War, Torture, and Children

Abstract

Russia’s large-scale deportation, torture, and forced assimilation of Ukrainian children is one of the starkest violations of modern international law and child-rights norms, and its gravity becomes clearer when we follow the thread of law as a continuous story rather than a list of provisions. Children have been singled out from the earliest codifications of humanitarian law for “special respect.” The Fourth Geneva Convention, drafted in the aftermath of the Second World War, treats the forcible transfer or deportation of civilians from occupied territory as a crime in itself, regardless of any military pretext. Article 49 could not be plainer: no occupying power may deport protected persons from occupied territory to its own land or any other place. When the people in question are children, the prohibition acquires an even deeper resonance, because children are understood in international law as bearers of a double vulnerability—too young to defend themselves and essential to the cultural survival of their communities. Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions (1949), adopted in 1977, therefore requires parties to “take all feasible measures” to ensure the care, education, and identity of children caught in war, a requirement echoed decades later in the near-universal Convention on the Rights of the Child. That treaty insists that in every action affecting a child, the “best interests of the child” must be the primary consideration, and it explicitly forbids torture, cruel or degrading treatment, and arbitrary detention. The prohibition of torture, codified across the Geneva Conventions, the Convention against Torture, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, establishes the absolute duty to protect children from all forms of abuse, even amid war or national emergency. The unlawful deportation and torture of Ukrainian children thus represent not isolated atrocities but breaches of universal norms demanding urgent international prosecution and the restoration of their identities and ties to their homeland. Drawing on original survivor testimonies collected through encrypted online interviews and corroborated by extensive international investigations, this article exposes a deliberate Russian policy of abduction, ideological re-education, and cultural erasure. These crimes do not appear as scattered atrocities; they reveal a calculated strategy aimed at destroying the identity of an entire generation of Ukrainian children. Two emblematic cases—each singular and devastating—anchor the analysis and illuminate the extreme vulnerability of minors during armed conflict. The first concerns a mother and her adolescent daughter from Bucha, both raped by Russian soldiers. Their ordeal demonstrates how sexual violence functions not merely as a personal assault but as a weapon of war designed to terrorize entire communities and rupture family bonds. In clinical terms, the daughter’s near-total silence during subsequent interviews speaks eloquently. Trauma research identifies such muteness as a form of dissociative shutdown, the mind’s last defense against overwhelming threat. Her quiet, therefore, becomes testimony in itself, a wordless record of violence and the profound psychological cost of war rape. The second case involves a fourteen-year-old boy subjected to repeated electric-shock torture so severe that his dental fillings were expelled. Medical documentation confirms the injuries, providing chilling evidence of state-sanctioned cruelty and the methodical infliction of pain on a developing body. His stark narrative, devoid of ornamentation, stands as a permanent indictment of a system that transforms the suffering of a child into an instrument of policy. These findings reveal the large-scale deportation, psychological and physical torture, and forced assimilation of Ukrainian children by the Russian Federation. Drawing on encrypted survivor interviews and corroborating reports from international institutions, this study integrates legal analysis, developmental neuroscience, and trauma theory to demonstrate that these acts meet the thresholds for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and elements of genocide. The evidence shows that children held in so-called “recreational camps” in occupied territories and Russia were subjected to indoctrination, coercive medical practices, and enforced Russification—constituting severe violations of the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Through the lens of Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model and War Rape Survivors Syndrome (WRSS), the study explores how torture and chronic stress reshape the developing brain, attachment systems, and social ecology of children and families. The paper concludes by urging a child-centered, trauma-informed approach to accountability, emphasizing the need for urgent legal action, psychosocial rehabilitation, and recognition of the moral injury inflicted by collective silence. The War Rape Survivors Syndrome (WRSS; Rebecka, 2024 ) conceptualizes trauma as the convergence of bodily injury, betrayal trauma, and systemic silencing in wartime contexts, linking neurobiological injury with relational and institutional harms across generations.