During the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, thousands of women mostly Tutsi women were sys-tematically raped, often tortured and mutilated, abused as sex slaves in forced marriages and deliberately infected with HIV / AIDS. Many of them became pregnant. Up to now, the sub-ject remains a taboo in Rwandan society.
Sexual violence during the genocide, including unwanted pregnancies, was aimed at sys-tematically liquidating the Tutsi ethnic group. The existence of these children from “bad memories” or “hatred” sometimes called children from rape represents the continual destruc-tion of the Tutsi community.
For a long time, SEVOTA worked mainly with mothers in the context of the “Abiyubaka fo-rum”. The conception described here now focuses on the psychosocial support for children from rape and includes two sides: a therapeutic side and a giving-a-sense-of-responsibility side. We call these children “Young people who can…” (In Kinyarwanda: Urubyiruko rusho-boye…. . In this way, we want to express and emphasize the potential of these young people and not to set bounds to them due to the violent circumstances of their origin.
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