Russia’s transformation meant a significant alteration in the response to sexual violence. Whereas earlier Soviet police might take action when a woman was raped by those known to her, by the 1990s, police began routinely rejecting all sorts of sexual violence statements without any investigation (Human Rights Watch 1997, 21—24). If they accepted the initial complaint, they often obstructed the process at every point, for example by refusing to give referrals to forensic doctors or delaying the referrals and not informing the rape victims of the consequence of showering before their examination (Johnson 2004). Women reported being turned away or simply choosing not to report sexual violence because they did not believe the police would help them (Israelian and Zabelina 1995, 23—24). Arrest rates for rape had begun to fall in Russia in the mid-1980s (Nalla and Newman 1994). Other women persisted. For example, a fifteen-year-old gang rape victim said that after she told her story twenty times, the police finally accepted her statement. According to Human Rights Watch (1997), victims of sexual violence usually had to tell their stories at least four times to different police officers. Even when women overcame police reluctance, they met a similar coldness from prosecutors; the majority of cases that were closed during the preliminary investigation stage were rape cases (30). Other times the criminal justice system assisted alleged rapists who would blackmail, threaten, or bribe women to drop the charges. The results were disastrous for women’s rights. For example, a Saratov lawyer-activist reported that she had not had a single case where a woman wanted to go through with prosecution for sexual violence.9
Although part of the problem may be attributed to the dysfunctional and weak state,10 most police and prosecutors were explicit that their actions were based on their beliefs about women’s culpability. Most police detectives believed that young men were often victims of false allegations made so that the alleged rape victims could extort them, that 70 percent of the men who are convicted of rape in Russia are “essentially not guilty.”n In other cases, women are held responsible for “provoking” their own rape, such as by drinking with men in their car or apartment (Human Rights Watch 1997, 19—20), confusing what global feminists might consider bad judgment for legal responsibility. At the same time, police and prosecutors tended to continue to employ coercive measures in response to some types of rapes—particularly vicious gang rapes and serial murders—even forcing innocent men to confess (Khodyreva 1996; Johnson 2004). In sum, law enforcement had moved more types of sexual violence from “real rapes” (Estrich 1987) into the category of rapes that they did not see as real.
Their justifications reflect late Soviet and early post-Soviet legal thinking about sexual violence.12 An analysis of the two leading legal specialists on rape who were writing in the early 1990s illustrates the role of the idea of a particular concept of morality (Attwood 1997, 104—106). While earlier Soviet theorists might have referred to the “woman question” and the public order as justifications, these theorists hinged their argument on the idea that a civilized or moral society “strictly protects the honor and dignity of woman as a symbol of its own honor” (Iu. M. Antonian and A. A. Tkachenko, cited in Attwood 1997, 104). With convoluted logic, they turned their “moral” critique onto the women, holding that rapes have increased during the liberalization of communism because of the immoral behavior of young women who, influenced by the West, now drink and have sex with many men. Building on earlier theories of provocation (and viktimnost’), they cast drinking and drunkenness by women as particularly contributory. Illustrating the continued reliance on essentialist notions of sex differences, these theorists also placed blame for the problem of rape on the “the demise of traditional masculinity and femininity” (Attwood 1997, 106). In contrast to global feminist concerns with consent and coercion, they suggested that police should prevent dubious people from gathering in courtyards and on the streets.
As a result, in contrast to all other forms of violent crime, which rose steeply, official statistics on rape and attempted rape suggested an implausible drop of approximately one-half throughout the 1990s. Officially, the number of male rapists (of women) decreased from 13,902 in 1991 to only 6,688 in 2000, with only a slight upsurge from 1992 rates in 1993 and 1994.13 This suggests a decrease in the rape rate from 9.5 per 100,000 persons in 1991 to 4.9 in 2000, which is especially unbelievable when compared to the mean European rate of around 6.4.14 This decrease follows some thirty years of sharp increase, interrupted only by a marked decrease just as Gorbachev lessened control of society in the mid 1980s (Kon 1995, 211; D’iachenko and Koloskova 1995). Even police officials begrudgingly recognize that these official rates do not reflect reality. Illustrating the particular Russian morality-based thinking, a spokesman for the Ministry of Internal Affairs defensively explained that this decrease is a result of women not reporting rape “because their moral standards have been corrupted by sex on television.”!5
There are only limited studies indicating the actual rate of rape in Russia. Activists have argued that actual rates are ten times the official statistics, finding that somewhere between 5 percent and 12 percent of those who call their hotlines also report their rapes to the police. Experts suggest perhaps only 3 percent of victims report rape (Zabelina 2002, 10). A 1993 sociological study in St. Petersburg found that one in four women admitted they had been raped (Kon 1995, 213). The fact that one in two registered rapes is a gang rape and the stories women tell of sex without consent suggest that rape is very common (212). Studies suggest that younger women are predominant targets (perhaps 40 percent of all victims) and that almost all rapes are accompanied by other physical violence or threats of murder (D’iachenko in Zabelina 2002, 9—10). By the 1990s, being raped was a constant fear for most women. For example, a 1994 survey found that only 5 percent of Muscovite women did not fear rape (Zabelina 1995, 20).16
The state response to sexual harassment was even worse. Without effective local Communist Party or labor boards, as the system was transformed, the only recourse left to women was the criminal justice system, whose reluctance to respond to most rape complaints apparently extended to all sexual harassment cases. Up through the early 1990s, there were apparently no criminal cases opened^7 Women were unlikely to even file a complaint. For example, one leading St. Petersburg activist had many women coming to her after being harassed—typically they had been promised benefits for sexual services, refused, and then lost their jobs—but none had filed complaints.18
Yet, the problem of sexual harassment was more common than previously as economic liberalization created more workplaces outside the state. By the mid 1990s, job advertisements often specified young and attractive women employees “without inhibitions” (bez komplekhov). In response, women seeking jobs in newspapers explicitly stated that they want no expectations of sexual services (Khot — kina 1996, 15). One study in St. Petersburg found that approximately one in three women had experienced this kind of sexual harassment (Kletsin 1998). Inappropriate comments—or what American feminists call a hostile environment—are so common to be seen as normal.