In the early years, women’s crisis centers were remarkably successful at getting coverage in local, regional, and national newspapers. For example, in 1997, according to their files, the work of Syostri or Syostri’s founders was reported in fifteen English-language articles, in United States and Russian news, and thirty-nine Russian-language articles, dating from a 1991 publication. That the articles were published in some of the most important and popular news sources—Argumenty i Facty, Ogonek, Izvestiia, and Nezavisimaia Gazeta—illustrated that the women’s crisis centers had early been able to command attention toward sexual assault.
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Articles on rape appeared first, but in 1994 Komsomol’skaia Pravda published the first article in Russia that regarded sexual harassment with seriousness and as a social problem (Khotkina 1996). In the early to mid 1990s, the Russian mass media, newly freed from censorship, were enamored with writing about social problems that had previously been taboo and were even open to innovative ways of thinking about these problems.
Unfortunately, this kind and degree of interest did not last long. Of all the forms of gender violence discussed in this study, rape is the most commonly covered issue in national and regional newspapers and newswires, reflecting not a new awareness of the problem, but the long history of a (limited) understanding of rape. There has been no meaningful increase over the time that the crisis centers have been active. For example, coverage in the long-running national newspaper Izvestiia from 1995 to 2005 remained relatively consistent over time until 2003 (see table 4.2). The more recent increase in coverage, coming after activism had waned, reflected coverage of several high-profile cases, including a serial rapist “maniac” active around Moscow. As during the Soviet period, rapes such as these that are seen as particularly threatening to the social order receive a lot of attention, and most other articles refer to rape as a criminal problem or use the word as a metaphor for other problems. Very few articles cover rape as a form of violence against women or violation of women’s rights, suggesting that the campaign against rape has very little impact on media coverage.
More telling, these news sources almost never used the new terms for familiar rape that activists wanted to introduce (Khodyreva 1996). Whereas there were over eight thousand articles from 1994 to 2004 that referenced rape in an entire database of national and regional newspapers (East View), only a handful used an activist term for “date rape” (iznasilovanie na svidanie), and none referenced “rape in marriage” (iznasilovanie v brake)}7 Neither of these terms appeared in Izvestiia. The Russian media do not recognize a broader construction of rape.
Similarly, activism against sexual harassment had no positive impact on media
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coverage of the problem. Albeit less than rape, sexual harassment was discussed quite often in print media. This would seem to be a significant accomplishment as sexual harassment, unlike rape, was a new concept, suggesting that any coverage might signal a change. The most common term for it was “sexual overtures” (seksual’nye domogatel’stva), the term chosen by scholar-activists at the 1995 seminar on sexual harassment.18 However, the concept of sexual harassment appears to have been quickly picked up by the media, but almost never as a serious discussion of the problem as it relates to women (see also Zabelina 2002, ch. 5). For example, spikes in the references to sexual harassment in Izvestiia tend to reflect American events (see table 4.3). The increased attention to the issue in 1998 was a response to the scandal over then U. S. president Clinton’s relationship with a White House intern. The upsweep in 2003 and 2004 reflected the attention to the 2003 allegations of sexual misconduct by Michael Jackson and the 2004 American sexual abuse of prisoners in Iraq. More broadly, many articles that mentioned sexual harassment did so as part of either ridiculing the concept or casting it as a foreign idea, such as by mocking Americans and their “ludicrous” regulation of sexuality in the workplace. For example, a 1994 study reported in the news suggested that Russian “[w]omen view their bodies as a way of furthering their careers—that’s just the way that it is. . . . Sexual harassment is absolutely not a real problem in Russia. . . . I assure you there is no opposition on the part of [Russian] women to this.” w As elsewhere (Saguy 2002), “sexual harassment” was a domestic construct created by nonfeminist nationalists.