In April, a Ukrainian psychologist Oleksandra Kvitkon the phone rings. The caller was a 12-year-old girl.
The girl said that one day she had gone to the yard to pick flowers. The idea was to delight the mother.
He went out even though his mother had denied it. The Russian occupiers were already in the city.
The soldiers saw the girl.
The mother later found her daughter unconscious in the yard. The girl was mass raped.
After the rape, the girl tried to kill herself.
– The girl blamed herself. He had gone out, even though his mother had denied it, Kvitko, who cares for the victim, says.
Psychologist Kvitko follows From a horrific vantage point in the war in Ukraine.
He answers an emergency telephone number from which victims raped by Russian troops seek help. He is often the first to be told about rape.
In many cases, Kvitko receives information about the rape before the Ukrainian authorities.
In the worst cases, sexual violence has been revealed in the autopsy of civilian victims. The experiences of the survivors only become clear when they begin to share their experiences.
Many victims want to talk to a psychologist, but not yet to the police. Kvitko and his colleagues are a source of information for the Ukrainian government on what has happened.
There are constant calls from people of all ages. Women, children, men and the elderly report rape.
Assistance is provided over the phone as victims have fled across Ukraine and Europe. The psychologist himself fled with his children from Kiev to western Ukraine when the war began.
The Ukrainian High Commissioner for Human Rights opened the line with the support of Unicef in early April. There are five helpful psychologists.
Kvitko currently handles 94 cases. A total of 600 victims of sexual violence have been reported to them.
Kvitko has been working with victims of sexual violence for a long time before the war. But now, too, he has difficulty holding back tears in the interview.
– What we are being told now is completely unprecedented, Kvitko says.
There are reports of victims it turned out that the rapes follow a certain pattern. A formula that proves that this is not about the actions of individual Russian soldiers but about systematic violence.
Kvitko tells of a call that came from the mother of an 11-year-old boy. Russian troops tied the mother in a chair. The soldiers then raped the boy in front of his mother.
Kvitko also talks about sisters, the younger of whom was raped in front of his big sister.
– Big sister went to her knees and asked the soldiers to take her instead of her little sister. The soldiers lifted him up and said, no, you look, the psychologist says.
In none of the rapes reported to Kvitko has the soldier been present alone with the victim.
– It’s always a mass rape, Kvitko says.
Victims are not taken aside. They are raped in front of family, acquaintances or neighbors.
– They have wanted an audience, Kvitko says.
Public rape is a terribly effective tool of warfare. In addition to the victim, it traumatizes the entire community.
In almost all cases reported to Kvitko, the rapists have covered their faces for the duration of the act.
– Psychologically, this is scary. If the perpetrator cannot be identified, all men will become enemies and rapists, Kvitko says.
The majority of those who call the emergency line people live in the vicinity of Kiev. From there, the occupier has been evicted, and the actions of Russian troops have begun to be revealed in all their horror.
One such place is the small town of Ivankivi, 85 kilometers north of Kiev. The area is bordered on the north by the Chernobyl nuclear accident area.
At the beginning of the war, Russian troops stormed a nuclear-contaminated area and occupied Ivankivi. The bridge to Kiev was blown up so people could not escape.
Weeks after the release, the bridge is still scattered, but a temporary crossing has been built next to it.
Destroyed Russian tanks can be seen along the roads. The hotel at the mouth of Ivankivi has a sign burned and hung on the door: mines. The Russians mined the buildings and terrain so extensively that it takes an estimated years to clear the mines.
The car should be driven in the middle of the road, as there may be mines in the sidewalks.
In the center, the townspeople dare to walk out again after weeks of hiding. The occupier arrived in Ivankivi so quickly that few residents managed to escape.
Friends in the central square Elina19, and Sofia16, say they have been in the city throughout the occupation.
– We tried to hide together. But nowhere was it really safe, neither inside the home nor in the basement, Elina says.
Elina says they knew the soldiers were looking for young women their age. As the Russians withdrew from the city, friends learned that siblings aged 15 and 16 had been raped from a familiar family.
– It happened here, in our house, Elina says.
Sofia says her hometown feels different after the occupation. The news that Russian soldiers were here and invading people’s homes left a lasting fear.
On the way back from Ivankivi the western route back to Kiev will come from the news headlines Borodjanka, Busha and Irpin.
Here, Russian soldiers were killed and raped. When the cities were liberated, it was revealed that civilians had been shot in cars, homes and on the backs of their bikes. In Borodyanka, Russia had bombed a residential building so that those seeking refuge in the basement were buried in the rubble.
In the eastern and southern part of Ukraine, Russian occupation continues. No one knows exactly what is going on there.
Psychologist Kvitko receives calls not only from the vicinity of Kiev but also from the Kharkiv and Kherson regions from people who have managed to escape.
– Not everyone wants to talk, they write. Children also draw.
Only five of Kvitko’s 94 patients have so far reported to the authorities about the rapes committed by Russian forces. Kvitko reports the victims’ reports to the authorities for war crimes investigations and encourages patients to report.
– Especially for children, it is too early. They can’t talk yet.
The majority of the victims are women and children, but during the Russian war of aggression, men have also reported sexual violence. It took a long time before the men started calling Kvitko.
Kvitko is currently helping six men, three of whom are over 60 years old.
The psychologist says the number of people being helped is overwhelming. He has sought support from Israel from psychologists with experience helping victims of the war.
Kvitko says they have raised their hands and said they have no experience of such widespread sexual violence.
Ukrainian Marta Havryško has investigated rapes in various wars in Ukraine. He fled Ukraine at the beginning of the attack on Switzerland, from which he gives an interview in a video call.
According to Havryško, millions of women and children have not just fled the bombs in recent weeks. They also fled the rapes, the memory of which sits deep in the memory of the nation.
Havryško has investigated the use of sexual violence in Ukraine during the Nazi occupation and during the Soviet era. In her work, she has interviewed dozens of elderly women who have been raped during previous occupations and repression.
It is quite clear from Havryškos that Russia is using rape again as a weapon of war. If the rapes had been committed by individual soldiers, the soldier would have tried more often to cover his footsteps.
Based on the testimony of the victims, Russian forces are systematically raping with the same formula. With a crowd and a face covered.
– These are public rapes where the family and acquaintances are forced to look at the suffering of their loved ones, the researcher says.
The aim is to cause as much suffering as possible to the whole community in addition to the victim.
According to him, the rapes have features of a genocide that has long been paved in the Russian state media and in speeches by the Russian leadership.
The genocide is a harsh accusation, but Havryoshko says there is growing evidence of it.
In one case reported to the public, Russian soldiers had barked at victims of Nazi fornication. Russian propaganda justifies an illegal war of aggression by liberating Ukraine from the Nazi regime.
In another case, victims had been told that rape would continue until women never wanted to be with a man again and have more Ukrainian children.
– This is a clear speech referring to genocide, Havryško says.
Rape is a weapon used in genocide because it traumatizes the entire community. The rape of women and children is a message to the soldiers defending the homeland that they failed to protect their relatives.
According to Havryško, systematic rape has a clear link to how the Russian leadership and media talk about Ukraine and the Ukrainians. The message of genocide is constantly on display.
– They deny the existence of Ukraine as an independent state. They are spreading the idea of destroying Ukraine, he says.
As one example, he says Putin’s scary joke.
In early February, Russia president Vladimir Putin received the President of France Emmanuel Macronin In Moscow. The web was filled with jokes as Putin, who was afraid of the corona, sat at a long table meters from Macron.
At a press conference after the meeting, Putin, for his part, told a joke that was open only to those who knew the Russian language and culture. So also for the Ukrainians.
Putin referred to Ukraine with a phrase that was identified as a reference to a Soviet-era punk song. The paragraph refers to necrophilia, or rape of the dead.
The Ukrainians heard a dark echo of the joke.
Ukrainians knew how to fear sexual violence because a generation of mothers and grandmothers had experienced the same thing.
– The women’s body is on the battlefield again, Havryško says.
Victims of rape need it both immediate and long-term assistance. One of the most urgent is the possibility of miscarriage.
Commissioner for Human Rights of Ukraine Lyudmila Denisova has reported that nine of the 25 women repeatedly raped in the butch cellar were pregnant.
Many flee the war to Poland, where abortion is very difficult to obtain. Aid organizations have begun deliver (switch to another service) In Ukraine, birth control pills, but they need to get to the victim quickly.
Many are afraid to talk and share their experiences. The reason is shame and self-blame.
Psychologist Kvitko fears that rape has only revealed the tip of the iceberg. Even in times of peace, many victims report sexual violence only after years.
His psychological first aid for rape victims is to make them realize that these are not to blame for anything.
– As is usually the case with sexual offenses, women blame themselves. Why I had that skirt, why I went to the wrong place, Kvitko says.
Like the girl who was raped when she had gone to pick flowers for her mother.
Kvitko says the victims need help for a long time. They can call him again at any time of the day. Kvitko answers and listens.
did not attempt to interview rape victims for this purpose. An interview situation without the support of a psychologist may exacerbate the trauma. The psychologist reported cases where victims have given permission to share their experiences anonymously.
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