After the 2020 protests in Belarus, a phone taken at interrogation is often not only a source of “evidence” about marches and chats but a lever for sexualised humiliation. One account — from a Belarusian woman detained in 2022, called Vera here (name changed): officers, she says, found intimate images in her messages to her partner and made them the focus of a multi-hour interrogation.
Vera’s account
In 2022 Vera was detained for taking part in protests. During interrogation, she says, officers accessed her phone and found private correspondence with her partner that included intimate photographs. Those images, in her telling, unexpectedly became the main tool of pressure.
The session lasted several hours. Almost any topic, she recalls, eventually came back to the photos: officers, she says, showed them to one another, discussed her appearance and body in front of her, made degrading comments and threatened to publish the material. She heard: “You’re a mother — we’ll show this now.”
What hurt most was a sense of total helplessness: handcuffs, a closed room, several men with, in her words, complete power over the situation. The point was not proving participation in a rally but control through shame and fear of exposure of the most private sphere.
Not an isolated pattern
Human rights defenders and journalists describe similar logic in other cases. In a Respect-Protect-Fulfil, one respondent said that at detention she was made to strip to record tattoos in a protocol, while officers copied semi-nude photos from her phone and posted them on a pro-government Telegram channel. The same body of testimony records insults aimed at mothers — “bad mothers”, “your children are without you now”.
Defenders stress that any vulnerability — job, children, sexual orientation, compromising images — can become a lever. Reporting on “kompromat” describes intimate life being used to extract testimony or cooperation; the mechanism is called universal: find a weak point and press.
After the 2020 protests the UN and international bodies documented torture and ill-treatment in Belarus, including sexual violence and threats of rape against detained women. Access to a phone and threats to leak intimate material fit the same picture of psychological abuse even when the formal case is “political”.
Why it matters to say it aloud
Such episodes rarely appear in official records: victims fear secondary trauma, family shame, and images actually reaching the internet. That is why public accounts like Vera’s (under a changed name) matter for understanding how pressure on women in the protest movement worked — not only through beatings and sentences but through intrusion into the most closed part of private life.
Legally, access to phone contents on the street and at detention is increasingly normalised in law-enforcement practice; restoring deleted data from devices after the protests has been described as a mass investigative tool. Against that background intimate photos are not a random find but a predictable way to break resistance without putting physical violence on the record.
When humiliation is built on a phone and motherhood, punishment begins before the verdict — through fear that the private will become public.