Slate: Children of Bad Memories - Photographing a generation born of rape during the Rwandan genocide

They call them “enfants mauvais souvenirs,” children of bad memories. During the 1994 Rwandan genocide, hundreds of thousands of Tutsi women were systematically raped and forced into sexual servitude by members of extremist Hutu militia groups. Many of these women became pregnant. Since abortion is illegal in Rwanda, some resorted to back-alley procedures or traveled to the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo to terminate their pregnancies. Others gave birth and abandoned the babies or gave them away to orphanages. Still others kept their children and are now struggling to raise them alone in post-genocide Rwanda.

Photojournalist Jonathan Torgovnik first became aware of the estimated 20,000 Rwandan children born of rape in 2006. He was traveling on assignment for a Newsweek story pegged to the 25th anniversary of the AIDS epidemic. While in Rwanda, he met Odette, a young Tutsi woman who had been raped repeatedly during the genocide and had contracted HIV as a result. During the interview, she revealed that she was raising a son fathered by one of the Hutu militiamen who had raped her and slaughtered her family. (The subjects’ names have been changed to protect their identitites. While the women want the world to know what happened to them, they hope to protect themselves and their children from the censure of their own communities.)

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