The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston School of the Arts presents the two related photography exhibitions: Jonathan Torgovnik's 'Intended Consequences: Rwandan Children Born of Rape' and Heather McClintock's 'The Innocents: Casualties of the Civil War in Northern Uganda.'

The new exhibition opens with a reception on Friday, January 22nd, at 5 p.m. and will run through March 13th.

Here's more on the awareness driven show:

Intended Consequences: Rwandan Children Born of Rape

During the 1994 genocide, over one hundred thousand Rwandan women were subjected to massive sexual violence perpetrated by members of the infamous Hutu militia groups known as the Interhamwe. Among the survivors, the most isolated are the Tutsi women who have borne children as a result of being raped. In February of 2006, Jonathan Torgovnik traveled to East Africa to report on a story for Newsweek, coinciding with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the outbreak of HIV/AIDS. While in Rwanda, he met Odette, a survivor who was raped during the genocide. As a result, she had a child and contracted HIV/AIDS. Her horrific story led Torgovnik to return to Rwanda to work on a personal project about women who were the victims of the same heinous crimes. Intended Consequences: Rwandan Children Born of Rape brings together Torgovnik’s powerful stories of these women. The exhibition on view is comprised of twenty-five stunning individual portraits of the women with their children accompanied by their testimonies: intensely personal accounts of the daily challenges they face and their conflicted feelings about raising a child who is a reminder of horrors endured.

The Innocents: Casualties of the Civil War in Northern Uganda

For more than twenty years, a civil war in the north has claimed women and children as its primary victims. It is estimated that the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has abducted as many as 66,000 youths under 20 years old, wrenching them from their families and forcing them to become soldiers, porters and sex slaves. They have inflicted grotesque carnage and senseless chaos on their own people. Yet, whilst protecting the population of the north, the Ugandan military has perpetrated its own share of massive human rights abuses. At the peak of the conflict, spread out over 80% of the region, two million Ugandans lived in massive, squalid camps that lack access to basic sanitation and resources. Hundreds of thousands still subsist in these camps today and tens of thousands of defenseless civilians were butchered, severely weakening cultural traditions. After years of stalled peace talks, failed military attempts to apprehend the indicted war criminal Kony, and his subsequent retraction and insurgency into other regions, northern Uganda may no longer be officially at war, but neither is it psychologically at peace. Beginning in the fall of 2005, Heather McClintock lived in northern Uganda for just under a year. She began weaving the very tenuous threads of a new way of life, which led to months of travel throughout the northern part of the country where she learned firsthand of the ongoing civil war and the strife of the Acholi tribe.