‘Has anyone here been raped?’

What I’ve learned about rape in Ukraine and whether it will be tried as a crime against humanity.

A Ukrainian woman mourns at the grave of her deceased husband in Izium, in Kharkiv Oblast. (Photo by Metin Aktas/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

When I was in Ukraine this summer, I didn’t ask the people I met about rape. I think it was because I’d spent more than a decade writing about rape in conflict, and I just wanted to focus on other war crimes, such as torture, murder, forced displacement and disappearances, etc. (Much of my reporting there was for a long-form story I’m still working on — apologies for my Substack absence).

But something my fixer told me won’t get out of my head. He said he’d heard that there had been a journalist wandering around asking, “Has anyone here been raped?”

Believe it or not, this has happened before, a number of years ago, in what I think was the Democratic Republic of Congo (the location varies based on the teller). A fellow journalist recently confirmed that this actually happened, but the myth of it is awful enough. To hear that some journalist may have been doing this same thing in Ukraine is just too much.

Over the years, I’ve seen some media somewhat improve how they cover sexualized violence. I’ve been called by editors and writers for advice and to do newsroom trainings. How do you not retraumatize people? How do you make them comfortable? How do you make sure you keep your sources — and their families — safe? If someone is tracking you, you’ll be leading them right to the survivors, for one thing. How do you write about what happened? In terms of security, any name you use or detailed description in your story could result in retribution against the source or their family.

I’ve witnessed terrible journalistic practices in the course of my work on rape in war. For example, one reporter had so retraumatized a 14-year-old Syrian girl in a Turkish hospital I visited, the girl refused to speak to another reporter ever again.

In any case, I came here to fill you in on what I’m learning about rape in Ukraine, so let’s get to that. Because a number of investigative bodies — national and international — are working on this issue, let me define a few things first.

Under the 1948 U.N. Genocide Convention, rape can be part of genocide, which consists of mental and physical crimes “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” including a deliberate and intentional attempt by the enemy to literally destroy women’s bodies so that they are unable to create the next generation. Sometimes, too, there is forced impregnation, which is meant to contaminate an ethic or national bloodline, as was the case in the 1992-1995 Bosnian war, when Serbian soldiers raped Bosnian Muslim women, and in Uganda in the early 2000s by the Lord’s Resistance Army, a militia group known for forcibly inducting children.

Rape in war can also be a crime against humanity. Two criteria must be met: The attacks have to be proven to be systematic and widespread — both of which can be hard to demonstrate in a hidden and taboo crime like rape.

Crimes against humanity include, according to the Rome Statute of the ICC, “crimes such as murder, extermination, rape, persecution and all other inhumane acts of a similar character (willfully causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health), committed ‘as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack.’”

Side note: Unlike crimes against humanity, war crimes “must always take place in the context of an armed conflict, either international or non-international,” according to the United Nations.

There are many ways to build a case showing that rape has been perpetrated as a crime against humanity. One lesser known puzzle piece can come from what women and men have heard soldiers say during their assaults. There can be a repetition of phrases, which can indicate that there is a command to rape coming from above. One good example of this was in Zimbabwe in the mass violence during the 2008 election. The New York-based nonprofit AIDS-Free World found that 96 percent of 380 women raped later testified that the men who had assaulted them had made similar political statements.

As I’ve begun to tap into Ukrainian sources on this issue, I’m realizing that every investigator I speak to, including Yuri Byelousov, head of war crimes at the Ukrainian prosecutor-general’s office, are considering whether rape is haphazard — a crime of opportunity — or systematic. Is it widespread? Some have also told me that the International Criminal Court is gathering evidence for a possible case, although no one at the ICC would either confirm or deny that.

One Ukrainian legal expert I spoke to, Larisa Denysenko, told me that the systematic nature and prevalence of rape committed by the Russians of nine women she is representing makes her think that “this is a military tactic of the occupation army, a method of terror and intimidation of the civilian population.” She pointed to the fact that all of the nine women, most of whom were gang raped, had heard Russians saying during their attacks: “banderivka” (fascist), “Nazi,” “prostitute” and the phrase, “I will teach you, you will know how to resist.”

Tetiana Pechonchyk, a legal expert from a Ukrainian human rights organization named Zmina, told me while we had coffee in a smelly fish restaurant in Kyiv that she’s heard about various cases of women being told by Russian soldiers, “We will rape you until you won’t want to see men anymore.”

But it’s hard to know whether the Russian soldiers are simply repeating government propaganda, or whether they were specifically indoctrinated by their commanders to commit these brutal acts in the name of slanderous lies.

Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations told the Security Council in June that the “mountain” of reports of sexualized violence committed by Russian soldiers in Ukraine is growing every day.

The notes from that June meeting quote Natalia Karbowska, the cofounder and director of strategic development for the Ukrainian Women’s Fund: “Although the full scale of conflict-related sexual violence is not yet known, human rights activists and law enforcement agencies estimate that hundreds of cases have been committed not just against women and girls, but also men and boys and people of other gender identities.” And behind those hundreds are likely hundreds more. I’ve been told over the years by experts that for every one person raped are at least eight others too afraid to come forward.

For his part, Vassily A. Nebenzia, the Russian Federation representative to the U.N., countered that “in recent years, Ukraine has been among the top five countries in terms of the number of victims of human trafficking and sexual exploitation in Europe. In Las Vegas, posters emerged, inviting Ukrainian strippers to a casting session. In Germany, fast-food chain KFC in its advertising said that ‘we are happy to welcome all the chicks from Ukraine.’ Obviously, this is just the tip of the iceberg.” 

That’s some wackadoo iceberg, and this is probably one of the crappiest deflections in history.

Anyway, there are many other kinds of evidence needed to convict wartime rape on the international stage as a crime against humanity. In my experience, however, that while people tend to accept that men have been tortured by the enemy, rape is still “too difficult to prove” in too many cases. Aka, we still have a ways to go toward properly valuing the integrity of women’s bodies.

The good news is that many people are investigating this possible crime against humanity and uncovering credible evidence that can be used in trials of some kind, somewhere, someday.

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NB: I’m thinking about doing a live Zoom call with whoever wants to join to discuss what I saw and learned in my reporting in Ukraine. Please let me know if you’d be interested. Thanks.