Trigger Warning:

This thread contains vivid details of the experiences of victims of genocidal rape & and the aftereffects

It is disturbing content, so I encourage you to prepare yourself emotionally or to avoid reading, if you believe it will be traumatizing for you. https://twitter.com/LWSupremeStreet/status/1248476774037467136

Academia has begun to pay close attention to how rape is weaponized in conflicts. This is an incredibly difficult subject. And Survivors still grapple with the effects of it to this day.
I am pulling from research done by Dr. Donatilla Mukamana et al and Rachel A. Sitkin et al.

In his book waiting for first light, Roméo Dallaire describes sending a patrol into a village after receiving reports that the population had been slaughtered earlier. The patrol stumbled upon a large ditch in a cordoned-off area, it was a rape site. Dozens of women and girls had

been horrifically hurt. He writes, “Sexual violence had not been the exception and it had not been spantenous. Broadcasts over the radio had incited rape as a highly effective tool in the genocide; the minister of youth had even inicted her own sons to commit this act of

degradation as a means to achieve the end of the Tutsi minority.”
Article II of the 1948 Geneva Convention defines genocide as: “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group”, as such:

(a) killing members of the group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group the conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) imposing measures intended to prevent

births within the group; and (e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
The systematic use of sexual violence as a tool of genocide, fulfills not one, but all five conditions of genocide. While women often bear the blunt genocide sexual violence,

it is important to note that sexual violence isn't reserved solely for women. Many boys and men were subjected to sexual terror as well.
Sitkin asks an important question: “Why humiliate a population that is in the process of being completely destroyed? What goals could be

accomplished through sexual violence that couldn’t be accomplished through homicide? Clearly, most of the Interahamwe who used rape as a weapon of genocide had no compulsion against killing women.”

“The rapes function to add socio-cultural insult to physical injury for the victim and the ethnic group itself. Not only will the population be destroyed—the ultimate goal of any genocide—but, before the destruction occurs, all dignity and rights held by the population will be

removed.”
These the findings by Dr. Donatilla Mukamana and her team in their paper "Genocide Rape Trauma: A Conceptual Framework for Understanding the Psychological Suffering of Rwandan Survivors."

Genocidal rape heightened the fear of Tutsi women who were already enduring fear of death, starvation, and loss of shelter and family members. This is the web of suffering illustrated by Dr. Mukamana’s team to help grasp what survivors have been dealing with.

This an essay (academic) that I wrote on some of the politics.
"Many kill lists were drawn containing the names of Tutsis in an area, but no rape lists needed to be drawn. The constant media propaganda, innuendoes and jokes were interpreted as intended..."
https://blogs.ubc.ca/supremestreet/terror-against-tutsi-women/

I was hesitant to share some of these because of the magnitude of these horrors but @IntwaliBruce told me, “It is of absolute importance that we don't try to dilute the horror that Genocide is. I think it's important to lay it bare for people to be able to understand that these

are not just statistics, they're people's lives that have been altered eternally (and in some cases irreparably).”
We stand with survivors wishing for them unending peace and healing. Always. #Kwibuka26 #Kwibuka_Twiyubaka

https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2019/04/africa/rwandan-daughters-cnnphotos/