Voices of Stolen Children: Soldiers and Wives of Kony's LRA

When Pulitzer Center grantees Joe Bavier and Marcus Bleasdale set out on a journey to Congo, Central African Republic, Sudan and Uganda on the trail of the Lord's Resistance Army in 2010, few had heard of Joseph Kony and the terrors his gang had forced upon the lives of people in central Africa. But the new campaign Kony2012 by Invisible Children has changed that. The controversial 30-minute film has become one of the most viral videos in history, catapulting Kony's name into a grand-scale public discourse.

Adding an important voice—the voice of the victims—to the Kony2012 discussion, Bleasdale, with support from Fotografiska, created this video featuring interviews of children abducted by the LRA. The interviews were conducted over a period of several months in 2010 in for Human Rights Watch and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Bavier and Bleasedale's reporting project "The Lord's Resistance Army: The Hunt for Africa's Most Wanted" explores how Joseph Kony still manages to evade capture despite an International Criminal Court arrest warrant and an ongoing Ugandan-led multinational military operation.

Bleasdale's photographs of the LRA's victims are also being featured in the exhibit Stolen Children: Soldiers of the Lord's Resistance Army at the Fotografiska Museum in Stockholm, Sweden.