![]() ![]() “He choked me so much that I passed out,” the woman said through a translator, her hands clasped tight around a tissue in her lap. She said she grew up believing it was normal for sex to be transactional, and for men to demand it of her whether she wanted it or not. Upstairs, they swapped recipes in a shared kitchen.īut down the corridor, a woman who asked that she be identified by her first name, Tatiana, sobbed into her scarf as she recalled the terror she experienced at the hands of her boyfriend. In the corner, one woman showed the others how to shape sugar into realistic-looking flowers. The sound of their laughter carried through the halls. ![]() Women of all ages gathered on couches in a sunny, plant-filled room with coffee in their hands and cookies on the table. On the other side of town at a shelter for women in Uzhhorod, Canada has created a safe space for the wives of Ukrainian servicemen and survivors of sexual and domestic violence to share their stories and heal. The service also provides a safe house in a secret location for survivors and their families to stay, with cribs, bunk beds and toys for children, for up to 20 days while they figure out their next steps. Gender-based violence, as well as stereotypes, have been normalized in many families in the region, said Mariana Stupak, a social worker with the Canadian-funded counselling service, through a translator. Now, with Ukrainians having lived through more than a year of war, counselling services such as the one funded by the Canadian government are finding themselves most often providing support to those who suffer the kind of abuse also seen in peacetime: domestic violence. Her organization and others in the region helped some of those women go abroad to safer countries where they would not feel under the same level of threat. “They couldn’t handle that, some of them even falling on the floor,” she said. The sound of helicopters coming and going from the nearby airport was triggering for many of the women who survived sexual violence by enemy troops. “It was even too difficult to be here,” she said. Many victims have been too traumatized to remain in Ukraine, said Tetiana Machabeli, the director of the Uzhhorod-based NGO Nehemiah, which supports Ukrainians displaced from their home communities. This is humiliation and deprivation of dignity. “It is the same in the context of the war concerning what the Russian military does with Ukrainians. “Sexual violence is humiliation, taking away the freedom and dignity of a person,” she said. Horovenko said the sexual violence goes beyond crimes of opportunity. There is also $9.7 million aimed at investigating sexual assaults perpetrated by Russian troops in occupied territories and to bring them to justice.Īs of October, the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine had documented 86 cases of conflict-related sexual violence against both adults and children, including gang rape, forced nudity, torture and other abuse at the hands of Russian forces. The service, which has provided support to some 200 survivors of sexual and domestic abuse, is one of many that Canada launched through the United Nations Population Fund as part of a $7-million aid package. ![]()
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