She had just married her husband –“a tough man” - when he started to beat her.
“I was under his control,” Yekaterina Vingorovna, 39, says as she sits shaking in a café in the outskirts of Moscow. “He wanted to know everything; I didn’t have my own life”.
When she complained, he beat her until she could no longer move.
“He hit me really hard here,” says Vingorovna, pointing to her eye and showing a picture of herself bruised and battered. “This happened five years ago, and it just got worse after that”.
Vingorovna says her husband abused her throughout their marriage. She says the first time he hit her was after the two had an argument. Vingorovna says she never called the police, and considered the initial abuse an accident rather than a crime.
In Russia, domestic violence results in the death of 14,000 women each year, or one every 40 minutes, according to a report issued by the Anna Center for Domestic Violence, a non-governmental organization.
The actual figures are even higher, according to the center, because police do not count women who were hospitalized and subsequently died from injuries sustained in domestic abuse.
“True statistics on domestic violence are not even available in Russia,” the organization’s president Marina Pisklakova told RIA Novosti. “We can’t provide figures for the overall scale of the problem”.
Nina Ostanina, a member of the State Duma’s Committee for Women, Family and Youth Affairs, as well said it was unclear why the Interior Ministry had not reported the latest data for domestic violence.
A study published in 2005 by Amnesty International showed that nearly 75% of married women across the country had been subjected to physical, psychological or sexual violence.
Domestic violence is rooted in Russia’s history, dating back to tsarist Russia when wife-beating was seen as necessary. Men were expected to beat their wives on a regular basis to be considered a good husband. Some researchers, on the other hand, attribute the increased domestic violence to the high level of alcoholism in Russia.
Despite the scale of the problem, Pisklakova says authorities often don’t act until it’s too late.
“Of course a woman can call the police,” she says. “But until they arrive, and the woman is able to provide evidence in court that something actually happened to her, it will be too late”.
Another problem is that Russian law requires women to compile case materials for the court personally, and as a result 80 percent of such lawsuits are rejected on legal technicalities.
Despite the difficulties, things are slowly changing.
“There is a new trend happening in Russia: more women are speaking out about domestic violence,” says Alexei Parshin, a lawyer who specializes in domestic abuse cases. “The problem now is that most of them don’t know what action to take or what rights they have”.
Parshin currently represents Vingorovna. He took on her case while she was a client at the Anna Center for Domestic Violence in Moscow. All clients who enter the clinic are assigned a lawyer for the course of their stay at the center. Parshin describes Vingorovna’s former husband as a “seriously ill” and “a dangerous man”.
“Several suspicious incidents have happened since the two separated,” says Parshin. “Her summer home was burned, her car tires slashed, and a lot of her documents stolen. We are linking these incidents to him, who else?”
Vingorovna, who has three children, now lives with her parents. Although, she is in the process of getting a divorce, she claims her estranged husband continues to harass her.
“I know he is sitting somewhere in his car right now, and watching me,” she says in a surprisingly calm manner. “There are plenty of women like me in Russia. It is scary, sure; but what can we do?”
By Diana Markosian RIA Novosti
