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1. It’s worth delving deep into the problem described above and then ask the questions:  The men who commit such sadistic acts of violence against women, or are profiting from human trafficking, are they really Armenian men ?  Are they brought up with traditional Armenian Christian values ?  How strong is their Armenian identity?  Yes, we should look into the issue of identity.   In my opinion, real  Armenian men have enough self-respect not to commit such horrible acts…

2. Thank you for this courageous article.  I think it is a very important and crucial question.  It is central to my relationship to my ethnic heritage and culture.  I think that, as part of a particular cultural and geographic environment, we Armenians have to think about these issues in terms of Christianity.  The treatment of women should be better (indeed, our church has historically ordained women deacons – albeit in limited function – throughout the centuries when no other church did).  We should think carefully about our culture as one that is to stand for values even if those in our surroundings do not share them.

3. I’m glad Henri Theriault wrote about that problem and brought it into the open. We should adopt an organisation in Armenia that already deals with that andtalk about that on TV and in the papers. The people who do those heartless acts really don’t have any human values or Armenian values. There’s a song where the Fedayee says ” me vakhenar hankist guetsir baji djan, gananz yerpek tserk dali tché djan Fedan”. Any change will happen only if  we in the Diaspora stand behind the organisation in Armenia with financial aid and expert support. Otherwise change won’t come easy.

4. A very bad article which is trying to show Armenian men as brutal as possible. They want to destroyArmenian family by their lies. Raping Azeri women, husband is raping his wife??? what does this mean

5. Dr. Theriault,
    
   First of all, I would just like to commend you for a brilliant, timely, and thoughtful article.
    
   I would like to point out a few a things, however:
   1. There is a far more comprehensive study done on domestic violence in Armenia by the Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights: (http://www.mnadvocates.org/Work_in_Armenia.html).  You should give this a look.
   2. There has been a lot of attention given to sexual slavery in Armenia, I just think because of a few reasons you pointed out, and the fact that Armenian society is too exhausted to deal with issues like this — they have been neglected.  I’m pretty sure if we didn’t have a 30% unemployment rate, poverty, blockades, genocide recognition, threat of war, and such a corrupt government, our society would be quite inspiring on this issue.
   And I don’t want to throw a patriotic twist to this, but the Azerbaijan and Armenian cases are different.  What happened in Kharabagh was done by a band of militants during a WAR.  What happened in Azerbajian (and what happened in Turkey in the 50s and 60s) was done by a mob of CIVILIANS.  I think the point might be trivial, but it says two very important things about our societies — and how different we are when it comes to the “other.”  Azerbajian has few of the hardships the people of Armenia have, and yet their society hasn’t even decided whether or not they WANT to prosecute the CIVILIANS who committed those atrocities in Sumgait and Baku, let alone whether or not they CAN/SHOULD.  Putting a soldier on trial is politically sensitive, especially when you’re trying to maintain discipline and preserve a state.  They don’t have to deal with putting soldiers on trial for Sumgait or Baku and yet a lot of them justify it — I’ve seen no such sentiment within our wider society.
    
   There’s a brilliant documentary on sexual savery and Armenians in Dubai done by Hetq:  I encourage you to watch it if you haven’t done so yet — It’s called Dessert Nights: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fC7KDY4sqE — that’s just part 1.

6. And, I would ask you to look into the following regarding the Armenian response to the women who were violated and raped during the genocide.  It’s a sad read:
    
   TACHJIAN, VAHE. “Gender, nationalism, exclusion: the reintegration process of female survivors of the Armenian genocide.”Nations & Nationalism 15.1 (2009): 60-80.

7. I have been waiting a long time to see an article like this. The brutal treatment of Armenian women must be stopped. Those who traffic or torture Armenian women should be removed from society forever. They are a detriment to not only  having a civil society but a detriment to Armenian nationalism and the Armenian Ethos. I wish to actively participate in solving this problem. Hopefully there will be another article on how I and others can change this aspect of Armenian society. If the rights of women are protected and justice is swift to all those affected, I think everything else in Armenia would improve. If you ask me, ensuring civil and human rights for women is a national security issue. The problems concerning this issue will only get worse when the border opens.

8. Excellent, impressive, and necessary. Thank you Dr Theriault. There is nothing to be surprised at, especially if one looks at figures in far more prosperous and developed countries. Wife-killing and wife-raping are a nationial plague in Spain for example. It is not a matter of being Armenian or anything, it is a matter of how men see women, especially if the latter are helpless for economic or psychological reasons, or simply because they have small children. Machos are machos. And Armenians have often remained machos, they don’t compare with Swedish men. Boys’ mothers bear part of the responsibility of course. For an Armenian reader, this is terrible : It means that when we stand in a crowd in Yerevan, a lot of men whose sleeves touch ours, not just a few, have already hit or raped a woman. And it means that in a feminine environment, like at the hairdressers or in a clothes shop, a high proportion of the women we chat with have experienced rape, violence, sadism. What you didn’t mention, Dr Theriault, is incest. When there is rape, when a man doesn’t control his sexual drives, it is hard to believe that incest committed by brothers, cousins, fathers, grand-fathers, male in-laws cannot exist.   Isn’t it a disgrace, too, that Diaspora organisations and parties have closed their eyes on many of the scandals in Armenia? Corruption, mafia etc. Not all of the population’s misery is due to the Turkish blockade.  In Artsakh, an organisation called “Mères courages” supports only widowed mothers, by giving them a cow and a calf – to have milk for the children and to make and sell cheese  then to get more calves, of which some must then be returned to the group which donates the animals to another widowed mother etc. It is very successful. Like with other sorts of microcredits, including those provided by the Grameen bank, they show that trusting and empowering women, especially mothers who care for their family while fathers, when they exist, tend to rather care for their own well-being, has a significant  impact on the economy and on society at large. Eventually boys and men profit by it too. And the sons get a positive image of women when they see their mothers become little businesswomen. If Dr Theriault or the Armenian Weekly were kind enough to provide the names and addresses of organisations that defend women’s rights in Armenia, I too, would be glad to contribute financially, and if possible, by disseminating their appeals.

9. During the last five years of living in Armenia I have only heard of one case (not one of several that I have read) of daily brutal abuse of a woman living in Vanadzor who was essentially married to a maniac. Judging from the detailed stories that were told to me by her best friend (I met the abused woman a few times, actually) her husband was obviously mentally deranged. I have seen the statistic of 69 percent of women having endured some kind of physical violence (I have read that same report but do not have it at my fingerprints as I write this comment), but a significant percentage of women in this category have only experienced it no more than a few times or certainly less, with a slap across the face, something like this. Many women consider such an instance of violence to be justifiable, that their partners had good reason to slap them, crazy as that sounds (a woman who was slapped only once actually told me this). Naturally I am not trying to justify this behavior, but I just want to point out that the entire 69 percent of Armenian women surveyed who have suffered from domestic violence did not experience it brutally on a day-to-day basis. I hope readers have not interpreted this to be the case.
    
   As the article points out the most poignant dangers that vulnerable women face, especially those living in rural areas, is trafficking. Usually those who have little opportunities and who lack a solid familial support structure are lured into being sold into sexual slavery when promised jobs picking oranges in Greece, and instead they wind up in Dubai or cities in Turkey where they are forced to “buy back” their passports by working for years as sex slaves, if they ever do get them back. The Armenian authorities have been cracking down on traffickers and sentencing them but some wind up on the street by “escaping” from prison or paying bribes for an early release. This information has been available for well over five years now and it’s not hard to find on the Internet (see for instance the extraordinary “Desert Nights” series of articles along with the companion documentary produced by Hetq).
    
   I don’t know what it’s going to take for diasporan Armenians to understand how important these problems are, especially trafficking, for Armenian women. I think quite honestly people choose to ignore these pertinent issues because they don’t want their grandiose, romantic vision of Armenia to be shattered. Hopefully, Dr. Theriault’s article will enlighten many of them.

10. This issue has other repercussions for the Diaspora.  Many Armenian women anticipate violent behavior from their Armenian husbands, even when these Armenian husbands are raised outside of the Armenian cultural base. This anticipation  and fear causes problems in the marriage, even when the husbands are gentlemen. The result is that many Armenian women marry odars, and assimilated Armenian men marry odars after an unsuccessful  marriage to an Armenian woman. If this trend continues, the Diaspora will disappear within  a few generations. We are our own worst enemy.

11. All, or near all dwell upon the article either commending and/or in compliance  with it.
    Only Vahe´s  few words must ALSO BE TAKEN INTO ACCOUNT.For it is one thing  to praise and affirm what  seems to be completely correct and true ,another to try to see more  into the Armenian mens(in general) more positive  sides and their treatment of Armenian women.
    let  alone Some ( very few, if  any) cases  of  Armenian soldiers abusing Azeri women.
    Please try to be more inclined to believe  that Armenian men in very rare cases  are  or have been abusing Armenian women,comparred to Euro-Americans

12. The article details a horrible but yet very common reality. Sorry to disappoint you Gaytzag but the abuse of Armenian men towards Armenian women is not very rare at all, it is more than common and the comparaison with Euro-Americans to minimize this behaviour is outrageous. Armenian men, even in the diaspora, tend to think that just because they’re Armenian they’re entitled to get any Armenian woman or girl they want and she doesn’t have to say no specially if her mother agrees with him. They think just because they had a drink or a dinner with a girl or they’re dating her that they own her, and this is just a date or a girlfriend. Let’s not even talk about the wife or the daughter of whom they think as their own possession and most of the time put to work to take their money instead of getting a job themselves. They think of women as of inferior creatures no matter how smart and educated they are and no matter how uneducated the men are and tend to believe that they can get any girl do whatever they want with a few words, because come on she’s just a girl how hard will it be to trap her. And of course, if the girl by chance isn’t dump then she’ll get a massive amount of violence, sexual and physical, without forgetting verbal assault, which of course will not be considered abuse by the Armenian man because of course she was there and therefore she agreed even if he didn’t bother to ask for her opinion, or does it after having got what he wanted just to say he asked. So please, put your misplaced pride aside and start admitting that Armenians are very very far from being civilized and humane specially with women and vulnerable people. As for comparing them with “barbarian” euro-americans, I would say that you would better go to Europe and see how Scandinavian, English, Spanish, Italian and other cultured male treat woman and how they speak of them. Armenian men and sometimes their complice women not only do not help and respect the vulnerable element of the community in order to reinforce them but they wait like predators for the moment a person will fall, get sick, have an accident in their life, specially if the person is a young and beautiful woman, in order to abuse and humiliate. There’s a massive education effort to be done for these people and sincerly I don’t know how many generations it will take. And please stop complaining and weeping about what turks did because what you do to your own women and children is much worse.

13. Daily abuse from their husbands is something many women face in Armenia still today, unfortunately, and that’s from my personal observations. Hopefully things will improve in the future. Definitely, talking about it and bringing it out into the open is a step in the right direction. But like many of you said, it’s a taboo topic for an Armenian woman to complain to police or to anyone about her husband’s abuse. Many endure this in silence.

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