Children born of rape: the devastating legacy of sexual violence in post-genocide Rwanda

A woman carrying a child looks at a wall in Kigali with names of the victims of the 1994 Rwanda genocide.& Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP via Getty Images by Myriam Denov, McGill University Trigger warning: this article contains accounts of sexual violence. The 1994 Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi led to the murder of more than 800,000 people, an estimated 70% of the country’s Tutsi population. The unprecedented violence and mass killings of Tutsi and non-extremist Hutu were carried out over 100 days between April and July 1994. An estimated 250,000–500,000 women and girls were raped during the genocide by the Hutu-led militia group Interahamwe, local police officers and individual men. Hutu women were also abused by soldiers from the Rwandan Patriotic Front. Up to 90% of Tutsi women who survived the genocide suffered some form of sexual violence. Although rape was often immediately followed by murder, some girls and women survived, and were told by their aggressors that they would “die of sadness”. Sexual violence was used as a deliberate strategy and weapon of genocide to degrade, humiliate and destroy the Tutsi. It had devastating physical, psychological and socio-economic effects. Conflict-related sexual violence affects individual rape survivors, as well as entire...