
Disclosure: Rwandan Children Born of Rape
- Publisher
- Akaaka Art Publishing
- Year
- 2020
- ISBN
- 978-4-86541-115-7
- Specifications
- Softcover
250 x 212 mm
114 pages
Japanese / English
Photographs and interviews by Jonathan Torgovnik
Planning and translation by Mariko Takeuchi
Book design by Masakazu Onishi
In the genocide of 1994 in Rwanda some 800,000 people were killed in 100 days and many women were made victims of sexual violence as a weapon of war; some 20,000 children were born as a result, a fact long buried. Jonathan Torgovnik, who learned of it by chance in 2006, interviewed women and photographed them with their children in the earlier book Intended Consequences. Twelve years after those first meetings he returned to the families, 16 of the 30 pairs of mothers and children who had appeared, and for the first time interviewed the children, now adults. Their mothers had told each of them of their origins, and the children speak of having been called children of killers, of discrimination, and of hope and forgiveness. The sexual violence of conflict is a profound trauma that is passed down to future generations.