Topless Women Protest Rampant Sex Trade and Violence Against Women in Ukraine

Since the group's founding, Femen has protested a range of social issues.

"We are doing more and more protests abroad like in Switzerland against prostitution and at the Davos forum, in Italy against [Prime Minister] Berlusconi and Pope [Benedict], in Russia for the freedom to vote, in France against [Dominique Straus-Kahn], in Bulgaria against domestic violence, and in Belarus against the president," Shevchenko said.

Femen does not collaborate with any other Ukrainian women's NGOs, and protests a range of social issues.

"They present themselves as feminists to the western media and at the same time reject any association with feminism in their interviews to national media. ... In my opinion, they use feminism symbolic capital instrumentally, to obtain some popularity in the West, where their represent themselves as the only women's rights advocates in Ukraine," Kis said.

Femen is not the only women's rights group in Ukraine. There are more than 1,000 women's groups active in Ukraine today, including La Strada, which works to prevent trafficking of women all over central and eastern Europe. The organization has a hotline that victims of the sex trade can reach at any time.

Kis said the Femen protests are not effective in making a positive change for women, but instead work against what other women's groups in Ukraine are fighting for.

"I find their activism making more harm than good for women's rights advocacy in Ukraine," Kis said. "Ukraine is now famous as a country where pretty young women walk naked down the streets -- is that not a hidden propaganda of sex tourism?"

The Femen members defend their method of protesting, saying that instead of being forced to undress for one man, they are undressing in front of the world by their own free will, claiming ownership of their bodies.

"For me, the best and only way to be free is to take off my clothes not in front of one man, as his slave, but in front of the world, showing that to be undressed can have another meaning -- not against a woman but for her," Shevchenko said.