Anastasiia Melnychenko, the head of human rights organization Studena2, was incensed when she read a man’s Facebook post about a woman he had found half-dead in park after she had been raped. The man commented that “(the woman) shouldn’t have been hanging around alone at night.”
She immediately started a Facebook hashtag campaign, writing her own story of all the sexual violence she had endured, decrying the practice of blaming victims for the sexual abuse they suffer.
“I was furious and scared when I found that some other men in the comments section supported the male poster, saying women are themselves responsible for being raped,” Melnychenko told the Kyiv Post.
She shared her story under the #ЯнеБоюсьСказати (#IamNotAfraidtoSayIt) hashtag, and in a day it went viral.
More than 1,000 people reacted, 200 shared her story, and some started to tell their own stories under the same hashtag of the horrific sexual abuse they had been subjected to.
“I expected there would be a massive response. But their stories touched my heart,” said Melnychenko.
The social media post revealed cases of sexual harassment at work, sexual abuse in childhood, and molestation in the street, at school and on public transport.
Such frankness is unusual for Ukraine, and blaming the victim for sexual crimes is still common in Ukrainian society, according to experts. The attitude is a legacy of social conditions in the Soviet Union, where sex was a taboo subject.
Female rape victims who take their cases to court still find the process of seeking justice traumatic as well, according to Alyona Zubchenko, the head of the public communications department of the La Strada-Ukraine women’s rights center.
“She will have to prove the she was raped, being subjected to humiliating tests, questioning and even physical examinations. Otherwise it is just her word against his,” Zubchenko said.
La Strada-Ukraine helps victims of sexual violence in court. Zubchenko said sexual harassment and rape cases usually take far too long to be considered by the Ukrainian justice system.
“One case of child molestation has been going on in a court in Dnipro for seven years already,” she said.
According to the crime statistics regularly published on the Prosecutor General’s Office website, in June alone 580 sexually related crimes were committed in Ukraine: 229 rapes, 112 cases of rapes involving sodomy, 43 incidents of child molestation, but only one reported case of sexual harassment.
Rapist always guilty
Melnychenko recalled an incident when she was 13, as she was walking on Khreshchatyk Street in the heart of Kyiv, holding bags of groceries in each hand. Suddenly a male passerby came up to her, grabbed her between her legs, and then released her and walked away as if nothing had happened.
Another incident happened when she, at the age of 21, dumped her then boyfriend, who turned out to be mentally unstable.
“I had just came to his place to get back my grandpa’s embroidered shirt, which he had borrowed. He grabbed me, twisted my arms, stripped me and then tied me to the bed naked. He didn’t rape me; just hurt me in different ways. I felt so weak, I couldn’t do anything,” Melnychenko said.
“But I’m not ashamed to talk about it because it wasn’t my fault. The rapist is always guilty.”
Women across Ukraine agreed in their comments in the hashtag campaign, saying that it was wrong not to speak out about such violence. Some of them confessed to even becoming used to some of the molestation, thinking it was completely normal behavior for men.
“I had a teacher in the first grade who took the class to the park to collect leaves, but showed us pornography and than his penis instead,” wrote Velina Vaitkunaite from Kyiv.
Myroslava Pavlyk recalled the day she moved from Kyiv to Lviv. She had been sitting on some steps in the city center, listening to a street music concert, wearing a long skirt and a simple t-shirt. When she started to stand up, a man from the crowd offered to help her.
“There were a lot of people around – what bad thing could happen, I thought – and I gave him my hand. However, after I stood up and tried to take back my hand, he grabbed me harder, and started dragging me away from the central square,” recalled Pavlyk.
“I was crying for help, screaming to the people on the square that I didn’t know this man. But no one cared.”
She managed to escape when the stranger loosened his grip. “I rushed into a nearby cafe and stayed there until my male friend came to rescue me. All the time, the stranger was standing at the café window, watching,” wrote Pavlyk.
Some men also shared stories of being sexually abused.
“When I was 11, a dirty old man tried to seduce me, to lie in bed with me. I ran away when he started touching me. No sex happened. Child abuse is disgusting, so is coercive sex. It’s not only women who can be the victims of sexual violence,” wrote Yevgen Mitsenko, 37.
La Strada-Ukraine psychologist Anastasia Korenkova said that unfortunately, male victims of sexual harassment turn to them for help less often.
“That’s all because of the social stereotype of a ‘real man,’ who has to be strong and can’t afford to cry or show weakness,” Korenkova told the Kyiv Post.
Damaging stereotypes
Social stereotypes still play a damaging role in modern Ukrainian society, Zubchenko said. She said that the roots of sexual violence lie in the influences of parenting and social expectations, or more precisely on the stereotypical differentiation between the accepted roles for males and females.
“From childhood girls are raised with the message that a woman must be polite, quiet and a beautiful homemaker, who shouldn’t argue with her husband, and who should satisfy all his needs,” she said.
These role models are hangovers from the time when women had fewer rights then men. In modern society, where women can earn money and work at the same level as men, such stereotypes are irrelevant, the expert said.
The hashtag campaign did not meet with universal approval, however. Some people reacted by saying it was inappropriate to reveal such sexually explicit stories via social media, while others, mostly men, insisted women were to blame if they were sexually assaulted, and “shouldn’t complain about men giving them attention.” Some described even the hashtag campaign as being anti-male.
But Korenkova said that campaign had been very useful for the victims of violence, as it was a type of group therapy.
“People don’t usually reveal these horrific experiences, because they’re afraid of criticism,” the psychologist said.
“This hashtag campaign helped them not only find support, but also realize that they are not alone in their problem. This was very useful, as it helps people let go of the problem.”
