Mary Frances Calvert, Kirsten Luce, Katie Orlinsky, Sergey Ponomarev and Jonathan Torgovnik have won this year’s Getty Images Grants for Editorial Photography.
In 2006, Jonathan Torgovnik worked on a photographic essay, on the children born as a result of rape during the genocide there in 1994.
Many Tutsi women were forced to watch their husbands killed right in front of them, and then were brutally and repeatedly raped by Hutu militias. They often contracted AIDS and gave birth to children, who were at the time unwanted. Their woes were exacerbated by their own tribe’s rejecting both mother and child because the child was the product of mixed parentage. These little family units received little or no help or comfort.
“An estimated 20,000 children were born of rapes that occurred during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Fifteen years later, the mothers of these children still face enormous challenges, not least of which is the stigma of bearing and raising a child fathered by a Hutu militiaman. Over the past three years, photographer Jonathan Torgovnik has made repeated visits to Rwanda to document the stories of these women.
During the 1994 genocide, Rwandan women were subjected to massive sexual violence, perpetrated by members of the infamous Hutu militia groups known as the Interahamwe. Among the survivors, those who are most isolated are the women who have borne children as a result of being raped. Their families have rejected both them and their children, compounding their already unimaginable emotional distress.
