Women’s rights activists lead the charge in Armenia’s fight against domestic violence

Story by Teresa Di Mauro for The Beet.

Nina rushed to the Women’s Center in Hrazdan when she heard she had a chance to tell her story. As she recounts the abuse she endured at the hands of her husband, her dark brown eyes fill with tears. “I got married in 2012. During our life together, I experienced constant violence. He was very jealous. He would wake up at night and start scolding me or accusing me of cheating,” says Nina, whose name has been changed for her protection.

Nina met her husband when he visited one of his relatives at the hospital where she worked as a nurse. A month after they met, Nina’s family forced her to marry quickly because her grandmother was dying. Her in-laws knew their son was violent towards Nina, but they assured her that after the wedding, “he will stop.” Instead, the abuse continued, even after she became pregnant with the first of their two children.

“I had just given birth. I was wearing trousers, and [my mother-in-law] told me to take them off and wear something more appropriate,” Nina recalls. “She and my husband started beating me and forced me to take off my trousers. My body was bruised.” “They even told my father to come and discipline me because I wasn’t obeying them,” Nina continues. “And my father went along with them so I wouldn’t get a divorce.”

At the time when Nina got married, victims of family violence in Armenia had little recourse. People had only begun to speak more openly about domestic abuse in 2010 following the femicide of 20-year-old Zaruhi Petrosyan. The young woman’s brutal murder at the hands of her husband shocked Armenian society, creating momentum for raising awareness about domestic violence.

The Women’s Support Center (WSC) in Yerevan, an advocacy and support group for domestic violence victims, was established that same year with funding from the Armenian diaspora and international organizations. Together with other anti-violence groups, the WSC also co-founded the Coalition to Stop Violence against Women to promote systemic change.

“In the beginning, we provided legal aid [and] psychological and social services to women and their children. In the first year, we had about 50 clients come through our doors,” says Ani Jilozian, director of development at the Women’s Support Center. “This was at a time when domestic violence was still very taboo and not talked about in Armenian society. In fact, it was still very much a silent crime. Women felt they had no legal mechanisms to protect themselves.”

Thanks to increased media coverage, the WSC was able to raise awareness among the population and open its first shelter in 2012. “We realized it was a service that wasn’t being offered — and it’s a life-saving service,” says Jilozian.

The Coalition’s advocacy also led Armenia to adopt its first anti-domestic violence law in December 2017. However, while the bill was seen as an important first step in establishing a legal basis for protecting victims, rights organizations were far from satisfied and called for amendments to address the legislation’s limitations. “It was a very flawed law. There were no punitive measures, meaning that domestic violence still wasn’t criminalized. But it was a foundation,” says Jilozian.

The Women’s Support Center opened its second shelter in 2019. But while activists had succeeded in increasing public awareness about domestic violence in Yerevan, the rest of the country was largely left out of the conversation. This is one reason why Nare Hayrapetyan, a long-time environmental and women’s rights activist, decided to set up an NGO in her hometown of Hrazdan to help domestic violence victims and women refugees.

Since its founding in 2019, the Resource Center for Women’s Empowerment has worked tirelessly to support domestic violence survivors and empower women by teaching them new skills, including traditional Marash embroidery (in which the crossed stitches interlink to form geometric shapes that symbolize life and protection). However, attracting funding and donations remains a challenge.

“All the grants go to [organizations in] Yerevan and all the money is spent there. Even if it’s a big project, it goes to the regional grassroots organizations as a sub-grant,” says Hayrapetyan, who runs the center and also works as a fundraiser.

“In general, domestic violence is very widespread in Armenia, and violence tends to be normalized. But we also have some negative developments that can be linked to the aftermath of the Karabakh war,” says psychiatrist Aram Hovsepyan, the president of the Armenian Mental Health Association.

The war with Azerbaijan in 2020 lasted just six weeks but resulted in more than 7,000 military casualties and around 170 civilian deaths. It ended with a Moscow-brokered ceasefire that saw Azerbaijan regain part of Nagorno-Karabakh and adjacent territories Armenia had captured in the 1990s. The hostilities displaced more than 130,000 people, though the vast majority soon returned home.

“We have an increase in the number of people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which usually leads to violence, and we have a general change in the basic mental attitude of men,” Hovsepyan explains. According to the psychiatrist, the war led some men to “adopt a more traditional stance as a defensive mechanism,” using their role as “defenders” to justify violent behavior. “They feel it is their right to be aggressive to become better defenders.”

In the four years since, the Women’s Support Center in Yerevan has seen its caseload triple, while the number of high-risk domestic violence cases they’ve handled doubled. However, WSC staff note that during the 2020 war and its immediate aftermath, there were fewer reported cases, as people fleeing the hostilities were focused on day-to-day survival; many war-related domestic violence cases came in a year or two later.

Following Azerbaijan’s seizure of Nagorno-Karabakh last September, which drove more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians from the disputed enclave, Jilozian believes the same trend is bound to repeat itself. “After the forced displacement [last year], we had about 30 domestic violence cases between September and December, which is actually higher than we expected because that was a really turbulent period where people were relocating,” she says. “Now, we’re seeing [the number of cases] trickle back down. [But] I’m sure that as time goes on, a year or two from now, we’ll see more and more women coming to us.”

Astghik (a pseudonym) used to be a teacher in Nagorno-Karabakh. She separated from her abusive husband in 2019 and struggled for years to create financial stability for herself and her two daughters. Then, last September, Astghik and her children were among those forced to flee to Armenia, where she found herself living in the same town as her abuser. “I don’t want to get into it, but my loved ones weren’t very much help even in these circumstances,” she says.

Astghik turned to the Resource Center for Women’s Empowerment in Hrazdan for help — and she wasn’t the only one. Hayrapetyan says her center, like the one in Yerevan, saw an increase in domestic violence cases after last year’s exodus, which staff also link to a corresponding rise in PTSD cases. “After 2023, the number of cases increased due to post-traumatic stress disorder. [The center] was a new service for Karabakh women. No one talked about domestic violence [there],” says Zhanna Hakobyan, who runs the domestic violence section at the Women’s Empowerment Center.

Like other refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh, Astghik had to try and rebuild her life from scratch. A year later, her living situation remains precarious. “I rent a house that’s not in very good condition; it’s not even hygienic. My children sleep on broken beds [with] torn mattresses that are very dirty no matter how much you clean them,” she says. “I don’t have the money to buy clean beds for my daughters, not even second-hand ones. They miss our old house and the conditions we used to live in.”

Thanks in part to the work of the Women’s Support Center and the Coalition, the Armenian Parliament adopted a substantial package of amendments to the 2017 anti-domestic violence law, which came into force in July. This included removing the reference to “restoring family harmony” from the law’s title after rights activists argued that it could be used to pressure victims into staying in abusive relationships.

“Since 2018, there had been two minor changes to the law, but it’s only with this latest draft that there were major substantive changes,” says Zaruhi Meljumyan, a criminal lawyer at the Women’s Support Center.

The amendments provide greater protection and support for survivors, including a clearer definition of abuse, enhanced legal protection for children who witness violence, expanded medical care for victims, and stronger measures to hold perpetrators accountable for their crimes. The amendments also introduce the term “intimate partner,” expanding the scope of the law to include dating couples, people in common-law marriages, and same-sex partners.

According to Leo Zatikyan, a community officer at the LGBTQ+ rights organization Pink Armenia, LGBTQ+ people are particularly vulnerable to abuse from their parents or other family members — and may end up perpetuating the cycle of violence themselves. “When an LGBT person or a queer person starts to have their own relationship, they [sometimes] can’t help but repeat the patterns of their parents or the household they grew up in,” Zatikyan says.

Even before the overhauled law came into force, Armenian authorities noted that the number of criminal investigations concerning domestic violence practically doubled in 2023. They say this is due in part to an increase in reporting rates as opposed to a rise in violence.

For Jilozian, the increased number of reported domestic violence cases indicates at least one positive trend: more women in Armenia are getting themselves out of danger. Moreover, she says, they’re doing so sooner than before. “Women used to come to us in their mid- to late-thirties, but now, on average, they’re still in their twenties. So that suggests that they’re able to break the chains of violence [earlier],” Jilozian explains. “And, for the first time, we’re seeing women in intimate relationships coming to us even before marriage, which was completely unprecedented 10 years ago,” she adds.

After years of psychological and physical abuse, Nina was able to separate from her husband, who was later convicted of stalking her. The police issued a restraining order against him, which expired in May.

Nina’s children remain in the care of her husband and his family. She’s still in the process of fighting for custody, but her court date keeps getting postponed. “I saw my daughter recently when she was at school. But I haven’t seen my son,” Nina says. “His birthday was in May. I went to their house on a rainy day; I knocked on the door several times, but nobody opened it. I even brought a gift with me.”

Astghik’s main priority is also her children’s welfare. “I have been able to feed them for the last three months,” she says. “I don’t know what the future holds, but I will continue to work. My only problem is that I don’t have time to spend with my daughters.”