Those offices and officials and the United Nations as a whole assuredly have ...

Those offices and officials and the United Nations as a whole assuredly have an indispensable role to play, but the key to further progress in reducing suffering and in protecting the vulnerable is action by the parties to conflict. Every Government has a responsibility to establish standards, develop institutions and pursue policies that protect its people from sexual violence, whether perpetrated by the Government's own forces or by others. That responsibility includes, as Special Representative Bangura just put it, redirecting the stigma from the survivors to the perpetrators. That duty extends to men and boys, who have suffered sexual violence to an extent we have only recently begun to appreciate — in places like Colombia, where boys were turned into sex slaves by illegal armed groups; in Rutshuru, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which was under the savage control of the Mouvement du 23 mars for much of 2013; and in Libya, where the United Nations reported that armed brigades used rape in detention as a form of torture.