It's not just in East Africa that these stories remain unheard. 'There are certain things you just don't believe can happen to a man, you get me? But I know now that sexual violence against men is a huge problem. 'That was hard for me to take,' Owiny tells me today. The wounds of one were so grievous that he died in the cell in front of him. He watched as man after man was taken and raped.

His captors raped him, three times a day, every day for three years. During his escape from the civil war in neighbouring Congo, he had been separated from his wife and taken by rebels. Laying the pus-covered pad on the desk in front of him, he gave up his secret. He reached into his pocket and pulled out an old sanitary pad. The man then murmured cryptically: 'It happened to me.' Owiny frowned. I'm sure there's something he's keeping from me.' 'My husband can't have sex,' she complained. A female client was having marital difficulties. This particular case, though, was a puzzle. For four years Eunice Owiny had been employed by Makerere University's Refugee Law Project (RLP) to help displaced people from all over Africa work through their traumas. This is just what happened on an ordinary afternoon in the office of a kind and careful counsellor in Kampala, Uganda. Yet every now and then someone gathers the courage to tell of it. Governments, aid agencies and human rights defenders at the UN barely acknowledge its possibility. It is usually denied by the perpetrator and his victim.

O f all the secrets of war, there is one that is so well kept that it exists mostly as a rumour.

Nobody here but us trees