Like Armenians across the Ottoman Empire, Trabzon (Trebizond) Armenians received an official order of deportation in June 1915. However, approximately 3,000 children (girls up to 15 years old and boys up to 10) and several dozen women remained in the city. Those Armenians were placed in special institutions, subjected to neglect, starvation, murder, and institutionalized rape. Sexual violence was a tool to foster submission and terror, humiliation, self-hate, and stigmatization. After four years, all male children disappeared, and the girls who mainly survived did so in Turkish households, to which they were given as gifts or sold to serve as servants or sex slaves. Anna Aleksanyan a postdoctoral fellow at the Armenian Genocide Research Program of the Promise Armenian Institute at UCLA.