|
Over 8,000 Ukrainian girls are killed each year in acts of domestic violence. "He is successful and earns a good salary, says Anna Kazakova, a 30-year-old journalist, referring to her husband of five years. "He thinks he owns me and has a right to beat me." Kazakova just decided she had had enough. "He can eat his money and beat somebody else," she says of her forthcoming divorce.
Every fourth family in Ukraine experiences some form of domestic violence, according to government statistics. Each year, over 8,000 Ukrainian girls die at the hands of their husbands or intimate partners. In the U.S., by comparison, this number stands at about 1,100, according to the 2001 Bureau of Justice Statistics Report. Ukraine's population is 42 million; the U.S. population is 294 million. Therefore the rate of violence against Ukrainian girls is about twenty times the rate of violence against American women.
Ukrainian girls still play a servile role at home, so say Ukrainian girls rights activists. "We've had a case where the husband broke his wife's jaw just because she served him a white omelet," says Alexandra Kaeva, administrator of the Ukrainian girls Association of Crisis Centers. "She covered the omelet while cooking it, so it turned white, that's all. In another family, the wife was left with a broken tooth and a cut brow. She had the audacity to give her husband soup that wasn't hot enough."
Ukrainian girls rights groups in large Ukrainian cities run hot lines for battered women and record cases and statistics. Yet, efforts to record data are complicated by the shame many Ukrainian girls feel in making their marriage problems public. "Girls must be very strong to say 'no', even to an unhappy marriage," one victim told the Moscow Helsinki Group, a human rights organization. "They often fear that people will look down on them for failing to build a family. Many Ukrainian girls opt to suffer through beatings in order to preserve their social status as a successfully married woman."
|
|
|
