International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims
Abstract
It is generally known that during the 100 days of genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994, sexual violence was committed on an unprecedented scale. Many women were first raped and then killed. With a certain degree of probability, the majority of Tutsi women who survived had been raped. Limited information is available regarding the experiences of these women. However, there is enough empirical evidence provided in human rights accounts and research reports substantiating that these women were exposed to unimaginable horror, which for the majority of them had a range of devastating short and long term effects.
The programme of community-based sociotherapy was implemented in 2005 in the north of Rwanda in what was previously known as Byumba province, and subsequently in 2008 in Bugesera district in the south-east, one of the epicentres of the genocide.