A friend of mine told me the other day about this weird amazonian tribe. It seems that after a victorious battle against another tribe, they have a custom to RAPE all the POW’s. It is supposed to dishoner their foes, so that they would never fight against them again.
Now, is this total bullshit or what?
Well, if you’re looking for a weird Amazonian tribe, you probably want the Yanomamo. Napoleon Chagnon spent a lot of time living with them and wrote several books about his experiences.
As for your question, I found this quote about the Yanomamo from a lecture transcript. I recommend reading the whole page, it’s pretty interesting.
Try a Google search on Yanomamo and on Yanomama before you accept everything Chagnon published. He has come under increasing criticism over the last 20 years for having created many of the conflicts that he “documented” and for generalizing a lot of tribal behavior from individual incidents (some of which he may also have invented).
Sublight’s lecture transcript link tries to be even-handed, claiming that Chagnon “might” have been a little too eager to draw his conclusions of violence. There are a number of other reports that are pretty strongly condemnatory of Chagnon and his methodology.
Two fierce opponents of Chagnon have been Kenneth Good and Patrick Tierney. Good eventually married a Yanomama woman who now lives with him and their three children in Pennsylvania (when they are not on expeditions). Tierney wrote a scathing book, Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon, condemning Chagnon, but flawed by a number of factual errors (particularly concerning a measles outbreak that he insists was introduced or exacerbated by a doctor accompanying Chagnon).
While everyone seems to have an axe to grind, I would not accept as fact anything that made broad claims to strange behavior–particularly regarding warfare.
Thanks for the info. The whole thing just sounded so weird that I had to know if there was any truth in it. 
-Alphie-
Well, it’s probably not total bullshit - rape of POW’s is known in Europe, Asia, and Africa, why not the Americas? It’s one of those dirty aspects of war that isn’t much talked about.
As for “dishonoring” their foes - yeah, I’m sure it’s awful and devastating. However, when this was (reputedly) done to T.E. Lawrence it only made him that more determined to get the [insert profanity of your choice] who did that to him. It may be rationalized by otherwise heterosexual men in various ways, but raping POW’s (male or female) is, like all rape, more about power than sex.