As democracy assistance disappeared, possibilities appeared for antitrafficking grants. In the earlier stages of the Russian women’s crisis center movement, with little funding available for antitrafficking efforts, very few crisis centers had taken on the issue of trafficking in women even though the high point of the problems appears to have been in the late 1990s (Khodyreva 2004). The new global attention to trafficking, especially the new U. S. legislation, changed the financial incentives. Embracing the new opportunities, centers in Moscow, Petrozavodsk, Ekaterinburg, and Krasnodar secured funding from USAID for “trafficking prevention and information dissemination” (200i—2004).33 Crisis centers in Barnaul and Saratov won an additional grant from USAID for public awareness campaigns and the introduction of crisis intervention services.34 A similar grant supported some thirteen women’s organizations in the Russian Far East and Siberia “to address the trafficking problem through short-term training programs in job skills and small business development, awareness raising activities, targeted information dissemination, and individual services and consultations for women at risk.”35 A fourth, much smaller grant went to a Novgorod crisis center to compile a trainer’s portfolio on trafficking, which was completed in 2004.36 Other funds went to individuals as part of an “International Visitor Exchange Program on Trafficking of Women and Children” that brought Russian experts to Washington, D. C., for exposure to U. S.-based programs. In general, these interventions were modeled on earlier gender violence interventions in Russia and funded through traditional development channels^7
However, the new kind of funding available through the new U. S. State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons (G/TIP) went to a new player in the anti-gender-violence campaign in Russia, the MiraMed Institute and its Angel Coalition. Founded in i99i in Moscow by American doctor
Juliette Engel, MiraMed is registered as both an American nonprofit and a Russian nongovernmental organization. Originally focused on improving Russian birthing centers and orphanages, MiraMed turned to the issue of trafficking in women and young girls in the late 1990s, founding the Angel Coalition to link twenty member organizations combating trafficking in 1999.38 By the beginning of 2004, the Angel Coalition claimed thirty-three members in Russia.39 Seven of these organizations collaborated to provide hotlines, and five ran temporary “safe houses” for trafficked women who are deported back to Russia.40 According to their April 2006 newsletter, their members have helped 3,700 victims of trafficking since January 2003, and their shelters have housed 87 victims since 2004.
Although most members of Angel Coalition were organizations unaffiliated with the women’s crisis center movement, six organizations were also members of RACCW, and several more were members of the broader Russian women’s movement.41 For example, the Psychological Crisis Center in St. Petersburg, under the direction of Natalia Khodyreva, an early crisis center leader and the official president of the Angel Coalition, was coordinating one of the safe houses. In 2003, they had a hotline to counsel people considering working abroad and a nine-woman shelter offering psychological counseling, medical assistance, and education and job training^2 In contrast, in Kazan, the capital of the Russian Republic of Tatarstan, Angel’s affiliate was a micro-financing woman’s organization previously unaffiliated with the crisis center movement. Their safe house was a rented apartment, which housed one woman who had been deported back to Russia in the summer of 2004. For some women’s crisis centers, joining the Angel Coalition was simply a pragmatic decision, a quest for more resources. For others, joining meant a new status that they had been unable to obtain within the movement. Several women’s organizations had no recollection of giving MiraMed/ Angel the green light to add them to their list.