Since the start of the war, Russian soldiers have targeted vulnerable Ukrainian women for sexual abuse.
These are just a few of their stories.
Olena Zaitseva was in the early stages of pregnancy when she was unlawfully detained by Russian forces in February 2019.
“They took me into a prison-like facility, where they handcuffed me and attached me to a pipe,” she recalls. But soon after, they moved her to another room, “where the violence—and all the horrors imaginable—took place.”
Living close to what was then the front lines of eastern Ukraine, where the ongoing war with Russia first broke out in 2014, Olena and her 18-year old son Vladyslav had been accused by Russian forces of plotting to destroy railway infrastructure. Without legal defense or recourse, the mother, then 48, would spend the next four years as a civilian captive, while her son would be sentenced to 22 years in prison.
Olena was first held captive in Makiyivka, a former prison colony, and later in Izolyatsia, a former pre-trial detention center. Both had been converted into torture chambers by the Russian army, and were widely known for the atrocities committed by Russian servicemen against Ukrainian prisoners—atrocities that continue to this day.
When she first arrived at Makiyivka, Olena tells me she was imprisoned in a one-person cell, where around six men in balaclavas beat her and raped her with rubber batons for several days. (The soldiers put a bag on her head, so she could not count the total number of perpetrators.) The rapes triggered grave gynecological difficulties, causing Olena to bleed heavily. For nearly two years, these symptoms persisted. “I was alone in a cell with only a mattress, a bottle of water, and one bucket,” she says. “I’d sit on the bucket so that the blood could flow because I had no pads, no cloth, nothing.”
Olena with a photo of her son, Vladyslav. (Photo: Sara Cincurova)
Subjected to other forms of torture, Olena did not receive medical aid in her four years in Russian captivity, except for a single hospital visit in occupied Donetsk to consult with a gynecologist. “I cannot translate that feeling into words,” she recalls. “It was like in American movies: my hands in chains, my legs in irons, I was forced to bend forward and look down, and they dragged me like a dog. I was so ashamed.”
“People were walking in the street, and I had a bag on my head, like the worst of the criminals,” she says.
The doctors did not give her a diagnosis that day. It would have been impossible, Olena says, because the same Russian servicemen and prison guards who had abused her were watching and listening. But she already knew she had lost her pregnancy as a result of the violence she’d experienced during her imprisonment. (The father of her child would die on the front lines before they could be reunited.)
After four years in captivity, Olena was freed in a prisoner exchange in 2022. I meet her outside of Kyiv, where she now lives alone in a small room in a shared apartment. She has recently applied to receive disability status as a result of permanent injuries sustained during her imprisonment, while her son Vladyslav remains in Russian captivity, now for the eighth consecutive year. Olena continues to advocate for his release every day, and says she only relives the abuse she experienced and gives interviews to the press in order to help draw attention to his case. But she admits there is little hope.
“For my son to be exchanged, a miracle would have to happen,” she tells me. “Looking at what is happening, those who had been imprisoned before 2022 have been forgotten.”
Searching Houses for Vulnerable Victims
Olena’s story is just one of nearly 30 testimonies I have collected over the past two years of conflict-related sexual violence perpetrated against Ukrainian women, and is consistent with the testimonies of other women I have interviewed who were held at Makiyivka and Izolyatsia.
All of the women’s accounts were independently verified by Ukrainian NGOs collecting evidence of Russia’s war crimes, and together, paint a grim picture of systematic abuse—one that is not just a crime of opportunity, but suggests an intentional scouting effort by Russian soldiers to find potential victims who are especially vulnerable.
Although the Geneva Conventions, as well as international humanitarian law, stipulate that all civilians in conflict who are wounded or sick “shall be respected and protected in all circumstances,” UN reporting suggests that Russian forces have not respected these protections, routinely abusing even the most defenseless of Ukrainian civilians. Children, disabled persons, and the elderly are also protected civilians under international law; as are pregnant women like Olena, as well as mothers and other caregivers. But since the war broke out in 2014, rape and other war crimes have been routinely documented against each of these protected groups, as confirmed by both a 2023 and 2024 UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine. Explicitly defining rape as a form of torture under international law, the investigators found that soldiers routinely "identified women in a vulnerable situation" and "committed acts of rape and sexual violence when they broke into the victims’ houses," sometimes "at gunpoint with extreme brutality and with acts of torture, such as beatings and strangling."
(Photo: Diana Deliurman)
While sexual violence has become a defining weapon in the Russian war in Ukraine, it has also been on the rise in conflicts around the world. A 2025 UN report documented thousands more cases of conflict-related sexual violence in 2024 compared with the year before—a 25 percent increase, widely considered a conservative estimate. A 2026 report of the UN Secretary-General on conflict-related sexual violence estimated that for each rape reported in connection with a global conflict, 10 to 20 cases went undocumented.
Rape and other forms of sexual violence have long been a violation of international humanitarian law, yet committed with impunity in conflicts around the world, Jessica Neuwirth, founder of the Frontline Women's Fund, tells The Conversationalist. Her organization works to combat this by offering support to women's organizations working in conflict zones, helping survivors of sexual violence. “The Geneva Conventions prohibit ‘outrages upon personal dignity’ and specifically mention ‘rape and any form of indecent assault,’" she says. “The statute of the International Criminal Court explicitly includes rape as both a war crime and a crime against humanity.”
The problem, Neuwirth says, has not been the legal prohibition of rape, but the failure to hold perpetrators accountable under the law.
There have, however, been some efforts to bring perpetrators to account. In 2025, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Alice Jill Edwards, joined by several other experts, sent a dossier of sexual torture allegations to the Russian Federation, involving the cases of 10 Ukrainian civilians. “These were all highly sexualized assaults which included rapes, threats of rape, and other depraved conduct,” the dossier read. “It is becoming clearer that the Russian Federation’s deliberate and systematic policy of torture in Ukraine involves sexualized torture and other sexualized cruelty, including against the civilian population.” (While Russia did not formally address a reply to the UN, the Kremlin has publicly stated its belief that many reports by Ukrainian women of sexual violence were groundless.)
The Strongest of All
“No one is as strong as Ukrainian women,” Liudmyla, a retired teacher who will celebrate her 79th birthday this summer, tells me. In the summer of 2022, she was beaten and raped by a young Russian serviceman in her house in a small village of the Kherson region, then under Russian occupation. The soldier left her with four broken ribs, among other injuries.
I interviewed Liudmyla for the first time in February 2025. Despite temperatures in the negatives that day, we set out to meet in the ruins of a bombarded elementary school in her village, which Liudmyla wanted to show me. In the end, we had no choice but to record the interview in a car because of the unbearable cold.
Despite the risks of coming forward with her story, Liudmyla has refused to be silenced, and has inspired other survivors in the country to speak out—including elderly or deeply religious women who at times blamed themselves for their assault. For her bravery, she is now seen as a local leader.
Liudmyla. (Photo: Diana Deliurman)
A year and a half after our first interview, I meet Liudmyla again. Her mobility has worsened; she struggles to walk up and down the stairs. But her resolve remains unchanged, speaking with the same determination she had the first time we met.
The day she was raped, Liudmyla recalls, she was convinced she would die. When the soldier started violating her, she said “farewell to my children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren in my mind.” But she survived. “I speak in order to denounce the war crimes committed by Russia against Ukrainian women,” she tells me.
Liudmyla says the Russian soldier who raped her stormed into her house around 10 p.m. She was terrified: At the time, she lived alone. He shouted and interrogated her, asking questions such as “who lives in your house?” and “why are the lights turned on?” Then, he beat her up and tore her clothes apart. He raped her, she says, then immediately fell asleep beside her. Liudmyla said those hours were among the most harrowing. “I lay right next to him, petrified,” she said, “while he was asleep and snoring.”
At 4 a.m., the soldier woke up and told Liudmyla he would come back in two days. “He told me that if I told anyone, he would kill me,” she says. Liudmyla was too scared to go to the hospital—then occupied by Russian troops—and immediately decided to flee her village rather than wait for the soldier’s return. She was only able to move back to her house, which had been almost completely destroyed, after her village was liberated in late 2022.
Recalling the days of occupation, Liudmyla says she saw wounded and desperate civilians being tortured by Russian soldiers. Some were hanged; others were forced to drink motor oil, she recalls. Other survivors as well as Ukrainian soldiers from the area I have interviewed recall seeing and hearing school children being raped.
Today, Liudmyla’s village is located near the so-called “kill zone,” about 30 kilometers from the frontlines, where Russian servicemen use first-person view (FPV) drones to kill civilians with precision. The practice is called “human safari”—an act of brutality consisting of dropping bombs on people, cars, and even children at play, as if it is a video game. Making matters more dire for the village, there is almost no access to food or medications. “If it wasn’t for humanitarian organizations, I would die of hunger today,” Liudmyla tells me. She hopes the situation will not get worse.
Liudmyla’s testimony is not an isolated incident. Rape and forced abductions of elderly Ukrainian civilians by the Russian army have been widely documented in recent years. The elderly also represent a large majority of people who remain living close to the frontlines, unable or unwilling to move out of the houses where they have spent their entire lives.
Pain That Cannot Be Expressed in Words
While international humanitarian law protects all civilians living in conflict without discrimination, certain groups are singled out for additional protections. The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, for example, contains specific protections for people with disabilities, who are at greater risk of violence, including of a sexual nature.
While reports across various countries have shown that violence against people with disabilities tends to receive relatively little media coverage, the UN has been “gravely concerned” about the fate of disabled Ukrainians since the outset of the war. “People with disabilities trapped in the Russian control zones in Ukraine are reportedly being used as ‘human shields’ by the Russian Federation armed forces,” the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) warned in September 2022. Other human rights organizations such as ZMINA have also published reports documenting the experiences of women with disabilities living in Ukraine.
Lidia Tarash, the acting head of the Department of Documenting War Crimes at the Ukrainian NGO Media Initiative for Human Rights, tells me that according to their organization’s data, at least 27 civilians with disabilities are currently held in Russian captivity. “We also have testimonies regarding at least five seriously ill civilians unlawfully detained by Russia,” she says. “These include people with spinal conditions, epilepsy, diabetes, asthma, cancer, amputations, and paralysis.” Some of these civilians are also being held “incommunicado,” in complete isolation from the outside world—their whereabouts and conditions completely unknown.
“These cases demonstrate that even particularly vulnerable groups of civilians receive no protection from Russia’s system of persecution,” she explains. “They point to the systematic nature of the unlawful detention of Ukrainian civilians and Russia’s blatant disregard for international humanitarian law."
Documenting disabled people’s stories in conflict also presents particular challenges. Many disabled people live close to the frontlines, where media access is limited and particularly dangerous. Disabled people are also a largely underrepresented group across traditional media, and anecdotally, this has made it especially difficult for journalists to find a home for their stories. On his last day in the role, Giles Duley, the United Nations Global Advocate for Persons with Disabilities in Conflict and Peacebuilding Situations, said, “When I photograph somebody in a war zone… they always say to me: share this story with the leaders. But the opportunities to do so were never fully realized.”
(Photo: Diana Deliurman)
In the spring of 2025, I spoke with the mother of a disabled woman, living with her family only about 13 kilometers from the frontlines of the Kherson region. Their village, which was occupied in 2022, has been routinely hit and targeted by FPV drones.
Her daughter Olha, she explains, sustained a severe head injury as a toddler that blocked the flow of oxygen to her brain, leaving her non-verbal and bed-bound. Although now a young woman of 33, she still looks like a child, no older than 9 or 10.
In late February 2022, as Russians stormed into their region, Olha’s parents were taken to the local police station for questioning. Her mother says they were forced to kneel for hours as they were beaten and interrogated by Russian soldiers. But all the while, she feared most for her daughter, who had been left at home alone.
Hours later, Olha’s mother was released. When she returned home, she found Olha lying on the bed, naked and motionless, with sweets placed on her pillow.
“Olha cannot undress herself alone,” her mother tells me. Devastated, she immediately knew: It must have been the Russian soldiers.
With Olha unable to speak, it was impossible to fully determine what had happened. But Olha’s body spoke for her. In the months that followed, she lost around 10 kilograms, and nearly all her teeth fell out. She became terrified of men, her mother says.
While the family will never know the details of the abuse, organizations such as Human Rights Watch have documented similar war crimes perpetrated against people with disabilities in Ukraine. In 2024, the country’s United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) stated that the prolonged and combined nature of insecurity, displacement, and economic deterioration had reduced “the coping capacities of women and girls and other at-risk groups in Ukraine ... further exposing them to risks of gender-based violence.” The organization also warned that older women and women with disabilities represent a significant majority of vulnerable civilians in frontline areas, and that both are more likely to be left alone, which often makes them especially vulnerable. As a result, the UNFPA concluded that different forms of gender-based violence have been significantly increasing.
A Fear of Sexual Violence
Children are legally protected in armed conflicts under international humanitarian law, with a series of rules granting them special protections. Ukraine’s General Prosecutor’s Office is currently investigating 23 cases of child victims of conflict-related sexual abuse, out of a total 396 reported cases of sexual violence by Russian troops. These numbers, however, are likely just the tip of the iceberg, and do not reflect the full reality of the sexual abuse that has been committed against children.
Alla Sobchuk, a 42-year old woman from Kherson, tells me she was unlawfully detained with her then 11-year old daughter, Viktoriia, when the city was occupied in 2022. She says they were driving through a checkpoint set up by the Russian military, who tried to force her to remove her window tint.
“I said no and they threatened to shoot me,” she says. “They handcuffed me, beat me, put zip ties on my wrists, and sprayed me with tear gas.” All of this, she adds, happened in front of her daughter.
Alla next to a sign that reads, "Ukraine will win." (Photo courtesy of Alla Sobchuk.)
The pair was then taken to a former police station, occupied by what seemed to be Russian police, she says. Viktoriia watched as Russian officers hit her mother and tore her dress apart.
“We are both very afraid of sexual violence,” Alla says, “and very afraid they would assault us.” (She adds that “luckily,” the Russian forces “only” used physical violence.)
Viktoriia was taken to a separate office, where the soldiers interrogated her. One of them threatened to send her to a boarding school and Alla to prison, before threatening Alla directly, as well. “He hit me in the face because I demanded my child be returned,” Alla says. They were both held at the police station in separate offices for nearly 24 hours. The next day, they were freed.
After they were released, Alla says, Viktoriia was very frightened—but relieved to see her mother again. “I supported her by telling her she was a hero, and even adults could not endure the [abuse] by occupation forces the way she did.”
Viktoriia next to a sign that reads "Kherson is Ukraine!!!" (Photo courtesy of Alla Sobchuk.)
This kind of exposure to violence—sexual and otherwise—is prevalent in captivity, especially in cases where children and teenagers are held for longer periods of time. But as more cases emerge involving Ukrainian children, particularly those detained in Russia, humanitarian organizations—and victims’ families—are warning of another deeply disturbing reality: evidence of severe physical and sexual violence inflicted on children themselves. Mariam Lambert, the co-founder of Emile Foundation, an organization that helps bring Ukrainian children abducted to Russia back to Ukraine, shared one recent case involving a family reunited after years of separation. “One of the children, a six-year-old girl, had previously been identified on a Russian adoption database,” Lambert says. “After her return home, evidence emerged indicating that she had been exposed to violent sexual abuse while in Russian-controlled custody.”
Lambert also confirms that similar incidents point to a broader pattern of abuse, disappearance, forced separation, and exploitation of vulnerable children caught inside a system operating without transparency or accountability. “The world still does not fully understand what some of these children have endured,” she concludes.
Hundreds of Methods of Torture
The sexual abuse committed as a weapon of war by the Russian forces remains just one method of brutal torture used against imprisoned civilians and other prisoners of war. Lyubov Smachylo, the Head of the Analytical Department at Media Initiative for Human Rights Ukraine, an NGO that has carried out comprehensive investigations and in-depth interviews with detained civilians, says she and her colleagues have been able to document patterns and connections between violations of civilians’ rights in different locations and at different times, which indicates that such violations “are not isolated incidents and may qualify as war crimes, as well as crimes against humanity.” Today, the organization is aware of at least 2,495 civilians held in unlawful captivity across 240 locations.
Based on in-depth interviews conducted as part of the organization’s research, in 87% cases of torture, Russian forces subjected victims to severe beatings, using their hands, feet, sticks, clubs, belts, hammers, or other improvised equipment. Of the 54 torture victims identified, 34 were also subjected to electric shocks. The evidence also suggests that Russian forces have used sexual and gender-based violence against both male and female detainees.
On May 22, 2026, the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights, Dmytro Lubinets, reported that Russia has used 695 different forms of torture, including physical and psychological abuse, as well as sexual violence, in the war so far." Prisoners of war are strangled, beaten, subjected to electric shocks, set upon by dogs and sometimes forced to stand in one place for up to 18 hours; as soon as you start to squat, you are immediately physically beaten,” he said. He said that Russia has already tortured 406 Ukrainian captives to death.
This torture and abuse is perpetrated unlawfully and indiscriminately. The stories described above are a reminder that such horrors have not spared anyone—not even the elderly, not even the children. But reporting for months on sexual abuse across Ukraine, it has become clear to me that numerous survivors do not want their accounts to remain buried in shame. Nearly all of the women I spoke to longed to have their stories told and shared with the world—showing global readers that such unbearable, widespread abuse continues, and none of its perpetrators have been brought to justice for their crimes.
[post_title] => "All the Horrors Imaginable"
[post_excerpt] => Since the start of the war, Russian soldiers have targeted vulnerable Ukrainian women for sexual abuse. These are just a few of their stories.
[post_status] => publish
[comment_status] => closed
[ping_status] => closed
[post_password] =>
[post_name] => war-crimes-rape-sexual-assault-ukraine-civilians-russia
[to_ping] =>
[pinged] =>
[post_modified] => 2026-06-02 23:23:38
[post_modified_gmt] => 2026-06-02 23:23:38
[post_content_filtered] =>
[post_parent] => 0
[guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10622
[menu_order] => 0
[post_type] => post
[post_mime_type] =>
[comment_count] => 0
[filter] => raw
)
On January 4, in Enoch, Utah, 42-year-old Michael Haight shot and killed his wife, five children, and mother-in-law, before turning the gun on himself, a form of murder-suicide known as "family annihilation." Tausha Haight, his wife of twenty years, had filed for divorce a couple weeks prior. Abusers always lose it when you leave.
It's since been reported, first by the Associated Press, that Haight was investigated in 2020 for potential child abuse after someone outside the family reported it to the police. Utah's child protective services got involved. At the time, Haight’s eldest daughter Macie said the abuse had begun years earlier, in 2017. She described a time her father grabbed her by the shoulders and threw her into furniture, along with another incident in which he had strangled her. She said she’d been afraid that he would kill her. Michael blamed the then-14-year-old for his violence, saying she was "mouthy." During the same police investigation, Macie also said that her father regularly belittled her mother, and Michael admitted to surveilling his wife’s communications. No charges were filed.
Nearly three years later, Michael’s obituary in the local paper would read that he "made it a point to spend quality time with each and every one of his children," and that they were a "cherished miracle." One commenter spoke of his “Christlike love and service.” Neither the obituary nor the commenters mentioned the murders, and it was only taken down after Shannon Watts, gun reform advocate and founder of Moms Demand, tweeted it out.
Haight’s story isn’t so uncommon. In the United States alone, a man has annihilated his family every 3.5 weeks for the last two decades, a likely miniscule portion of the estimated family annihilations worldwide. Men who strangle their partners are ten times more likely to become men who kill them. And having a gun in the home increases the risk of murder in a domestic violence incident by 500%.
So why do we continue to treat what happened to the Haight family like an isolated tragedy—a “personal” matter—as opposed to exactly what it was: a domestic tyrant who felt entitled, by virtue of being a man, to enforce his will, crush dissent, and destroy his family as soon as they tried to flee?
When a head of state insists on their natural or divine right to monitor your private communications, stalk your movements, imprison you at home, and beat or kill you for wearing certain clothes, meeting friends, or maintaining a separate bank account, we rightly call them authoritarian. We are loud in our disapproval: When Iranian women took to the streets in protest over the arrest and murder of Mahsa Amini by morality police for not properly wearing hijab, the support abroad was strong, the brutality obvious. But when it's the head of a household terrorizing you, the euphemisms (and excuses) surface: family difficulties over a private matter, better dealt with behind closed doors; it’s best not to get involved, it’s none of our business. All support evaporates, because father still knows best — and if father wants to blow everything up just because he can, who's going to stop him?
Studies on familicide say in almost every case, the man claims his family as property, with the right to end their lives. Murder, after all, is the ultimate form of control. But the impulse to control or destroy isn't limited to physical violence: The easiest way to break people is to break what's precious to them. Look at Elon Musk, who had to lose 200 billion dollars before people finally stopped calling him a genius. Within months of his taking over Twitter, 80% of the company’s workforce had quit or been fired, especially anyone found criticizing him. In a recent New York Magazine piece about Musk's takeover, they describe how Twitter employees flocked to the company Slack during these mass layoffs, all anxiously waiting for the ax: "One person posted a meme of Thanos from Avengers: Infinity War, the supervillain who exterminates half the living beings in the universe with a snap.”
Advertisers fled Musk’s "extremely hardcore" site as he rolled out a disastrous verification process, threatened people who linked out to other social networks, reinstated Nazis, and ranted about eugenics, all while overseeing a radical uptick in harassment and slurs. With no clear plan to make Twitter profitable, and engineers rolling their eyes at his technical expertise, it's no wonder Twitter and Tesla's value has since plummeted. Not that he's taken any accountability for the losses or the lives he's upended. He's been too busy impregnating his employee, lashing out at mouthy critics, and, most recently, firing a Twitter engineer for informing him the reason his engagement was down wasn’t due to a bug—but because people weren’t as interested in him as they used to be.
Whether they're the head of a family, company, or state, everyone suffers so long as masculinity is wrapped up in an ability to dominate. Impunity and entitlement breed ignorance and nihilism. Patriarchy is ancient, authoritarian, incompatible with equality and democracy, and bad for everyone involved. And it’s as relevant to how Musk acquired and destroyed Twitter as it is to the protests in Iran as it is to what happened to the Haight family.
Human rights also don't disappear at your doorstep. According to the UN, 47,000 women and girls were killed by their partners or other family in 2020. On average, that means one murder every 11 minutes. But freeing women and children from violence won't happen so long as it's still taboo to speak about it. We’d rightfully consider it outrageous if someone called reports of mass rapes and murders in Ukraine by Russian soldiers "airing dirty laundry.” Yet we don’t extend the same support to women abused and murdered by partners or relatives, which happens in every community, and is far more likely than “stranger danger.” (And on the rare occasion victims do get attention, they’re usually blonde, white, and already dead.)
Meanwhile, it's the same self-destructive, patriarchal entitlement that motivates domestic violence that motivates atrocities like the Russian invasion of Ukraine – if I can't have you, nobody can – with the same results. Putin first became aggressive in 2014 after Ukraine turned down a trade agreement with Russia in favor of one with the European Union. (Again, it's most dangerous when you try to leave.) Absent consequences, including for past wars in Syria, Georgia, and Chechnya, Putin has continuously escalated the bloodshed, and will do anything short of giving up power to punish Ukrainians for daring to be free, including letting Russia crumble. In that sense, he's just like Michael Haight: Insult the sovereign, or threaten his control, and watch him burn the building down with everyone trapped inside. Whatever it takes to teach them a lesson.
Our bodies don't differentiate between state-sponsored or home-bound torture. What does your killer's institutional affiliation matter when you're dead? The lines are blurred in any case, considering the number of men who abuse in private who also abuse the public. It's not a coincidence that police abuse their families at high rates, or that two-thirds of mass shootings are either an incident of domestic violence or are perpetrated by someone with a record of it. Yet time and time again, on both a personal and policy level, we treat domestic violence as a completely separate matter – anything to avoid the reality that some homes are conflict zones, too.
Even the preeminent global treaty on women’s rights, the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), does not contain the word "violence" once. In 1980, when CEDAW was passed, gender-based violence was considered outside its scope, a private matter that this public treaty wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole. Men's rights, especially in war, were already covered as human rights, a courtesy not extended to everyone else. It wasn't until 1992 that the CEDAW Committee issued General Recommendation 19, which interpreted the treaty to include gender violence. (Full disclosure, I'm on the board of an organization, Every Woman, calling for a new global treaty to close this atrocious gap in international law.) Like the Refugee Treaty, which advocates fought tooth and nail to have courts interpret to include gender persecution as a "particular social group," half the world's population suffering the most pervasive human rights violation was considered niche.
When feminism states that the personal is political, it speaks to the ways the private sphere continues to oppress women. There can be no equality in public so long as violence at home is ignored. To be part of the public, you first need to make it outside. Patriarchy cuts across every divide, but its effects are worsened by poverty, racism, and other forms of oppression. When 72-year-old Huu Can Tran shot and killed 11 people at the Star Ballroom Dance Studio in Monterey Park, California during a Lunar New Year celebration, people speculated whether this was yet another anti-Asian hate crime, a misogynist escalation, or possibly both. No motive has been found so far, or connection to any of the victims, but the shooting sparked a discussion online about domestic violence in the Asian American community. The Asian Pacific Institute on Gender Based Violence released a statement of mourning, and a plea to make the connection between femicide and mass shootings. They estimate that between 21-55% of API women in the US have experienced intimate physical or sexual violence.
In the United States, women of color are disproportionately affected by gender violence. The CDC reports that Black women are three times more likely than white women to be killed in a domestic dispute. More than half of Indigenous women in the US have experienced sexual or intimate partner violence. On a global scale, 1 in 3 women have experienced sexual assault or domestic violence.
Authoritarians know that subordinating women helps them stay in power, and systematically encourage and enact patriarchal violence to keep people in line. They claim that masculinity is under threat, and loosen laws that protect women and gender nonconforming people. Reactionary autocrats worldwide are attacking women's rights as a means of entrenching their control and weakening political participation in democratic mass movements. In Russia, Putin rolled back criminal consequences for domestic violence. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan withdrew Turkey from the Istanbul Convention, the European treaty on domestic violence. Poland keeps threatening to do the same, while Hungary never signed it in the first place. (In a move to distance itself from its neighbors, Ukraine finally ratified the Istanbul Convention last year.) Before he was voted out and supporters staged a failed coup on his behalf, Jair Bolsonaro cut 90% of funding for domestic violence prevention in Brazil. The Taliban once again won’t even let women go to school.
So long as authoritarian violence is acceptable, even encouraged, on the micro level within families, it will be impossible to defeat on a macro level. There is no democracy, no value for human rights, without the participation and inclusion of women and children. And that participation depends on feeling safe at home first. All life, and livelihoods, are devalued when we devalue vulnerable people. And for what? An ancient status quo built on brute strength. Marriage and the nuclear family still provide the basic unit for our tax code. We're incentivized by the government to create a private jurisdiction where men overarchingly rule. The patriarchs are not okay, and it's doubtful they ever have been. Their benevolent dictatorship kills, and it’s time to let the toxic institution go.
[post_title] => Why Do So Many Men Destroy What They Can't Control?
[post_excerpt] => And why do so many people support them?
[post_status] => publish
[comment_status] => closed
[ping_status] => closed
[post_password] =>
[post_name] => domestic-abuse-family-annihilation-gender-violence-why-men-destroy
[to_ping] =>
[pinged] =>
[post_modified] => 2026-01-15 08:43:59
[post_modified_gmt] => 2026-01-15 08:43:59
[post_content_filtered] =>
[post_parent] => 0
[guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=5576
[menu_order] => 94
[post_type] => post
[post_mime_type] =>
[comment_count] => 0
[filter] => raw
)
