Once we had established some rapport, I tentatively probed whether they had heard of any reports of sexual violence against men or boys in Syria. I asked them about their lives in the camp, how they were getting by, and what their main concerns were. I met with the first group, eight Syrian men who had fled the war. The UNHCR arranged for a translator and discussions with refugees at a nearby camp. In October 2016, I landed in Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, where more than 200,000 Syrian refugees had fled. I worried that few refugees would have heard of any accounts and that they wouldn’t talk to me about such a taboo topic anyway. Drawing on a few existing reports, I assumed some boys were being victimised, as well as some men in detention centres, but that sexual violence against males was not common. We knew that many women and girls were being targeted for rape and other sexualised violence, but we didn’t know much about what was happening to men and boys. L ast year I agreed to undertake a fact-finding mission for the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, on sexual violence against men and boys in the Syrian crisis.
