THE INVESTIGATIVE SERIES REPORT BY JELENA HELC
Content Warning: This article contains highly sensitive and deeply distressing accounts of domestic abuse and systemic violence. Reader discretion is advised. However, this report guides you through personal testimonies and thorough investigative work, confronting the raw truth.
PART ONE
I was 10 years old when a classmate’s father killed his mother. We were all 10 when the rumors started swirling; because the killer was a former famous athlete, the media found it crucial to broadcast every detail: how he waited for the wife he had divorced a year prior in her building’s entrance, how he dealt several fatal knife wounds, how she somehow managed to crawl up the stairs to her first-floor apartment, and how her son—my friend—opened the door only for her to fall dead right there, in front of him.
I was 34 years old when my best childhood friend told me how her father—a prominent member of society—had brutally abused her, her sister, and her mother for years. My friend was raped because that same father left her alone in a park one evening, angry with her because she wanted to go sledding longer. In a fit of rage, he went home alone and forbade her mother from going to get her. On her way home, she encountered a predator who dragged her into a building entrance and committed his heinous, sick act.
I was 44 years old when an acquaintance, a traffic police officer, sent me a photo of her son from the morgue—her only child, shot in the head by his father during a weekend visit, before the man turned the gun on himself. The woman was out of her mind with grief; she still is, as she doesn’t know how to cope with the pain and the injustice. She had reported him for violence. The system ignored her pleas because “ex-wives lie,” and since he was a police officer, it never occurred to anyone to at least temporarily confiscate his weapon. That case has been consciously suppressed in the Serbian media to this day.
I was 48 years old when I learned that my friend’s older sister had been murdered by an ex-boyfriend. My friend was 19, and her sister was 24. Today, the killer is free; while in prison, he had the right to “conjugal visits,” so today he has a child and a wife, while she has only a photo of her sister smiling in an elegant black dress on her birthday—just days before she bled out into the carpet her ex-boyfriend had wrapped her in.
All these people I have mentioned, as well as many others I have read about in the news, including myself—who divorced an abuser—go through the same thing. We flee from the claws of one abuser into the claws of another. Time has shown that we stand alone before the most powerful abuser in the sequence: the system.
THE SYSTEM LIES TO US. THE SYSTEM KILLS US. THE SYSTEM FORCES US TO LIE AS WE STRIVE TO SAVE OUR CHILDREN’S LIVES AND OUR OWN.
I went through a legal battle against an abuser who spent years mistreating my children and me. This marathon was fought and won in Berlin, Germany, where I received a verdict that states in black and white: “GUILTY.” I naively thought it was over. Six years after that first call to the police, and now living in Belgrade, Serbia, I face a new absurdity. A social worker—in a new process my ex-husband initiated out of revenge—tells me that “my sense of being endangered is merely my personal impression,” even though she has that final, binding German judgment in her inbox.
Even though I presented clear and unambiguous facts proving that he continues to exert financial, psychological, and emotional violence against the children and me, the system here remains blind. She saw the photos of my son with hematomas and bruises on his neck. She saw the photos of my injuries—not just any photos, but professional ones taken at a specialized clinic for victims of domestic violence, followed by an expert evaluation of my testimony to determine if I was telling the truth. Despite all this, in a conversation where she noted it must not be recorded, she committed a series of absurd, unprofessional, and painful violations—which resulted in me being rushed to the hospital by an ambulance with sirens blaring the following day.
It wasn’t a heart attack, but it was a severe and terrifyingly painful muscle spasm in my chest, caused by all the blows dealt to me by the representative of the system and the alleged guardian of children’s welfare—inflicted during an hour or more of conversation in front of the man who had choked me and was legally convicted for it. Yet, that did not stop her from spending all that time convincing me that “the feeling of being endangered is just my personal impression that I must set aside, because it is my responsibility to somehow persuade the children to agree to visits with their father. Because the father has rights. Even if the children do not want to. Because the children were abused and witnessed the abuse of their mother, which is also abuse.” For everyone, except for the worker representing the System of this so-called state.
The state has, therefore, made it clear to me that all the hell I went through in Germany to save my children and myself from an abuser was, in the eyes of the Serbian system, in vain. My state has made it clear that the entire legal process—long, painful, traumatic—was, in fact, meaningless. All those stamps are void. The purple ink and the judge’s signature are actually just my imagined danger, if not a mechanism of revenge against an ex-husband because “it is a well-known fact that 90% of ex-wives lie.”
A lawyer in Germany told me the same thing during my legal marathon there… trying to explain that “the system is simply like that… look, they are currently considering the father’s request to see the children, despite the fact that the request is being written from prison, where he ended up because he strangled the mother of his children with his bare hands while one of their two sons watched, and the other slept.” Nevertheless, the law is as it is; they are considering his request.
After being discharged from the hospital, I asked my doctor, who was prescribing me an additional round of injections because the spasm hadn’t let up even after five days, to give me a referral to a psychologist or psychiatrist. She told me that “it’s not smart because my ex-husband will use it against me in court.” She said this with the best of intentions—because for a long time, the system has accustomed and forced us to lie, to scheme, to look for shortcuts. Thus, a woman in a situation like mine, who wants to preserve her health, has one safe way: to find a private therapist and the money to pay for them—so that fact remains far from the eyes of the system.
Under the same value system, the representative of the social service center unofficially suggested that “it would be best if I somehow arranged for my ex-husband to get a restraining order.” I will repeat: a person paid by the state to care for children and families consciously suggests to a mother—a fraud. A lie. A criminal act. Because she lacks the courage to change the system and finds it easier to devise deceptions. Or perhaps, she was simply testing me, baiting me.
My battle for truth and justice lasted nearly three years. As a person, I was quite ruined, but the feeling of love and responsibility for my four children gave me superhuman strength to endure it all and obtain the six letters (GUILTY) that change everything.
And now, six years later, I cannot say that his new attack surprised me. I have read enough literature and worked on myself enough to have expected it. That is exactly why I fought for a verdict and believed that piece of paper was my impenetrable shield, a steel curtain that would protect my children and me forever.
It turned out that for the system, which should rest on laws, a final criminal conviction is worth as much as used toilet paper.
I have received many blows in my life, and I have stood up after all of them. Sometimes it took me less time, sometimes more, but I recovered from every one. This blow was the strongest. I am being violated by someone who was supposed to be my protector. I am being subsequently abused and re-traumatized by someone who absolutely should not be doing so.
The system is abusive. The system is dirty. The system is corrupt. The system protects abusers and criminals. For the system, dead children, damaged children, dead mothers, and damaged mothers who raise children alone are irrelevant, invisible. If they are loud-mouthed like me—they are even more undesirable.
I have done my homework; I have researched what all this looks like across the world… in developed and underdeveloped countries across the planet.
TO BE CONTINUED…
