NGL.media receives misogynistic messages following their investigation into child abduction

Oleksandra Hubytska, executive director of the independent anti-corruption center NGL.media, reports their editorial team receiving multiple misogynistic messages humiliating women following their investigation "Child abductors. Dozens of victims, millions of hryvnias earned. Story of the NGO Batko Maye Pravo".

Hubytska posted them on Facebook.

"I apologize that this appeared in your feed. But I have to show you a few quotes, accurate to the original, from the official response by the NGO Batko Maye Pravo to my colleagues' report," Hubytska writes.

Below are some quotes from Oleksandra Hubytska's post:

• "Women in Ukraine are as willing to write an article for money as they are to suck a dick."
• "In most cases, when a woman sees that there is a new trough with tastier feed, she switches to the new trough, dropping the marriage."
• "They always treat the child as an object."
• "A man certainly has no obligation to the ex-pussycat he f***ed at one point."
• "We are breaking the stereotypes that society, the state, lawyers and ex-hags have put into men's heads."
• "Broken-tailed pussycats have started howling and complaining to the government."

Hubytska noted that some insults were directed at their editors:

• "women's Tampax media";
• "Tampax-oriented media resource".

Oleksandra Hubytska believes that the police should respond to such a situation: "Obviously, the head of Batko Maye Pravo has some big issues that require the intervention of both medics and the law enforcement system."

In her comment to the Institute of Mass Information, the investigation's co-author Natalia Onysko noted that she does not view these phrases as cyber bullying.

"At least for now, our social media inboxes are not being hacked. It doesn't even look like a pressure attempt, it just shows the discourse level that the investigation's subjects operate on. Open insults to women, obscene language in the post, devaluation and misogyny are rather a sign of weakness," said Onysko.

She added that the editorial team plans to hand the downloaded contents of the chat in the Batko Maye Pravo Telegram channel, which NGL.media managed to access and review, over to lawyers and mothers of kidnapped children. In it, the group's members coordinate their actions such as kidnapping children and pressuring the mothers of the chat members' children, the media noted.

The investigation "Child abductors. Dozens of victims, millions of hryvnias earned. Story of the NGO Batko Maye Pravo" was released on July 22, 2024.

In the introduction to it, the co-authors Natalia Onysko and Marjana Verbovska explained that several women contacted NGL.media this spring Their ex-husbands had kidnapped their children. Ultimately, NGL.media identified 72 women who are now trying to get their children back. The common thread in the stories of these women is the fact that the father of their child became a client or activist of the NGO Batko Maye Pravo. According to the investigators, the organization's reputation for organizing child kidnappings and hiding the children in Ukraine, which it calls legal assistance to men, goes back almost nine years.

At the same time, Oleksandr Shvets, the head of the NGO Batko Maye Pravo, denied both the financial and the moral aspects of his work in the comment to the media outlet. "As for the fate of the children who get forcibly abducted by their fathers after his consultations, he assures that all these children ran away because of abuse from their mothers," the newspaper writes.