Women Allegedly Strip-Searched During Police Detentions, Report Rape Threats
Kristine Botkoveli (a.k.a. Nancy Woland), a leading activist in the ongoing protests in Georgia, says police forced her to strip naked during a search of her house on February 1. Former public defender Nino Lomjaria says Woland’s case is not an isolated one.
“Two female police officers entered my house, they conducted a physical search on me, and it was the first psychological violence against me when they told me I had to take off all my clothes,” Botkoveli said in a social media post on February 6. While her house was being searched, she received medical attention for emotional stress, although details were not known until she recalled the events to the public. Botkoveli also said that she plans to “temporarily distance” herself from the ongoing events and “get some rest.”
Botkoveli is the founder of the Facebook group “Daitove” [“Host Them” in Georgian], a popular network for sharing and spreading necessary information related to the protests and helping fellow protesters. The houses of the founders of the group were searched several times. Some of them were also arrested.
Georgia’s former public defender, Nino Lomjaria, says there have been reports from women that they were “forced to strip and do squats during detention and searches,” though she noted that women may be reluctant to share these stories for fear of the public spotlight. She stressed that such treatment by the police amounts to “torture” and is “inhuman, “degrading” and illegal, and urged women not to obey such orders and to ask the police to conduct searches with a special detector.
Another woman who was detained on January 13 near the Babilo restaurant, where the judges’ corporate event was held against the backdrop of the protests, said in a commentary for TV Pirveli that she was also ordered to undress completely in the detention center. She says she did not know it was illegal and considered it a simple “procedure,” which she says was “very insulting” and “very unpleasant.”
The stories have recently gone viral on social media, with women recalling how police targeted them at protests, especially during the February 2 protest near the Tbilisi Mall. During the protest and the subsequent march police apparently accompanied demonstrators for several hours from the Mall to Rustaveli Avenue, intimidating women in particular with sexually explicit insults, curses, and threats of rape.
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