Three teenage girls have been arrested and charged with murder in Russia after killing the father who they say abused them sexually and physically for years. Krestina, 19, Angelina, 18, and Maria, 17, say they retaliated against their father, Mikhail Khachaturyan, who was found dead on an apartment block staircase in July 2018. However, prosecutors plan to punish them for their act of self-defense.
I stand with the Khachaturyan sisters, who are facing murder charges for killing their abusive father; clearly an act of self-defense.
80% of Russian women imprisoned for murder were trying to protect themselves from an abuser.
This is unacceptable.https://t.co/pjzF9s9hpC— Avri Sapir (@AvriSapir) July 31, 2020
- Investigators have painted a grisly picture of the murder. They claim that Krestina, Angelina, and Maria attacked the elder Khachaturyan with a knife, hammer, and pepper spray after an incident in which he used the pepper spray on the girls to punish them for the house being untidy. They were arrested the following day, CNN reports.
- The girls say they were abused for at least four years. When admitting to the crime, the teens told investigators that Mikhail had subjected them to “beating, constant humiliation, threats and abuse, physical and sexual violence” for several years prior to his murder. While the prosecution initially accepted this defense, they later scrapped it and decided to proceed with premeditated murder charges.
- Mikhail Khachaturyan threatened his daughters and their mother regularly. Text messages sent by Mikhail were regularly violent, with one from 2018 allegedly reading, “I will beat you up for everything, I will kill you. You are prostitutes and you will die as prostitutes.”
- What choice did the girls have? “We think that they had no other choice. The father drove the girls to despair, their whole life was a continuous hell,” said one of the sisters’ lawyers, Aleksey Parshin. They cannot be compared to healthy, calm and balanced people … [the] girls developed serious mental illnesses, including abuse syndrome and post-traumatic stress disorder. This was confirmed by all examinations in the case.”
- Two of the sisters are now on trial. Krestina and Angelina both began their trial in Moscow on July 31. Maria was underage at the time of the crime and has since been deemed mentally unfit to commit a murder. However, she will be tried separately. This is a terribly sad situation all around.
- Russia is not a great place to be a woman. Russian outlet Media Zona did an investigation in 2018 that discovered that 80% of women in prison for murder got there because they were trying to protect themselves from an abuser. There’s little to no protection for women who are abused in the country, especially now that President Vladimir Putin shelved a 2016 law that was in place to shield victims of this horrible crime.
Stop prosecution of Khachaturyan sisters – victims of sexual and domestic violence – Sign the Petition! https://t.co/HwYnfm0Jvm via @ChangeAUS
— GrantS (@GrantLSophie) July 31, 2020
