Ekaterina Anchevskaya

Farida.

Farida grew up in Voronezh where she lived with her mother and a step dad. One day a friend of family met her after school and offered her to give a ride home. “My heart skipped a little bit but a believed him because he was a friend of parents so I sat in the car.” The man didn’t take her home but brought the girl to an unknown apartment and raped. Farida was 12 years old at that time. She confessed her mother what had happened to her and they went to a gynaecologist. Overtime she realised they had done her a hymen reconstruction surgery. 

In a few years Farida moved to Moscow with her boyfriend Arthur. One night he called her and asked to come to a bar. Farida was naive again. When she arrived, he fled and left her with unknown men. She was a pledge for the money Arthur lost in gambling. A pledge for a week. She wasn’t given food and was threatened to be sold to Turkey. Gambling became a sick addiction of Arthur at the same time when he started to beat Farida. He used to fasten her to battery, sit on her chest and beat. It all started when Farida told Arthur about what happened to her when she was 12. 

I couldn’t explain to myself why I was with him but I thought I loved him but now I know it was a dependance. I wed him anyway because he was saying he would gossip about me and the rape.

In a lighted apartment in a residential area of Makhachkala four women and six children share three bedrooms. Neighbours already got used to the noisy kids and women trying to divide control over the house among them. Some of them have timid eyes and move quietly in the house, others feel unprotected and fight back any word, but none of them ever felt caress. Growing up bullied, they tried to regain love with husbands but faced another decade of poisoned relationships. Warm House on a Mountain is a shelter for women who had nowhere else to go on their escape from the past. Farida is in this apartment too. Right now she laughs and calls herself a foolish optimist, past made her who she is now and together with Evgenya they operate the shelter to support other women. 

In Dagestan, especially in the villages, families care about their image in the eyes of the neighbours and relatives. Embarrassment and fear of gossips dominate many aspects of life. Nobody wants to share what happens in their personal life or request help, picturing what the neighbours will imagine. Angst of society and traditions sometimes becomes a strategy of life.

Warm House on the Mountain helps victims of domestic violence, clandestine mothers, orphaned girls. Women in the shelter are provided with three months to reevaluate, to find a place to live and a way to support themselves. They work with a psychologist and have weekly therapy sessions. As psychologist Larisa says there are many lies behind closed doors. Women can cover rape or pregnancy, give birth and sell the baby to another family to avoid gossips and shaming. Yet both physical and mental scars stay suppressed by domestic violence and lack of support. In the shelter they develop alternative ways to rehabilitate women trying to find out what works best for each of them. One of the main principles is to isolate from the past and conditions they were used to, sometimes by relocating to another city. “When you are unattached physically and separated from the situation, it immensely helps.” Technically, women are given a three-month period in the shelter so that they have a deadline for themselves and count not only on the shelter but their own actions. It maintains a balance of comfort and frustration. It startles them because they are unused to a various environment as much as they are unused to space for themselves and respect.

One of the shelter’s volunteers, Muaz, runs an NGO in Dagestan that delivers food to people in need. They also deliver dairy products to the shelter. He has no doubts that in Islam woman is the most protected person and she possesses rights. “A husband has to make money. She purely has to care about kids, house and nothing else disturbs her. Times changed, and women don’t know their place anymore.”  

Everything was going peaceful in the shelter until one night the apartment’s door was kicked down by a man. Through the relatives and friends, he found where his wife was hiding with the kids. He smashed the door screaming he would assassinate her and kidnap the children. Frightened women tried to lock the rooms, but he managed to seize two of his kids and leave. Swearing he would come back to kill. One of the kids still wakes up every night in screams terrified the man will come again. 

The man came for Alana (who asked to change her name) and their three kids. 

Alana.

“Bear with it and preserve the family” - that’s what Alana heard from her relatives all 9 years of marriage. But there was nothing to save anymore. 

Alana lived with her husband for nine years. They were both extremely religious but as she described her husband’s behaviour he used religion to justify his insanity and aggressiveness. He did ‘whatever gave him a kick’, and she was embarrassed to tell publicly what exactly he did to her. However he never touched the kids, he loved them but didn’t provide the fundamental needs. One day he brought a new wife home. That was the last trace for Alana. 

You will ask why I waited for so long. I didn’t want any relative to know about it. The longer I was waiting the more I was hoping he would change. But it was getting worse, I started to believe I didn’t deserve anything.

Evgenya and Farida together with lawyers found a way to return kids and were preparing a place for Alana in another city. She wanted to take off the hijab, find a job and start living for herself and kids. However, Alana seemed emotionless, waiting for others to choose life for her. Her face looked tired and pale and she was repeating similar words without any hope. The next month early in the morning she dressed her daughter in the nicest clothes and left without letting anyone know. She returned to her husband. In a week she sent a message to the shelter saying “He wants to kill me, I can’t do it anymore.” Since then any connection with her was lost. 

As the shelter founders say, they witnessed so many stories when women decided to return to their husbands. It can be a fear of change or blind dependence, echoing Stockholm syndrome when despite humiliation or pain victims develop feelings towards the abuser. They possess no power to restrain women in the shelter by force. 

Madina. 

I don’t know, it was such a hard childhood. Definitely right now I would love to have at least one parent. It is very hard when I go outside and hear kids calling their mothers.

Madina is an orphan. Together with her younger brother they lived with grandmother. Madina remembers coming home from school and seeing her uncle beating his wife, she discovered blood on the floor and always hid with her brother under a table. “When you are an orphan you need love and care even more” but her grandmother said she didn’t deserve love. Madina was married twice, has two children and many scars on her body both from her grandmother and her husbands. Her son grew up in the village while she was studying medicine and working in Makhachkala. When she was expecting a baby from her second husband, she found out he had another woman. Madina left. Bogged down in loneliness on spur of moment she realised she was sitting alone on a bench in a park, pregnant and with nowhere to go. Through social media she met Farida who invited her to Warm House on the Mountain. Initially, she didn’t want to talk to the therapist. She recalled her childhood and didn’t want to talk about it again. But then she started liking the sessions and wanted to share. 

After three months in the centre Madina was offered to stay as a manager of the shelter. She occupies a separate room and manages the timetable and documents, she also runs the health department initiative visiting antenatal clinics and explaining how the shelter can aid battered women. In the future she hopes to open her own centre to help women.