seemed to set him off all over again. He walked to a juvenile interrogation room, found a wooden broomstick, broke it over his knee and hid half behind a garbage can in the precinct’s bathroom. Then, donning a pair of borrowed leather gloves, Volpe and another officer returned to the front desk, yanked Louima’s pants and underwear down to his ankles, and in full view of the entire squad, frog-marched him to the bathroom.

“I kept asking ‘Why? Why’” Louima would say later. One of the officers answered: “You n!$$ers have to learn how to respect police.’”

Once inside the bathroom, Volpe threw Louima to the floor near a toilet, kicked him in his exposed groin, then muffled his screams by putting his boot over his mouth. The other officer lifted Louima by his handcuffs and Volpe shoved the broomstick six inches up his ass, tearing his colon and bladder. Louima would later say:

“When they pulled it out, it was covered with blood and feces.”

But Volpe’s attack didn’t end there; after he had sodomized Louima with the broomstick, he shoved it into his mouth, breaking several teeth. Only when it became apparent that Louima’s injuries were life-threatening hours later did Volpe and another officer transport him to the emergency room, explaining that he had been injured in a gay bar and found on the street. At Volpe’s trial, officers recalled Volpe parading around the precinct on the night of the assault while brandishing the bloodied broomstick like a trophy. And with no small measure of sexual bravado in his voice, he boasted:

“I broke a man down.”

Three months later, South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission heard testimony that a white, mid-level police officer named Jeffrey Benzien had routinely coerced confessions from Black anti-apartheid activists by using torture techniques that included attaching electrodes to men’s genital and, like Volpe, plunging a broomstick up the rectum of at least one detainee.

And three years before that, in 1994, Israeli commandos swooped into Lebanon to abduct a Muslim rebel leader, Mustafa Dirani, who was suspected of orchestrating the kidnapping of an Israeli airman. He was taken to a facility in Israel, stripped naked, shackled and brutally interrogated around the clock for weeks on end by six people, including a particularly sadistic man known only as “George.”

One day, George brought a uniformed soldier nicknamed Kojak into Dirani’s holding cell. Kojak dropped his pants while Dirani was shackled to a bench, and threatened with sodomy if he refused to talk. Dirani would later testify in an Israeli court:

I couldn’t see or resist. . .I was raped by the soldier. He said he would rape me, and he did. Two or three days later they started raping me with a police baton. It’s impossible to describe the pain. I yelled to high heaven.

A number of journalists and sources have by now debunked a New York Times story published in the final days of 2023 alleging that Hamas militants systematically raped and tortured Israeli women during its October 7 attack. Despite a lack of forensic evidence or credible witnesses, the Times continues to stand by its story, entitled “Screams Without Words: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence,” parroting, in a sense, the words of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfield in the runup to the Iraq war that the absence of evidence is not tantamount to evidence of absence.

However unlikely it seems that Hamas militants would sexually assault women during a running gun battle, it is true that no one can say definitively that the accusations of sexual assault by Hamas are untrue. On the other hand, what can be said with absolute certainty is that the white settler colonial state–from the U.S. to apartheid South Africa to Israel–has historically engaged in a pattern of sexual terror against both women and men as a means of asserting control over racialized subjects.

Social scientists have long understood sexual sadism as a tool of war. Soldiers with the Soviet Union’s Red Army are estimated to have assaulted as many as two million women during their occupation of postwar Germany, or as one Russian war correspondent wrote at the time, “every German female from eight to eighty. It was an army of rapists.”

Similarly, feminist scholars often refer to an American rape culture that is deeply intertwined with chattel slavery. According to Edward Baptist, author of The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, plantation owners envisioned the slave quarters on their property as their personal “sexual playground.” In her book, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance - a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Black Power Movement, Danielle McGuire wrote that sexual assaults of African American women by white men were so endemic that Rosa Parks began her career in activism helping victims pursue criminal charges against their tormentors.

Less well-known are the series of rapes committed by agents of settler colonialism against male dissidents and men of color who are even less likely than women to report their abuse because of the shame and stigma.

A video published this month on social media appears to show a gaggle of Israeli corrections officers gang-raping a Palestinian prisoner at the Sde Teiman detention facility in the Negev desert. With his hands bound behind his back, the male prisoner is escorted to a wall where prison guards–using riot shields to hide their identity from the camera–appear to rape him. The victim was hospitalized with severe injuries similar to Louima’s 27 years ago, including a torn rectum, broken ribs, and ruptured bowels.

When Israeli authorities detained the nine military reservists for questioning, a mob of far-right protesters–including at least two lawmakers and the defense minister–stormed Sde Teiman to demand their release.

While acknowledging that she is unaware of any data that interrogates the phenomena, Louise Du Toit, a philosophy professor at the University of Stellenbosch in Cape Town, South Africa who has written extensively about rape wrote to me in an email:

It seems right that sexual violence would be directed at men deemed to be racially inferior, because in my understanding, raciali(z)ation as a pseudo-biological category always partly depends upon a sexual denigration component.

In a telephone interview, Paula Ioanide, a researcher at the Center for Policing Equity, told me that she spent a decade studying Louima’s assault. The key to understanding the use of rape to terrorize racialized men lies in Volpe’s celebration after he had violated Louima.

It stumped me at first. I couldn’t understand how Volpe could be engaged to (marry) a Black woman and yet he could do this to a Black man. What would make this possible?I had to go back to the scenes of lynching to understand this libidinal component. When you look at the photographs they (the white mob) would have glee on their faces.

The ritual of whites murdering Blacks and dismembering their sexual organs for trophies is rooted in the mythologizing of African Americans as hypersexual, and Black men, in particular, as rapists. This is done, ironically enough, to justify massacres such as the 1898 slaughter of an estimated 300 Blacks in Wilmington, North Carolina, and Israel’s siege of Gaza which has resulted in the deaths of an estimated 186,000 Palestinians.

The conundrum, Ioanide said, is that white men in settler societies often begin to believe their own fantastical lie and develop a pornographic obsession with the very men that they pathologize.

Poor white people situate themselves as aggrieved and consistently under the threat of loss from Black people. You’re taking my taxpayer money, or in the case of Latino immigrants you’re taking my jobs.There is a kind of sexual jealousy that is produced between white man and black men

In Birth of a Nation, D.W. Griffith depicts Black men as hyper violent and also hpyersexual. This becomes a fantasy construction in the white male mind. . . that the Black man is more sexual. It suggests that white men are sexually lacking. And that in turn fuels the fear that the white woman will want the Black man more sexually.

So how do you extinguish this threat to the white man?

By castrating the Black man, by feminizing the Black man, by reproducing the lynching ritual.

Lynching, Ioanide said, not only eliminates the Black man as a competitor for the affections of white women, it also prevents the transfer of white wealth to Black men through marriage.

This helps explain the white settlers’ use of rape to terrorize men of color around the world. Investigating abuses at Iraq’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison under U.S. occupation, a Major General’s 53-page-report found evidence that military personnel engaged in:

Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.

At Attica prison in upstate New York, an emergency room physician working at a nearby hospital in 1971 after police put down a prisoner revolt reported that he saw “an inmate with large wounds around his rectum which were not from gunshot and which, he later heard, had been caused by a broken bottle.”

In Chicago, police under the command of Commander John Burge coerced confessions from more than 100 African American men over three decades using torture techniques that included electrodes attached to their testicles. (Burge learned the techniques from his tour of duty in Vietnam during the war.) Even the acclaimed African American writer, James Baldwin, wrote of a redneck southern sheriff’s deputy fondling him while frisking him.

For all the talk of rapes by Hamas, there is almost no evidence of racialized groups systematically raping their oppressors. Conversely, the Palestinian writer Nada Chehade wrote that Palestinian men, women and children have complained of rape by Israeli settlers for decades.

Colonizers rape everyone they colonize because of the power imbalance of occupation.

Jon Jeter is a former foreign correspondent for the Washington Post, Jon Jeter is the author of Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People and the co-author of A Day Late and a Dollar Short: Dark Days and Bright Nights in Obama's Postracial America. His work can be found on Patreon as well as Black Republic Media.

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