Recently the topic of what happened to the women - from all sides in the Bosnian War - who were the victims of rape and later gave birth to a child. So I asked two people's help, both are Muslims so their focus is on those victims.

In my experience (supported by reports on this) is that there is very little information because of the ‘culture of silence’ that has surrounded the issue since the war. Women tended to try to avoid the awareness of their neighbours that children were a product of rape (they may have moved away for example). There are inevitably some children who were resultant from the assaults but there would not be an open conversation of this. Hence the children would be ‘accepted’ but this would most likely be in tandem with silence on how they were conceived. There are, of course, exceptions but I would not know of any myself.
This is what I would say was the case in the Bosniak Communities which were the primary victims.


There is an excellent book on the topic of children born from rape, with a focus on Bosnia. As you will have imagined, the statistics and data is extremely elusive on this topic, and families affected by rape will have vastly different experiences:http://cup.columbia.edu/book/forgett.../9780231151306