Growing Pains: Domestic Violence In the New Russia

by Adele Barker & photo by Adele Barker

Another night at Kolya and Marisha's apartment. Dishes flying, a child left outside the apartment door, cold and half asleep until he is dragged in to be beaten, while the adults inside embark on their weekly round of alcoholic orgies and random violence. It is a world in which violence spares neither perpetrators nor victims.

I began this article with a scene from a story by one of Russia's most talented contemporary writers, Ludmila Petrushevskaya, because statistics often fail to convey the narratives that lie within them. The story Petrushevskaya tells is grim. So are the numbers. A total of 331,815 criminal cases of violence against women were reported in Russia in 1993; some 14,500 women were killed by their husbands or boyfriends; 57,000 Russian women were severely injured or permanently handicapped by domestic violence. In 1994 there were 565,000 crimes reported against women, nearly a 70 percent increase since 1993. These statistics reflect only the cases that went to court. Only now are women beginning to come forward with the stories that lie behind the statistics.

Last year my colleague Nadezhda Azhgikhina, head of the Association of Women Journalists, and I were awarded a grant by the USAID-sponsored Rule of Law program for our project to address issues of domestic violence in the new Russia. Our project was designed to provide women with the information they need to combat the legal, psychological and medical consequences of violence both in and outside the home. We realized that print and television were our best venues for disseminating this information to the public at large and women activists in particular.

We wanted to get outside the major cities and reach women in the provinces, who had received little benefit from prior workshops and seminars that had been held in the major cities with experts on domestic violence from Russia and abroad. Although some of these local activists were connected through e-mail to their counterparts in Moscow and St. Petersburg, many were still working in relative isolation from the West and each other. We planned to bring these women to Moscow for five days to discuss domestic violence with each other and a group of Americans specializing in the area of domestic violence. We then planned to send several members from the Association of Women Journalists out to areas of Russia not represented at the seminars where they would do outreach work with local women activists, sharing the results of the meetings in Moscow.

Last February, I traveled to Moscow with a small team of Americans from Tucson, where I live. Our group was comprised of two practicing clinical psychologists who work in the area of domestic violence, a young lawyer who tries domestic violence cases for Southern Arizona Legal Aid, a psychology professor from the University of Arizona who studies battered women and their children, and a grants specialist who worked intensively with the Russian seminar participants on identifying sources of funding and writing grant proposals. We arrived with over 20 boxes of donated books on domestic violence and sexual assault, reams of materials translated into Russian, and videos on domestic violence with accompanying Russian transcripts.

The participants came from Murmansk, Saratov, Naberezhnye Chelny, Nizhny Tagil, Sergiev Posad, Petrozavodsk and Shakhty. Also present were psychologists from Moscow, lawyers from Saratov and Kaluga, a woman police officer from St. Petersburg and ecologists from Siberia. The group included several journalists, including one from the TV station 2x2 who had done previous reporting on incarcerated and battered women. Her reporting on our seminar for the evening news helped bring the domestic violence crisis to the attention of a larger audience. At times our group swelled still further due to the unexpected influx of representatives from crisis centers who simultaneously were holding a meeting in Moscow. A member of the Duma came by twice to address us as word of the seminar spread quickly throughout the city. Some people in a position to make a difference weren't there; we had hoped for a representative from the Russian Orthodox Church and some emergency room physicians, who are often uninformed on the options open to battered woman.

For five days we sat in the frigid meeting rooms where we talked and shared ideas, frequently breaking into small working sessions on topics such as divorce settlements, child custody, treatment services, counseling hot lines and fund raising. Meanwhile, the Association of Women Journalists disseminated the results from our meeting to the widest possible audience through newspaper articles, segments on the evening news, and a radio call-in show on "Sexologia," a weekly program on the women's radio station Nadezhda. Interestingly, all the callers were men!

During the course of the seminar, I was struck by many things. Whatever credence one might lend to the notion that centuries of authoritarian rule have crushed individual initiative in the former Soviet Union, it obviously did not apply to the women activists at the seminar. Despite the sobering statistics, there were stunning stories of success. In Sergiev Posad, a women's organization had received funding to build a cafe run exclusively by women. This same group was also in the process of starting a school for women, a support network for single mothers, and a program to provide women with job counseling. In Nizhny Tagil, a city where one out of five women has been raped, a women's organization, begun as an informal group of hospital and social service agency employees, has organized to help rape victims and change public perception of rape. Because only 50 percent of Nizhny Tagil residents have telephones, the organization has had to rely exclusively on the print media and mass mailings to inform the public about domestic violence issues. Most impressive has been their success in sheltering women in the local psychiatric hospital, which has allowed women in crisis situations to stay in a safe place anonymously.

A complex pattern of support emerged from these stories. There were cases in which women's organizations had been able to accomplish an astonishing amount with virtually no support. Municipal governments had also provided real and concrete help to women's organizations where one might least expect it. Thus it was impossible to generalize about the level of support these women had received.

One of the most revealing aspects of the seminar was the consciousness and conviction on the part of the Russian participants that they were no longer willing to work under the model that has characterized Russian-Western relations for the past century, namely what I call "the bail out mentality," in which representatives from the West come to Russia, show them the "correct" way to do things, provide economic support and then leave. Some of these women had sat through more than one working session with foreign "experts" who had arrived in Russia to tell them "how it is done" with little regard for Russian history or culture or the ability of these women to find solutions themselves. The American team was determined not to perpetuate this stereotype, but to approach the sessions as an opportunity for the mutual exchange of ideas. It was quickly clear to us that western solutions to domestic violence were not always applicable to the Russian experience. One activist from the provinces spoke compellingly about how difficult it is to get women to call hot lines because of the belief, deeply held for centuries, that one should not air dirty laundry in public. Indeed, among many women there is still an odd acceptance of domestic violence, expressed by the age-old proverb, kogo lyublyu, togo byu [the one you love is the one you beat].

With the seminars behind us, Nadezhda Azhgikhina and her colleague Svetlana Svistunova of the TV station 2x2 went to work on outreach efforts throughout Russia, meeting with women activists who had been unable to attend the Moscow seminars. They traveled to Novocherkassk, Mirny, Irkutsk, Petropavlovsk and Vladivostok. Simultaneously, the Association undertook publication of a booklet entitled Kto zashchishchaet zhenshchin? [Who Defends Women?] containing articles by both American and Russian participants in the Moscow seminars, government documents from both Russia and abroad dealing with women's rights, plus interviews with women activists, lawyers, government deputies and representatives from crisis centers. One thousand copies of the booklet were published and distributed free of charge to women activists throughout Russia.

The process of social change in the new Russia is slow and painful. While we heard many success stories during the seminars in Moscow, there were numerous stories that spoke volumes of the long, difficult road ahead. We heard more than one story of women being raped by the very police officers answering their rape call.

But there have been stories of successes too, among them the concrete changes that have taken place as a result of the seminars and outreach efforts conducted by the Association of Women Journalists. In Irkutsk, more than ten articles have appeared in the local press about domestic violence. More volunteers have begun working in crisis centers there as well. In Murmansk and Mirny, crisis centers have been opened where women can receive psychological consultations. It is stories such as these which remind us that if the situation of women is to change in the new Russia, it will do so only with an increased consciousness among women and the public at large that violence at home is as much a crime as violence on the street. Clearly, women are acquiring the tools they need in order to effect the kind of change in their lives which has been slow in coming in both the old and the new Russia.

Adele Barker is an associate professor of Russian and comparative cultural and literary studies at the University of Arizona.

Association of Women Journalists, 10 Yelzarovoi Street, Moscow, Russia; phone: (095) 238-3641