The big picture: the project of Rwandan girls | Art and design

TToday marks the 25th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide. In just one hundred days, between 7 April and 15 July 1994, seven out of ten Tutsi living in Rwanda were murdered by their Hutu neighbors. One million people, including 10,000 Batwa pygmies, have died.

What is less well known about these terrible months is that nearly 250,000 women have been raped. Many were infected with HIV and died later of an AIDS-related illness. The UN estimates that 2,000 women have become pregnant (the actual number could be much higher). A quarter of a century later, while many of the surviving children of these pregnancies are older than their mothers at the time, many anxieties, tensions and social stigma persist.

The German photographer Olaf Heine, in collaboration with the humanitarian organization Ora Kinderhilfe, worked for three years on the Rwandan Daughters project, which presents 80 rape victims and their children (seven sons too). In the resulting book, the lives of two generations linked by violence and trauma are explored with disarming clarity and frankness.

Heine often photographs mother-child pairs in or around the rape scene – on farmland, roadsides and churches. In their poses, we can discern something of their relationships. Some hold hands or hug and seem comfortable in everyone's company. Others, like mother and daughter on this picture taken outside the capital, Kigali, keep a distance, one turning away from each other as if they were separated by an insurmountable barrier.

"All these Rwandan children have one thing in common: they have never been sought after, they have often been accepted only reluctantly, sometimes beloved, in a patriarchal society that considers them not as victims, but as children of murderers, "says Heine.

In the aftermath of the genocide, many abused women were unable to find a partner and lived in precarious situations, marginalized by society and struggling to accept their children. Therapeutic care provided by organizations such as Solace Ministries, which supported the Rwandan Daughters project, allowed a number of mothers and children to reconcile and move forward – but, as suggested by Heine's powerful testimony, some of the injuries inflicted 25 years ago may never occur. to be completely healed.

Rwandan Daughters of Olaf Heine is published by Hatje Cantz (£ 55)