Men Who Killed Me, The

Rwandan Survivors of Sexual Violence

edited by Sandra Chu & Anne-Marie De Brouwer, epilogue by Eve Ensler, foreword by Stephen Lewis, photographs by Stephen Muscati

tagged: human rights, photoessays & documentaries, women

Description

A searing testimonial to the horrors of sexual violence in war -- a littleknown aspect of the Rwandan tragedy.

In the hundred days of genocide that ravaged Rwanda between April and July 1994, an estimated 250,000 to 500,000 women and girls were raped. No one was spared. Grandmothers were raped in the presence of their grandchildren; young girls watched the massacre of their families before being taken as sex slaves. To a lesser extent, boys and men also fell victim to sexual violence.

Fifteen years after the Rwandan genocide, The Men Who Killed Me features testimonials from seventeen survivors. Through their narratives and portraits, sixteen women and one man bear witness to the crimes committed against hundreds of thousands of others. In their strength and courage, they challenge the stigma of surviving sexual violence and living with HIV/AIDS (an astonishing 70 per cent of survivors are HIV positive).

Proceeds from this book will go to Mukomeze, a charitable organization established to improve the lives of girls and women who survived sexual violence in the Rwandan genocide.

About the Authors

Sandra Chu

Sandra Ka Hon Chu is a lawyer and senior policy analyst with the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network. She has worked in East Timor, Libya, Hong Kong, Canada and the Netherlands.

Anne-Marie De Brouwer

Anne-Marie de Brouwer is an associate professor of criminal and international criminal law at Tilburg University, the Netherlands and is the chair of the board of Mukomeze (Empower Her), a charitable organization established to improve the lives of girls and women who survived sexual violence in the Rwandan genocide.

Eve Ensler, playwright, performer, and activist, is the founder of V-Day, a global movement to stop violence against women and girls.

STEPHEN LEWIS is the former UN Secretary-General's special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa and director of the Stephen Lewis Foundation. His previous roles include Canadian ambassador to the UN, special advisor on Africa to the UN Secretary-General, and deputy executive director of UNICEF. He was named "Canadian of the Year" by Maclean's magazine in 2003 and one of the 100 most influential people in the world by TIME magazine in 2005.

Samer Muscati is a Canadian lawyer and freelance photographer whose photographs have appeared in many publications, including Time magazine.

Editorial Reviews

"Muscati's 35 B&W photographs of the survivors and their families are as moving and unforgettable as their words."

— Publishers Weekly

"The Men Who Killed Me, with a foreword by Stephen Lewis and an afterword by Eve Ensler, has garnered attention from all corners of the social justice arena, and is being regarded as a haunting, blunt account of the rape and 'femicide' that underscored the Rwandan genocide. Romeo Dallaire...has said, 'Graphically, and without doubt, this book makes the case that rape is no lesser a crime than murder.'"

— Precedent Magazine

"An intense collection of first-hand testimonials combined with striking black and white portraiture, the book gives the inside story of the impact of one hundred days of genocide from the distance of an outsider's perspective, a privileged position given the inhumanity of the slaughter in which nearly a million people were killed in just one hundred days."

— Lucid Magazine

Out of print