Young Ukrainian women fall into high-risk groups for physical and sexual violence in EU

Fleeing the Russian occupation in March 2022, 24-year-old Yulia, who asked that her last name not be used for legal reasons, left Kupyansk for Hamburg, Germany. A few days before the long journey, she met a Lebanese man named Omar online.

His family had also fled their homeland in the early 1980s due to the civil war that engulfed Lebanon at the time. In Hamburg, Omar's relatives have been in business for a long time, opening a chain of small restaurants. The Lebanese man promised to help Yulia with housing and settling in Germany and offered her a job in one of the family establishments. After a while, Yulia and Omar's relationship became romantic — she moved in with him, and later the couple had a son.

However, their life together ended dramatically for the Ukrainian woman: one day, Omar's three brothers attacked her with their fists and threw her out on the street with her belongings. They did not return the child to the mother.

NV learned Yulia's story from a German lawyer who handled the Ukrainian woman's case and shared it on the condition of anonymity. According to him, Ukrainian refugee women are increasingly becoming victims of violence due to their vulnerable situation.

Statistics confirm this: since the beginning of the full-scale Russian aggression, one in four Ukrainian women has experienced physical, psychological, or sexual violence, according to a report by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA). According to the study, 39% of them were abused in Ukraine, and 62% suffered in other countries where they fled due to the war.

In total, almost 4.35 million Ukrainian citizens were living under temporary protection in the EU at the end of December. last year, and women aged 18 to 65 make up almost 44% of them.

NV looks into why hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian women face violence in Europe and what to do in these situations.

Safer in Germany

Following the start of the full-scale invasion, Ukrainian women leaving their homeland en masse mostly fell into a risk group due to a lack of local language knowledge, jobs, permanent residence, and financial savings, according to Sami Nevala, a leading FRA expert on violence. His data indicated that a total of 32% of women aged 18 to 29 under temporary protection in Czechia, Germany, and Poland have experienced physical and sexual violence.

"Almost 9 out of 10 victims reported long-term psychological consequences [after the incident]," Nevala shared the statistics, "namely anxiety, a feeling of vulnerability, or a loss of self-confidence."

Unemployed Ukrainian women without higher education are twice as likely to fall victim to attacks, he said. They are mostly at risk in large European cities, while the situation is calmer in rural areas.

In Germany, which accepted the largest number of displaced people from Ukraine — 1.2 million, while Poland and Czechia  rank second and third with 970,000 and 393,000, respectively — there are fewer such criminal cases than in other European countries, Nevala continued. This is because Ukrainians in Germany immediately began receiving sufficient financial assistance, which allowed women to ignore ambiguous or suspicious job or rental offers.

Anastasia Lukashevych, a communications specialist who received temporary protection status in Germany, also believes that Ukrainian women feel safer in this country. However, aggressive outbursts from Germans also happen, she added.

"Germans are not shy about their emotions," she said of her own observations, "especially in companies where the boss is a god and king. Ukrainian women face bullying at work, and even their neighbors insult them."

Another common example is inevitable discrimination when receiving services in government institutions while interacting with Germans with Russian roots and emigrants from the Russia, Lukashevych continued. She recalled a case when a Ukrainian woman applied to the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees and asked for an interpreter to understand all the information. However, a Russian woman came to help with the translation, deliberately providing her with false data.

Germans can also abuse Ukrainian women's poor knowledge of their own rights, cheat when paying salaries and calculating working hours, and assign inconvenient shifts, Lukashevych shared her experience.

"A person works 140 hours, but is paid for 120," she added. "And fighting the employer's unfair actions is an unrealistic mission."

Nevertheless, the manifestations of German antipathy toward displaced people do not compare with the situation in Poland, Lukashevych is convinced. There, in addition to xenophobia and calls to "get out to Ukraine," you can also fall victim to physical violence.

For example, the Polish broadcaster TVP described several incidents involving a Ukrainian woman named Adriana. One day, she and her family arrived at a church, and after the service, she saw that her car had been damaged by vandals: the Ukrainian license plates were torn off, the tires were punctured, and the words "Wracajcie na Ukrainę," which means "Return to Ukraine," were painted on the car body.

Another time, a drunken Polish man attacked Adriana on a bus, shouting xenophobic insults.

"He kept screaming, 'Why are you sitting here? Get out of here,'" the victim told reporters.

"He didn't like that I was talking on the phone in Ukrainian."

Oleksandr Pestrykov, an expert with the Warsaw-based human rights foundation Ukrainian House, noted: if one Ukrainian woman leaves Poland for financial reasons, ten more do so because of the humiliation of their dignity.

However, among the Ukrainian women NV spoke with, there are also those who have not seen any manifestations of aggression from locals over the years. One of them is Kateryna, who asked not to be named. She moved from Zaporizhzhya to Prague in 2023 and works in a beauty salon. According to her, she has not even heard of violent acts from Czechs.

"It seems that this shameful phenomenon is absent in Czechia," she said.

"Prague immediately set the condition for us to 'work or leave,' so Ukrainian women quickly became financially independent from men."

In search of justice

The FRA calculated that 72% of Ukrainian women who survived physical or sexual violence told doctors, lawyers, relatives, friends, or representatives of religious and social organizations about these incidents. However, due to fear of revenge from the abuser, only 12% reported it to the police.

Yulia, the Ukrainian woman whose Lebanese partner took her child, was also afraid to contact law enforcement officers, her German lawyer said. However, she finally dared to file a report.

"But when the police officers were drawing up the protocols," the NV interlocutor shared the details of the case, "the officer noted to her that it is impossible not to speak the language of the host country at all."

A local law firm provided the woman with free legal aid, but in court, Omar's family raised the issue of depriving her of parental rights. Last summer, Yulia was forced to return to Ukraine without her child. Her further fate is unknown.

Lawyer Serhii Antonov, who practices law in the Czechia, reviewed this case at NV's request. According to him, defense of the Ukrainian woman's rights was complicated by her actual status: the displaced woman depended on state payments and was not officially employed. The child's father, on the other hand, is a German citizen and pays taxes from his business.

"The Ukrainian woman did not prove that she had enough income to support the child," the expert commented.

"And to record beatings, you need to be able to communicate with law enforcement officers and have at least a minimal knowledge of German law. Apparently, the police did not delve into the essence of this case."

Communications specialist Lukashevych explained cases of violence involving people from the Middle East by cultural differences with a worse attitude towards women than towards men.

"A Turkish man once flirted with my underage daughter during a train ride," Lukashevych said, "but she immediately said she was 16, so he left her alone. This is a clear illustration that Eastern men easily harass women of any age."

Expert Nevala, for his part, advises victims of violence to contact law enforcement as quickly as possible, and in case of problems, to contact humanitarian organizations. He also encourages authorities in Czechia, Poland, and Germany to insure Ukrainian women financially.

"Officials have no right to leave women without money," Nevala is convinced.

"Ukrainian women need little: comfortable housing and work in their specialty in case of a decrease in material assistance. Women should not be defenseless."