Can You Love a Child of Rape?

Post-genocide, Rwandan women raise the children of their attackers. —Jonathan Torgovnik

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In 2006, photographer Jonathan Torgovnik began work on what became a three-year project photographing and interviewing Rwandan women who had children as the result of being raped during the genocide. Torgovnik won the 2007 National Portrait Gallery’s Photographic Portrait Prize for an image from this work. The culmination of his project is an exhibition and book, Intended Consequences: Rwandan Children Born of Rape, published by the Aperture Foundation. Inspired by the people he met on this project, Torgovnik co-founded Foundation Rwanda, established to improve the lives of Rwandan children born of rape.

Be sure to also visit MediaStorm's multimedia presentation of "Intended Consquences."

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Josette with her son, Thomas

The militias came in the evening and locked us in a house. Then they said they were going to rape us, but they used the word "marry." They said they were going to marry us until we stopped breathing. Every morning they hit us 10 times. After hitting us, we got a different man. Eventually my sister said it was too much, that we needed to commit suicide. There was a river close by that my sister heard people talking about. We went to look for it so we could throw ourselves into the river and die instead of living with torture. But when we got to the river, there were many dead bodies floating in it, and we feared going there.