Behind the Closed Doors: Voices of Children

Fourteen out of the twenty cases of domestic violence revealed by the rapid-response group of the NGO Society without Violence  are cases of physical violence with seven of them ending in death.  Most of these cases have taken place in the presence of children…

“It happened so many times, we slept on the roof, or in somebody else’s house… We were tired. He was drunk almost every day and when drunk he would fling anything at hand at us; nothing has remained intact in the house, he has broken everything…When he beat our mother, we would interfere and he would hit us too. Mother, with these injuries, would go and complain, but she was told that she did not complain well enough: what does it mean to complain well? I do not know what they wanted,” Marine tells about her father Levon A. Levon did not work. According to Marine, Levon together with mother collected berries in the forest, sold them in the market, and would spend all the money on drink…In October of this year, doctors saved the life of her 54-year old mother Siranush by miracle, after knife wounds inflicted by her husband…

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“I was sleeping; I woke up at four from the shouts of my mother. My sister, Arpine, was still sleeping. I ran quickly and saw that the dining-room door was locked and Volod (her stepfather) was pushing my mother uninterruptedly from the other side. Mother was shouting to me to open the door. I ran to the kitchen, took a spoon and opened the door with ease.  I entered and saw that he had taken the vase and was hitting … I tried to help my mother escape, but he managed to hit her again from behind.  Then he forcefully pulled my mother to the kitchen and began hitting her with a knife. We called for help, we requested that he not do it, but he would not listen to us and was killing our mother in front of our eyes,” tells 17-year old Anahit, who has become mature within few days from pain and grief.

The other sister, 14-year old Arpine, does not talk at all.  In the presence of the minors, the stepfather has killed his 35-year old wife by inflicting 21 blows with a knife…

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“He would send us to bed and would start beating our mother; I understood from their voices that he was beating.  Once I woke up and saw that he was holding a knife against my mother’s neck,” tells Hovhaness, a ten-year old son of Tatevik N.  Tatevik’s seven-year old daughter tells how her father took her mother and herself by car to a deserted and stony place and put a knife against her neck: only after the child’s request and cries ‘papa, please, do not do it’, father came to his senses and did not hurt.  For ten years, Tatevik was subjected to violence by her husband in the most brutal ways: he burned her hands with a white-hot screwdriver, beat her with a rubber pipe and in the end, when his wife, already unable to put up with this torture, had left home together with their children, the husband followed her and knifed her 25 times in the main entrance…

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…the 15-year old Susie saw, through the room’s glass door, how her father hit her mother with his fist and then knifed her. “I shouted that papa was killing mama, but before people came my mother had already fainted; before an ambulance service arrived my mother had been taken to hospital in a different car, but…” The five-year old Arman did not see how his father was knifing his mother, his sister Susie managed at that time to close her brother’s eyes with her hand, but when his mother, covered in blood, was being taken to the sitting –room and later from conversations of adults he understood that “mother was hit by father”; he told his grandfather, “When I grow up, I will kill him…”

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The spouses of 16 years had rarely lived in peace; once the husband drove out his wife with her baby in her arms into the winter cold, supposedly punishing her, or made Lusine stand on one foot in the corner for hours. He would not allow his wife to leave the house, socialize with their neighbors and forbade her to work anywhere. Before being killed, Lusine decided to put an end to her sufferings and told her husband that she would get a divorce…

Based on the materials of Nelly Babayan

P.S. If you have witnessed a domestic violence case, call the rapid-response group at http://rru.swv.am/.