Behind Closed Doors

Violence in wartime, conflict, and post-conflict situations forms a background that systematically feeds the spirit of hatred, helplessness, and despair. It saturates the general atmosphere with fear and aggression, a sense of humiliation and lack of freedom, distorting human relationships and often turning them into their opposite.

We witnessed the consequences of this through the story of Kateryna.

The war came to their village suddenly, though troubles had already struck her family before that. Yet with the war, every day became a trial for 27-year-old Kateryna: explosions on the outskirts, cold nights, the inability to provide her children with the bare essentials… But the greatest ordeal wasn’t even that—her husband had fully turned into a nightmare.

He beat her, abused the children—and there was no one to turn to for help. The war had robbed her of the opportunity to escape the abuser, to protect herself, to ensure the safety of her five-year-old and seven-year-old sons.

With her last hope, Kateryna turned to the “Volunteer-68 Humanitarian Aid Centre,” begging for rescue. According to her, she had already given up on herself. She was only terrified for her children, who flinched at every explosion, heard constant swearing, and suffered beatings from their father.

Our evacuation team, risking their own lives, took the family out of the danger zone and housed them in the “Without Limits” shelter—a temporary residence. There, for the first time in a long while, she could sleep peacefully, and the children could play without startling at every sound.

However, Kateryna's emotional nature led her into another misstep. A week later, she decided to reunite with her new-old love in Kharkiv. She probably believed that everything would be fine with this new man’s support—that he wasn’t like the monster she had just escaped from.

But the story repeated itself. A few months later, we received a phone call. Kateryna was crying, begging for someone to rescue her and the children. The “beloved” turned out to be just as cruel: he humiliated her, kicked her out onto the street, yelled at the children.

Once again, we brought her back and placed her in a dormitory for internally displaced families with children. Kateryna again had a safe place to live, received social and psychological support, and was able to recover. She attended our training sessions on combating gender-based violence and learned to recognize its signs.

But time passed, and once again her emotional tendencies and rosy fantasies led her down a dangerous path…

And once again—a call, the same despair, the same tears. We rescued her again, housed her again in our shelter. She’s still with us. It seems Kateryna truly understands now that violence is not love and relationships can be built differently.

We helped her file for divorce and begin the process of depriving her husband of parental rights. She managed to find a job, and her children finally started school.

It seems that Kateryna is no longer afraid of an independent future. She’s building it herself, thanks to a rethinking of her own experience. That’s what we want to believe. Because the sense of inferiority, the learned helplessness that come with long-term exposure to any form of violence, strike cruelly at personal wholeness and make escaping from the grip of such experience an extremely difficult task.