When Men Go to War, Women Suffer: The Rwanda Genocide and What Was Done to Women

On the evening of April 6, 1994, a plane carrying Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana was shot down over Kigali. He was dead before the wreckage hit the ground. Within hours, the killing had begun.

What followed was not chaos. It was a plan. Over the next 100 days, somewhere between 800,000 and one million people, the vast majority of them Tutsi, were killed by Hutu extremist militias and soldiers of the Rwandan Armed Forces. Neighbours killed neighbours. Priests killed congregants. Teachers killed students. The radio told people exactly where to find those who were hiding.

But inside that plan was another plan. One aimed specifically at women.

Between 250,000 and 500,000 women and girls were raped during the genocide. That number is not a side effect of war. It was the point.

The logic of targeting women

To understand what was done to women in Rwanda, you have to understand how the people organising the genocide were thinking.

The genocide was not simply about killing Tutsi people. It was about erasing them. That meant killing the living. But it also meant destroying the future. And in the minds of the architects of the genocide, the future lived in women's bodies.

Rape was not incidental to the genocide. It was a tool of it. Senior Hutu officials and militia leaders directed their men to rape Tutsi women systematically, with a specific intent: to destroy their dignity, their families, and their capacity to continue the Tutsi line. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) later confirmed that sexual violence against Tutsi women was a deliberate and coordinated part of the genocide, not a spontaneous act of individual soldiers.

The logic was brutal and explicit. Witnesses and survivors testified that men told women, before raping them, that they were doing this on purpose. Some were told: "We are not going to kill you the way we killed the others. We are going to give you AIDS. You will die slowly."

This was not a threat. It was a strategy.

What was done

Hutu officials and militia commanders took HIV-positive men, some pulled directly from hospitals and others drawn from the ranks of unemployed youth and petty criminals, and deliberately organised them into rape squads. The goal was not only assault but infection. The transmission of HIV was understood as an extension of the genocide: a death that would arrive slowly, in the bodies of those who had survived, and in any children they might bear.

A study conducted in 2001 found that 70 percent of women who survived rape during the genocide tested HIV-positive.

The violence went further. Women's bodies were mutilated with machetes, knives, sticks, boiling water, and acid. The injuries were targeted. Militia members cut off women's breasts. They attacked women's reproductive organs specifically. Pregnant women were not spared. These were not the random brutalities of a war gone wrong. They were deliberate choices, made by people who understood exactly what they were doing and why.

Women were also held in sexual slavery, kept captive in homes, schools, churches, and army barracks for days or weeks, raped repeatedly by multiple men. Many who were not killed immediately were abandoned when the genocide ended, left with injuries, infections, pregnancies, and trauma that the international community was slow to acknowledge or address.

The rape of women during the Rwandan genocide was among the largest and most systematically organised instances of sexual violence in modern history.

The legal reckoning

Before Rwanda, the law was clear about one thing: rape in war was wrong. But international courts had never treated it as what it actually was in cases like Rwanda: not a side crime, not a product of uncontrolled soldiers, but an act of genocide.

That changed in 1998.

Jean-Paul Akayesu was the mayor of the Taba commune in Rwanda. Rapes had taken place at the communal office under his watch, in his presence, and at his direction. Witnesses testified that he had encouraged and ordered sexual violence against Tutsi women and girls. In September 1998, the ICTR convicted him of genocide and crimes against humanity, including rape.

It was the first time in history that an international court had convicted someone for rape as an act of genocide.

The judgement was a turning point in international law. The ICTR ruling established that rape could not be treated as a spoil of war or a tragic inevitability of conflict. It was a weapon. It was a crime against humanity. And those who ordered it, supervised it, or enabled it could be held accountable, not just the men who committed the acts themselves.

This precedent would go on to shape how courts approached sexual violence in the conflicts that came after: Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bosnia, Darfur. Rwanda forced the world to confront something it had long preferred to look away from.

Seventy percent

When the genocide ended in July 1994, Rwanda was in ruins. An estimated three-quarters of the Tutsi population had been killed. The infrastructure of the country had been torn apart. Hundreds of thousands of people were in prison awaiting trial. Hundreds of thousands more had fled the country.

And approximately 70 percent of Rwanda's surviving population was women.

This was the direct consequence of what had happened. Men had been the primary killers, and men had been the primary targets of killing. Women had survived in greater numbers, not because they had been spared, but because the genocide had been designed to consume them differently. They had been raped, infected, mutilated, and left. Now they were expected to bury the dead, feed the living, and begin again.

There was no blueprint for this. There was no government programme waiting. There were no international aid organisations equipped to address what women were carrying. There were women, and there was rubble, and there was the work of survival.

Women formed groups to find and bury the bodies of the dead. They took in the children of killed neighbours and relatives. Rwanda had an estimated 400,000 orphans after the genocide, and women absorbed them into households that had nothing. They farmed land they had never formally owned. They rebuilt homes. They ran local councils in communities where most men had either been killed or arrested. They held the country together while the country figured out what it was going to become.

None of this was asked of them. It was simply what had to be done, and they were the ones who were there.

From survivors to lawmakers

As Rwanda began to rebuild its political institutions, women did not wait at the margins. They pushed.

Women's organisations formed in the aftermath of the genocide were among the most organised and persistent forces in Rwandan civil society. Groups like Pro-Femmes Twese Hamwe, an umbrella organisation of women's groups founded in 1992 and rebuilt after the genocide, advocated not only for survivors' rights but for structural representation. Women made the argument, loudly and repeatedly, that a country rebuilt on the exclusion of 70 percent of its population would not hold.

Rwanda's 2003 constitution, drafted in the years after the genocide, included a provision requiring that at least 30 percent of all decision-making positions be held by women. It was the first African constitution to mandate gender quotas at this level, and it was not written by accident. It was the product of sustained advocacy by women who had survived the worst and decided that survival was not enough.

In 2008, Rwanda became the first country in the world to elect a female-majority parliament. Women held 56 percent of seats in the lower chamber. That number has since grown to more than 60 percent. The record still stands.

In the same year, Rwanda passed a law making domestic violence a criminal offence, with serious prison terms for rape. The country that had seen half a million women raped in 100 days had written the punishment of that crime into national law, pushed by the very women who had lived through it.

Rwanda is not a perfect country. Authoritarian governance, press restrictions, and ongoing challenges for rural women and genocide survivors are serious and documented realities. But what Rwandan women built after the genocide is one of the most remarkable examples of collective recovery in modern African history, and it was built almost entirely by people the genocide had tried to destroy through their bodies.

This is not only Rwanda's story

It would be comfortable to treat Rwanda as an exception, a singular horror that was addressed, prosecuted, and then transcended. But what happened to women in Rwanda was not unique. It was extreme. It was documented. It was prosecuted. Those things are exceptional. The targeting of women in conflict is not.

Women and children now make up approximately 90 percent of civilian casualties in modern wars. Across the African continent, in Sudan, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in Ethiopia, in Mozambique, sexual violence is being used as a weapon in active conflicts right now. In eastern DRC, rape has been used by armed groups so systematically for so long that the region has been called the rape capital of the world. In Sudan, the number of women and girls requiring support after experiencing gender-based violence has quadrupled since fighting intensified in 2023.

When men go to war, they fight each other. When men go to war, women become targets, refugees, caregivers of the wounded, heads of households that no longer have the people they were built around. The bodies of women become territory: something to be conquered, marked, and destroyed.

This is not a natural law. It is a choice, repeated across conflicts, across centuries, across the continent and the world. And in Rwanda's case, it is a choice that was put on trial, convicted, and entered into international legal record as a crime against humanity.

The women who survived Rwanda named what happened to them. They testified in court. They gave their accounts to researchers, journalists, and truth commissions when the world would have found it easier to look away. They did that work while rebuilding the country. That is not a footnote to the genocide story. That is the story.

What to take away

• Between 250,000 and 500,000 women were raped during the 1994 Rwandan genocide over the course of 100 days, averaging between 2,500 and 5,000 rapes per day.
• Sexual violence was not incidental. Hutu officials deliberately weaponised rape, including by organising HIV-positive men into rape squads to infect survivors.
• A 2001 study found that 70 percent of women who survived rape during the genocide tested HIV-positive.
• Women were also subjected to sexual mutilation, targeted specifically at their reproductive organs.
• In 1998, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda issued the first conviction in history for rape as an act of genocide, in the case of Jean-Paul Akayesu.
• After the genocide, women made up approximately 70 percent of Rwanda's surviving population and became the foundation of the country's reconstruction.
• Rwanda's 2003 constitution mandated 30 percent representation for women. In 2008, Rwanda became the first country in the world to have a female-majority parliament.
• What happened to women in Rwanda is not unique in kind. It is unique only in how thoroughly it was documented and prosecuted. Sexual violence in conflict continues across the continent today.

The women who built Rwanda back from nothing were not doing it because the world asked them to. They did it because they were there, and because something had to be done, and because no one else was going to do it. When you visit the Kigali Genocide Memorial and stand in the rooms where the names and photographs of the dead are kept, you are also standing in the country those women rebuilt. Both things are true at once. Both things matter.