ABSTRACT
This chapter captures the phenomenon of post-genocidal trauma. It examines the specific ways in which it impacts women, the context in which it plays out, the challenges involved in responding to such a horrifying reality and, ultimately, outlines some of the strategies that have been effective in responding to this sobering phenomenon. The women are left without a male head of the household, the burden of shouldering family responsibility increases the stress and anxiety and often exacerbates the symptoms of the trauma of genocide. The reality of surviving trauma, and a trauma that involves mass and strategic extermination of one's own community and one that systematically dehumanizes the other, results in a life-long struggle to re-establish one's sense of individuality. Girls and women who live through the horror of genocide experience, of course, different levels and kinds of trauma. Their levels of victimization can, and often do, occur at every level of existence: physical, emotional, political, sexual and communal.
