Thank you for sharing your opinions with us and for providing us with some clarifications on proper genocide terminology.
I use the word “crisis”, but not at all in the sense of “genocide”. In my opinion, the situation of these young people and children born of rape is a crisis.
We are going to take the time to study this question and determine how Canada could be better prepared the next time human beings do something as terrible as the Tutsi genocide. We know that there are problems at this time in Syria and in Congo.
In your testimony you laid out quite clearly four points with regard to children born of rape: they're rejected by their mothers; they're rejected by their families; they're rejected by their communities; and they're rejected by the state. In order to not let the intent of this act come to fruition—the intent of this act was to destroy communities, to destroy the lines of families, and to destroy the country that the Tutsis were a part of—in order to not allow that to happen, I think there needs to be a means of reconciling the relationship between the mothers and the children and of reconciling the relationship between the children and their communities and the state. Part of that would be allowing these children access to the healing resources that are available to the survivors and the orphans of the genocide.
Would you care to comment on that?