Where do women activists find hope amid war in Ukraine where Russian forces weaponize brutal rape, and domestic violence surges?
It’s a question that momentarily silences three Ukrainian women during a joint interview for the Nobel Women’s Initiative’s 16 Days of Activism against Gender-based Violence.
Anna Chernova said the very question of hope “makes me want to start to cry.” Until that moment she spoke calmly, with authority and confidence about her lifelong vocation helping survivors of domestic violence.
Early in the war, she said, women frequently did not report domestic violence for fear their husbands and partners would be called up for military duty. Once general mobilization began last winter, reports of domestic violence started to soar.
Oksana Senyk silently searched out an answer. She had been explaining her legal work in Zaporozhye documenting the trauma of individual women, children and men who have been raped, forced to strip down and parade publicly, and otherwise abused by Russian soldiers in occupied zones of Ukraine.
“You are asking about my hope? I will tell you. I'm from Zaporozhye. I don't know if I will be alive in an hour,” she said. “I hope that I will. I hope Ukraine has victory in this war. And I hope that after our victory we will work hard to make the life of our people better.”
Nina Potarska searches each day for hope and ways to hold it. “Sometimes I feel that's the hardest thing, not to lose your hope,” she said. She finds it from solidarity with other women inside Ukraine and an outpouring of support from women around the world.
Nina is Ukraine coordinator for the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She fled Ukraine after the Russian invasion in February 2022 and from outside the country has been networking with women’s organizations and donors, mapping women’s organizations inside Ukraine, and trying to get grassroots voices onto the international agenda, into United Nations reports for example.
“There are gaps between the academic level, the feminist activists’ level and the women who are really doing this hard work at the grassroots level,” Nina said.
Oksana and Anna work for Charity Fund Posmishka UA which provided help to more than 2,300 people affected by domestic violence in the Zaporozhye and Poltava regions from July to October alone.
Anna has been so steeped in her grassroots activism for so long, going back 20 years, that she says it’s not work; it’s a lifestyle. “I also was a victim of domestic violence,” Anna said. “Yeah, I always used a lot of cosmetics on my face. I still have some marks on my face.”
She organizes case management, child psychologists, social workers, police intervention, child protection, home visits and other support for victims of domestic abuse. She regards family peace as “a small piece of peacebuilding.” In some cases, peace is found by escaping a violent partner.
“My main motivation is to show women another life, life without violence, to help them do the first step,” Anna said. “When you see the changes, the woman changes her city, her apartment, her job, she knows about her rights, this is my big motivation – to see changed lives.”
As a lawyer who documents survivors in Zaporozhye from Russian-occupied territories, Oksana bumps up against fear most days. “Most people are afraid to talk because the occupiers tell them that Zaporozhye will soon be occupied too,” she said.
People had reported to police in only two of eight cases of sexual violence and more than 20 of gender-based violence documented at the center at the time of the interview, she said. In addition to fear, she added that many people don’t regard sexual violence as a crime unless it is rape.
Oksana’s war work with women started in 2016, helping internally displaced women who had lost or been abandoned by their husbands. On top of struggling without financial support, a main challenge was navigating Ukrainian government restrictions on travelling with children to grandparents or other relatives in Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine without written permission of the husband or father.
Nina attributes increased domestic violence to the chronic, extreme stress of war.
“I think during this war situation, our society is at an extreme level of ongoing stress, and nobody knows when it will finish,” she said. “I think it's very difficult to keep your humanity because we are, of course, so angry about this situation. This kind of emotion is a destructive emotion, which burns us out from inside.”
Ukrainian society is traumatized, she said.
“It’s trauma that affects everybody -- mobilized people, people who are in the cities and waiting for the next shelling, kids who are becoming used to being in this kind of situation, people who are moved from Ukraine, but they do not belong to any country now, any territories, any society.”
She had recently spoken to a Ukrainian women’s group in Krakow, Poland. Some of the women told her that after six months they are not even trying to integrate; they are waiting to go home.
“These traumas will be with us for forever,” Nina said. “It's impossible to forget these experiences. It's impossible for kids to forget their experience in the basements, in the shelters, many days of traveling to safe places. It's impossible. This experience is with us forever.”
Anna said her experience working in Donbass for almost eight years gave her an instinct for when a colleague is heading for burnout.
“Sometimes I ask my colleagues to care for themselves and they say, ‘No, I can't, the situation is so bad, we should work harder to help people in the crisis.’ “The activists face the same risks in war as those they are helping, she noted. “They can be victims too.”
There is much work ahead when the war ends. “Thanks to Nina, we have a strong community of activists,” Anna said.
Nina thought ahead. “I think we should be extremely careful and extremely attentive, now and afterwards, to what is going on in the society affected by the conflict and where we can add resources to heal ourselves.”
Nina Potarska is National Coordinator of the Ukraine chapter of the International Women’s League for Peace and Freedom. Anna Chernova organizes help for survivors of domestic abuse in Ukraine. Lawyer Oksana Senyk documents Ukrainian survivors of sexual and gender-based violence by Russian military forces.
Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom
WILPF Open Letter to the UN Security Council on Ukraine
The 2022 Nobel Women's Initiative's contribution to the global 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-based Violence Campaign features interviews with women activists about their experiences advocating for peace and women’s rights in conflict zones. In Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Yemen, Myanmar, Sudan, Syria, Iraq and Ukraine, these human rights defenders pursue peace as one pathway to reducing sexual and other forms of gender-based violence.