Peer-reviewed article
Protection of rights and domestic violence against children in the conditions of war
O. O. Dmytryshyn ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This article examines how domestic violence against children worsens during armed conflict in Ukraine and identifies gaps in how it is recognized and measured. The author argues that children who witness domestic violence suffer psychological harm but are often not counted as victims unless they experience direct physical violence. The article calls for improved data collection systems and unified statistical measures to better understand the scope of domestic violence and gender-based violence during wartime, with special attention to vulnerable groups including children, women, and people with disabilities.
Key points
- Children who witness domestic violence experience harm to their mental health but are often not recognized as victims
- Domestic violence worsens during periods of military aggression and may remain invisible or receive inadequate societal response
- Different statistical forms across regions prevent qualitative analysis of the effectiveness of domestic violence prevention systems
- Current data collection does not adequately account for vulnerable categories such as women, children, and persons with disabilities
- There is a lack of comprehensive research on the impact of war and global challenges on domestic and gender-based violence
Limitations
This is a position paper that identifies problems and gaps rather than presenting empirical evidence or research findings. The document does not provide specific data, statistics, or evidence about the scale or outcomes of domestic violence against children in Ukraine, nor does it evaluate any intervention.
Abstract
The article emphasizes that in order to improve the protection of children’s rights during military conflicts and combat domestic violence, to identify facts of domestic violence against children, to improve and unify the forms of collecting, analyzing, summarizing and taking into account statistical data on cases of all forms of violence based on gender and domestic violence and the effectiveness of measures taken in these cases. Domestic violence is one such phenomenon that only worsens in the period of military aggression, while it can remain invisible or have an inadequate level of response from society due to many reasons. The problem of domestic violence is not new. This is especially true for children and teenagers. However, just as before the war, so now, children who are witnesses of domestic violence are not always recognized as victims. They are recognized as victims only if physical violence was directly directed against the child. Which, after all, a child who has witnessed domestic violence is obviously wrong, because the child who has witnessed domestic violence has at least already been harmed, in particular to his mental health. Different statistical forms in the subjects of prevention and counteraction to domestic violence, as well as their failure to take into account the features of today’s global challenges, make it impossible to qualitatively analyze data on the effectiveness of the system of prevention and counteraction to domestic violence / gender-based violence and lead to a lack of comprehensive scientific research on the impact of the pandemic and war on the situation of domestic violence / gender-based violence. At the same time, it is important to take into account in statistical forms vulnerable categories of affected persons, such as women, children, persons with disabilities, for the purpose of further analysis of such information and formation of effective assistance programs for such categories of persons based on the received data.