Artists and activists across the international community have staged sexually graphic protests around the globe of mass rape in Ukraine – with women leading the way.
In late April, Ukrainian government official Kateryna Levchenko was a guest on journalist Olga Tokariuk’s global podcast, centering on war crimes in the invasion of Ukraine. It was a grim episode. Discussions by a roundtable of women journalists and scholars in Ukraine and beyond focused on the use of mass rape under Russian occupation, and its ongoing status as a live war crime.
In the podcast, Levchenko reported on the hundreds of crimes of sexual violence already registered to date. Rapes have primarily targeted women and teenage girls, but not exclusively. Men, the elderly, even children and toddlers have been victims; and some have died of their injuries. Levchenko informed the audience that rape had been reported in every single region occupied by Russians to that point.
Another panelist offered a further chilling reality of life during the invasion – that many of the victims had not escaped after being assaulted and were still in fact trying to survive in Russian-occupied territories.
Civil liberties journalist and activist Oleksandra Matviichuk explained that Euromaidan SOS – a non-governmental organization (NGO), has begun distributing a comprehensive guide to surviving sexual violence for those in the occupied regions. It provides potentially lifesaving medical advice to women and other survivors, such as how to treat their own rape injuries when there is no possibility for obtaining medical care.
It is starkly clear. When NGOs see the need to print pamphlets for women and other sexual violence survivors in Russian-occupied territories on how not to die of rape injuries – to genitalia or internal organs, or from post-rape infections without access to hospitalization – mass rape as war crime has become a truly hideous reality in Ukraine.
International investigative teams from the International Criminal Court and Amnesty International are already on-site taking testimonies. Human rights groups like La Strada Ukraine and international women’s rights NGOs are mobilizing, especially those previously founded around sexual violence in conflicts from the Congo to Syria.
Yet another new development in this war has been the widespread and effective use of social media. This has helped not only to document and disseminate information about crimes, but to stage protests and instances of art action activism for maximum international exposure.
To that end, a different kind of army has mobilized around the world to draw attention to this most heinous of war crimes: artists and anti-rape activists. And many are women, who have mounted shocking works that blur performance art and political protest in public spaces.
From bloodied thighs and underwear and garbage bags over heads, to bloody handprints on naked breasts, such works have been holding nothing back in terms of the sheer horror and stark reality.
As the first reports of mass sexual violence began to trickle out of occupied Kherson in early March, art and protests directly accusing Russia of practicing rape as a war crime reached the doors of embassies around the world. Side-by-side with the ubiquitous blood red paint on gates, signs were placed from Europe to North America.
One in Ottawa in March called for the cessation of rape of civilian women in Kherson. In Cyprus in April, a woman in a white dress covered in “blood”, with a burlap sack over her head, played dead on the sidewalk. The sign covering her body read simply “they rape and kill children”.
Also as early as March, young women activists drawing attention to reports of mass rape were courageously coming forward in an unlikely place – within Russia itself. In St. Petersburg, one girl in a white dress covered in “blood” was photographed on steps in the city square as police amassed around her. The following day, another girl stood alone near the Ministry of Defense in Moscow with blackened eyes and smeared red lipstick, holding a poster in Russian: “Right now, the Russian military are killing and raping women in Ukraine”. Both young women were detained, their fates now unknown.
In April in Estonia, a line of women enacted a powerful protest in front of the Russian embassy – one that commanded the viewer to see such realities of rape as a war crime. Lined up in a row in shirts but half-naked below the waist, hands tied behind their backs and black bags over heads, the women exhibited red paint pouring out of their underwear and down their legs. Some days later, Lithuanian women re-enacted this protest in front of the lake at the Russian embassy in Vilnius, itself dyed blood red.
By May, such protests had gone even more high-profile and global, when a nearly nude woman ran onto the red carpet at Cannes and shouted directly into the cameras for the international audience. Blue and yellow body paint covered her breasts, while her stomach was overwritten with the words “STOP RAPING US” in black marker. She, too, wore white underwear stained with red “blood”, accompanied by bloody red handprints on her thighs. Under the shocked gaze of A-list movie stars in couture, the protestor was carried away by security.
Brutal mass rape as a war crime in this conflict is, horrifically, ongoing. In May, serial rapes of women and children were reported by refugees who had escaped from occupied Kharkiv.
As international experts continue to arrive in Ukraine to amass evidence of war crimes, court cases are prepared and Russian soldiers go on trial – artists and activists will continue to find it imperative to keep these horrific realities front and center in the public mind.
