Sex for Aid: The Ongoing, Invisibilized Sexual Exploitation of Ukrainian Women

Shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine began on February 24, 2022, Anna Maria,19, fled from Kyiv to northern France, where some family friends offered to host her. In a town with a population of 55,000, Anna Maria’s arrival was immediately known: she started receiving dinner invitations from a local businessman, who claimed he had been helping Ukrainian refugees and was already hosting one refugee family in his mansion. He later invited her to stay with him at his country house by the sea to enjoy a vacation.

“I always had trust in people,” she told me, especially when there was another Ukrainian family already with him. “He opened his doors to us so we could [have a] good time, recover, and adapt to our new life.” She went.

One night, the man invited Anna Maria to watch a movie with him alone when the others had already gone to bed. As they sat watching, he insisted on giving her a massage. She would need to lay on his bed, he said. Frightened, she obeyed. Then he began touching her breasts and forcibly kissing her.

“At that moment, I froze.”

He offered to give her a tantric massage next. “He told me I excited him and that he would like to have a free relationship with me,” she said. When he reached for her underwear, she pulled away and bolted to her room.

“I feel ashamed that I even lied in his bed,” she said.

In the two days Anna Maria was there, the man continued to harass and assault her, she said, but to protect herself from the situation escalating, she pretended nothing had happened until she was safely delivered back to her host family. She has since cut off contact with him, but in a small town, he’s hard to avoid.

He’s well known for his preference for young, blonde Eastern European women, locals told her.

Even before the Russian invasion, there was an established pattern of sexualized stereotypes assigned to Eastern European women across the rest of the continent, and, consequently, trafficking for sexual services was already highly prevalent. Then war arrived in Ukraine, and most men aged 18 to 60 were prohibited from leaving the country. Refugees from Ukraine were and remain mostly women and children, a uniquely gendered situation that abusers and traffickers wasted no time in seizing.

“The limited options to find a suitable job and accommodation and their responsibility [for their children] often force [refugee] women to accept risky offers,” said Marketa Hronkova, director of La Strada Czech Republic, an organization fighting against human trafficking there. “Perpetrators know and abuse this.”

At the outset of the war, major media outlets were quick to highlight stories of rape as a weapon of war employed by Russian soldiers, along with several cases of assault occasionally documented in new host countries. Some outlets even covered the dangers of new aid schemes, such as Homes for Ukraine in the UK, for their potential exploitation by sex traffickers. But stories like Anna Maria’s, which fit the legal definitions of sexual exploitation and sexual coercion—but not sex trafficking—have been grossly underreported by the press, if not ignored altogether.

After nearly two years, stories of sexual assault or predation experienced by Ukrainian women seeking safety across Europe are no longer considered newsworthy unless the crimes against them are particularly sensational or brutal.

As a freelance journalist who has covered Ukraine since 2014 — as well as the lives of Ukrainian refugees in my home country, Slovakia, for the past 18 months — I’ve interviewed dozens of women with experiences echoing Anna Maria’s, and their collective testimonies paint a grim picture of a crisis happening beyond the spotlight of mainstream media coverage, and without serious and sustained attention, it will only get worse.

Irina was 22 when she fled Ukraine for France with her 18-year-old sister in August 2022. While the sisters were waiting for a train crossing the German-French border, they were approached by a woman with a small child, who offered to drive them to their destination. They agreed, but as soon as they approached her car, the woman passively mentioned that they needed to “use the fact that they are girls” before telling them that she would drive them to an agency where they would earn thousands of euros a week for sex.

Throughout their journey, they’d been approached by men making “weird offers” to them, Irina said. “But we could never imagine that it would be a woman with a small child.” Luckily, the sisters managed to flee before the car drove off. They later made it to France safely.

They were nearly trafficked, but a narrow miss doesn’t constitute news, many outlets told me as I tried to report on this emerging pattern. I had to bring them a shocking scoop on sex trafficking; otherwise, “the piece is unlikely to work,” one editor said.

But aid workers I’ve spoken to fear that the unchecked exploitation of Ukrainian women — who are still displaced in different European countries, as well as internally, in Ukraine — will create those exact conditions for sex trafficking to flourish, with or without media taking notice.

Endangering stereotypes

“Migration is strongly genderized,” Hronkova said. “There is always exploitation of people on the run. Sadly, women are much more vulnerable to this exploitation — during their journey, but also in their final destinations.”

According to data collated by UNHCR, there are nearly six million refugees from Ukraine currently residing in other European countries. The overwhelming majority of them remain women and children, as military conscription remains mandatory for men in Ukraine. By now, the many European government aid schemes established to shelter Ukrainian refugees have long expired, and the programs that are still running have dramatically scaled back their aid. Meanwhile, other countries have significantly reduced support for newly-arriving refugees.

Ukrainian women who are fleeing for safety abroad today are largely left to fend for themselves.

Jana Cvikova, a gender expert for the Slovak feminist organization ASPEKT, told me that the further East that the women are from, the more intense the stereotyping. “This is linked to our expectation of women being more ‘real women’ the further East they live,” she said, pointing to their exoticization.

And those stereotypes collide dangerously with their refugee status, as has been the case for women fleeing conflicts beyond this one: “We expect that female war refugees will be doing ‘female jobs,’ that they will be grateful — and even, if a particular ‘hero’ offering to help them wishes so, that they will provide their bodies to him for sexual services.”

Recent research on violence against Ukrainian refugees in Poland, conducted by the University of Birmingham, supports how these stereotypes could lead to sexualized violence. “The Orientalization and sexualization of Ukrainian women was prevalent in public discourse, particularly on social media, where they were objectified and described as more beautiful, attractive, and obedient than Polish women [...] Some comments in Facebook groups manifested beliefs that Ukrainian women were submissive and would not refuse sex, indirectly inciting abuse.”

Their hypersexualization has also found its way into pornography preferences. An analysis of internet search trends found a significant increase in “Ukrainian porn” searches since the Russian invasion began, as well as in videos purporting to feature Ukrainian refugees. Researchers warn that traffickers may be motivated by the crisis.

Eli Jirman, a volunteer from Iniciativa Hlavak, a Czech human rights group helping refugees, told me in 2022 that the group had been approached by a woman host who specified that she wanted to offer accommodation exclusively to a woman from Ukraine’s Roma minority. “We put her in touch with a 40-year-old Roma refugee, but the host said she was ‘too old,’” said Jirman. “We found that suspicious. When we looked at the host’s social media profiles, we quickly found that she was shooting pornographic material, and was likely looking for a Roma woman specifically to exploit her for this purpose.”

The cost of benevolence

The women I’ve met all have had harrowing experiences in which they were refused accommodation or other forms of aid if they didn’t consent to sex with their host.

Katerina, 35, was looking for accommodation in western Slovakia for herself and her eight-year-old daughter several months after she fled her native Zaporizhia in late 2022. She posted in a local Facebook group and received plenty of willing responses. “I was so happy that I wasn’t going to become homeless that I didn’t pay attention to the fact that the offers came exclusively from men,” she said.

Katerina started chatting with the first man who offered her accommodation in Bratislava. “I asked if I would be living in the apartment alone with my daughter. He replied, ‘Yes, but we must discuss the rest over the phone.’’’ By phone, he told her that he didn’t need a lease agreement with her — and didn’t even need her to pay rent — but instead proposed an arrangement that would be “mutually helpful to one another,” Katerina said. When she asked for details, he said that he would let her stay in the apartment alone if he could come to Bratislava for a week every month and live with her “as a couple.”

“You have been far away from your husband for a while,” she recalls him saying. Katerina refused, but this would be only one of many such offers she would receive.

An Instagram project has been documenting stories from Ukrainian women who’ve attempted to resettle across Europe. Titled “I don’t need first sexual aid,” the project was founded by Natali Oliferovych, a Ukrainian artist and activist, after she herself was assaulted in France, and then witnessed her friend being assaulted in Italy.

“I came to Iceland with my 10-year-old son”, one woman wrote in one post. “I met a young man. He seemed to be a good guy, without unnecessary thoughts. We walked by the ocean. I kept my distance, not holding hands. He gave my son a toy car. [Then] he began to hint at intimacy, which I denied him. The next day, he threatened that he would call the police if [I refused]. ‘I'll call the police if you don’t fuck me,’ he said. He demanded I return the toy car.”

Another woman wrote: “In Switzerland, one guy bought my friend food and a thermometer. Then [he] asked for sex. My friend refused. ‘I just spent money on you for nothing!’’ [he said].’’

“My goal with this project was to reach a larger audience,” Oliferovych told me. She said that women are still coming forward and sharing new experiences of assault, while thanking her for the opportunity to have their voices heard. “This problem is still happening, and no one pays attention.”

Katerina eventually found an apartment in the Slovak capital for her and her daughter, but she’s struggling financially. Even though her landlord receives a monthly allowance from the Slovak refugee resettlement scheme to subsidize her rent, Katerina still pays 150 euros a month. She was able to keep her job in Ukraine and works remotely for the equivalent of 400 euros per month, making her rent nearly 40 percent of her income. Once she buys a monthly bus pass for her and her daughter, she is left with some 200 euros to live on.

“Where I grew up, we literally collected tons of strawberries near my village: we ate them, pickled them, made jam, and still had plenty left,” she told me when I interviewed her in Bratislava in July 2023. “In Slovakia, I find them so expensive that I cannot afford a box of strawberries for my daughter.”

When I asked about her daughter, she started crying. “My daughter asked me why I couldn’t buy her sweets. Does that mean I don’t love her? I didn’t know what to reply. I only hope that one day, she will understand.”

Refugees from Ukraine sheltering in neighboring European countries say they’re being pushed to the brink financially, forcing them into dangerous situations primed for abuse and exploitation. Like Katerina, many now risk poverty and homelessness just to avoid sexual abuse or coercion from predatory hosts and benefactors, while others had no other option. As the plight of Ukrainian refugees fades from view — from the media spotlight as well as foreign aid — the sexual victimization of these women is only primed to get worse.

*Some names have been changed to protect the women’s identities.