A 19-year-old Chechen woman who was fleeing violence was detained in Vnukovo

Selima Ismailova, a 19-year-old native of Chechnya, was detained at Moscow’s Vnukovo airport on Monday. She tried to fly to Germany. Ismailova says that she wanted to run away from incessant violence at home, beaten and threatened by her father.

According to the human rights center “Marem”, which provided assistance to Ismailova, the reason for Ismailova’s detention was the statement of her relatives to the police that she allegedly stole 85 thousand rubles from her paternal relative.

Human rights activists emphasize that theft charges are standard for similar cases, in which women fleeing from domestic violence in the North Caucasus are often caught. Relatives do this in order to have the opportunity to declare a fugitive as wanted.

According to Sofya Rusova, the press secretary of the Center for the Protection of Victims of Domestic Violence, the Moscow police intend to hand Ismailov over to their Chechen colleagues, who will arrive from Achkhoi-Martan during the day. Lawyers came to Ismailova at the airport.

As the founder of the “Marem” project Svetlana Anokhina told Kavkaz.Realia, Selima Ismailova was born in Chechnya, and moved to Germany with her family at the age of 12. The girl complained about violence in the family to the Department of Youth Affairs, but her mother forced her to withdraw her words with threats. In 2021, her father took Ismailova back to Chechnya, where she began to live with her grandmother. After returning to the region, the father often beat the girl and threatened to kill her, sent her voice messages threatening to break her daughter’s legs.

• Domestic violence is one of the systemic problems of the North Caucasus. Local residents are subjected to it by their husbands and other family members. As a rule, law enforcement agencies ignore such cases, and when criminal cases are initiated, the courts impose the most lenient punishment.
• Over the past ten years, draft laws on the prevention of domestic violence have been submitted to the State Duma more than 40 times, but have not passed a single reading. In 2017, the article on beatings was removed from the Russian Criminal Code, and administrative responsibility was introduced for domestic violence.