The international legal framework is the first indicator to measure awareness of sexual violence against the male gender worldwide. Therefore, this Database aims to explore existing International Treaties, Regional Treaties, and International Jurisprudence to identify all relevant provisions related to the topic of sexual violence against the male gender. Unfortunately, the crime under consideration has received little attention from the international community, mostly focusing on violence against women. However, violence against men has widely occurred during conflicts across the world, thus increasing the exigence to properly address and qualify this offence. 

Although provisions related to sexual violence have been formulated in gender-neutral terms in the Statutes of the International Criminal Courts and Tribunals, in practice the International Criminal process has been more ambivalent. International criminal jurisprudence has not always qualified atrocities against the male gender successfully as sexual violence. Included is thus case law where male-centered sexual violence has been labelled by the International Courts and Tribunals as torture,  inhumane treatment, humiliating and degrading treatment, terror and the like, thus choosing to prosecute male sexual violence under more generic and inherently non-sexual statutory provisions. On other occasions, male sexual violence has been recorded as such, but overall has been treated to set the scene for other crimes without any legal consequences resulting for the accused. 

The selection of case law in the database reflects all three rubrics of documentation of sexual violence against men and boys in an attempt to provide a more wholesome perspective on the issue.