Other Survival Tactics

By 2005, the national government was supporting some twenty-two women’s cri­sis centers (Zabelina et al. 2007, 21, 103), but prospects were bleak for most auton­omous women’s crisis centers, especially those committed to comprehensive femi­nist goals (see Hemment 2007). By year’s end, some eighteen had closed (Open Society Institute 2007, 32). One movement leader acknowledged that since “crisis centers survive only on the springs of foreign donors,” this was a “new stage [in the women’s crisis center movement] in which only the strongest organizations survive.” 53 Other than antitrafficking funding, there were few, unpromising sur­vival tactics, which I illustrate through brief case studies of three movement or­ganizations in disparate regions.