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>>Men are raped and sexually tortured as POW's as well. <<

And. . .your proof is?

In the Gulf War there is only one report of rape, British (John Peters, nice guy, chatted with him a few times).
There are no reports, classified or otherwise, that indicate rape.

If by sexual abuse you mean applying electrical shock to the private areas, that indeed happen.

If you are alleging rape happens to the extent that women get raped, you are simply not correct. 100% of women captured in the Gulf War were raped. Are you suggesting this is true for the men as well? Again, classified reports indicate no such thing. Not even close. Not even far. Not even.

Now, however, if you are referring to worldwide situations from places like the Sudan, perhaps you are right. But you are not correct when it comes to Americans.

The issue of rape is emotional and can be a strong weapon against the American male POW.

Are you asserting that male American POW's are immune to rape or sexual torture?

Male-male rape during war is a historical fact and has been for eons. So is castaration of male prisoners of war. Both of these things happened in the Balkans and in Viet Nam. I don't know the prevalence of torture vs. rape but it can happen to either sex as a POW. Male-male rape is especially prevalent as a form of retribution in Moslem countries. As is castration. Our own "allies" the so-called Northern Alliance in Afghanistan castrated Taliban POW's once they got the upper hand (in addition to raping and plunding the general population as well) until we reigned them in somewhat.

Regarding the Gulf War, how do you know what is not present in classified documents? There were not very many American POW's in the Gulf War so I doubt our government would violate their privacy by detailing any rape, torture or mistreatment, particularly if they had be sexually assualted. Why would they publicize this?

And in general male victims of rape are much more reluctant to talk about it than female victims. In the Balkans for example there were numerous accounts of male-male rape of prisoners (in addition to castration and other horrors) however no male rape victims have come forward to name their accusors at the War Crimes Tribunal. Most likely because most of them are dead.

"The rape of males was more widely recognized in ancient times. Raping defeated males was considered the special right of the victorious soldier in some societies, and was a signal of the totality of the defeat. There was a widespread belief that a male who was sexually penetrated, even if it was by forced sexual assault, thus "lost his manhood," and could no longer be a warrior or ruler. In the twentieth century, the best-known instance of this kind of humiliation occurred when the Englishman T.E. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia") was captured by the Turks, who were well known for this custom, during World War I. The subsequent disruption of Lawrence's life, while a surprise to his contemporaries, can now be recognized as a typical consequence of male Rape Trauma Syndrome. Gang rape of a male was considered an ultimate form of punishment, and as such was known to the Romans, as punishment for adultery, and to the Persians and Iranians, as punishment for violation of the sanctity of the harem (Donaldson, 1990)."

http://www.callrape.com/malerape.html

"As we saw on the battlefields of Kosovo - and previously Bosnia – the jingoistic, hysterical patriotism of wartime can turn routine homophobia into something even more sinister and evil. The Balkan bloodbath was no exception. Home-sadism became a weapon of war. While the rape of women was widely reported in the press, the rape of male prisoners passed almost without mention. Why? The widespread sex abuse of men has been publicly acknowledged by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson. What motivated journalists to suppress information about these monstrous sex crimes? The media did, after all, report every other inhumanity with a reasonable degree of honesty and impartiality. Accounts collected by UN observers from ethnic Albanian refugees and former detainees confirm that many male prisoners were raped at gun-point and sexually tortured under interrogation by Serb forces in Kosovo. In some conquered villages, Serb soldiers rounded up the men and boys, stripped them naked, and forced the boys to fellate their fathers, and the fathers to sodomise their sons."

http://www.petertatchell.net/international/homophobia.htm