Other attempts at reform came from feminist entrepreneurs, notably a take- no-prisoners feminist, Dianne Post, the gender expert at the ABA-CEELI, who hoped to skip the rigmarole of working with high-level officials in the still heavily bureaucratized Russia and focus directly on the line staff who respond to gender violence. From 1998 to 2000, Post zigzagged across Russia with crisis center leaders, upon the invitation of local women’s organizations, to hold conferences and seminars with state employees, such as police officers, medical examiners, other doctors, social workers, psychologists, prosecutors, and judges, as well as lawyers and anyone else who might be interested.33 Post, who had been a parole office, social worker, and domestic violence and then legal aid lawyer, astonished the more reserved women’s crisis center leaders with her energy and broke taboos about sexuality by demonstrating and describing each item in an American rape kit for emergency personnel to collect evidence of rape, something that was not available to Russian doctors.
Even having access to the state personnel who are the frontline of attending to sexual assault is remarkable in a polity where social organizations are new and often excluded, but these interventions and trainings also resulted in some remarkable changes. In Orel, a once flourishing but now impoverished city with no independent women’s crisis center, Post and the women’s crisis center leaders were met with a very limited conception of rape (as only stranger rape) and blame for the women for provoking the rape. For example, a psychologist at a city center for youth explained, “I don’t talk about guilt with my patients. . . . But if a woman is to walk in the forest with some men that she doesn’t know and she begins to talk about sex, she is provoking a response.” After a contentious debate with the women’s crisis center leaders and the formal workshop, a representative from the same youth organization spoke of “destructive behavior” instead of “provocation” and ended with a plea for special crisis centers for women because “human rights include women’s rights.”
According to Post (2002), the transformation was even more marked in other places, especially where an independent women’s crisis center already existed or was founded in response to the workshop.34 Some of those that she met already had feminist understandings of gender violence, such as rejecting the idea of provocation, but had had no language or logic to articulate their arguments. Some had felt alone and used the events to legitimate their work. Others were empowered by Post’s can-do attitude, a transformation explained to me in Barnaul three years after Post’s conference there. Some policymakers were shamed, such as a public relations person for the local prosecutor’s office in the Siberian city of Tomsk, who, after challenging questions, acknowledged that, although girls’ immorality (drinking with boyfriends) might make them more likely to be raped, “it is not the girls’ fault.” Illustrating the greater potential for influence in far-flung regions, in the far northern city of Norilsk, Post was lauded for simply coming to the hinterland where few travel. Even the crisis center leaders, trained in a Soviet system in which people “read lectures” (chitaiut lektsie) to passive audiences and hold conferences to discuss already crafted resolutions, began to imitate Post’s style when they participated, requiring audience participation and demanding plans of future action. In 1999, Moscow-based Syostri, for example, was conducting periodic trainings at a Moscow police academy; activist lawyers and psychologists were leading similar police trainings in St. Petersburg.