Together, these studies show that very little has changed since the first Human Rights Watch reports. Official rape rates are even lower because women had learned not to expect assistance from the authorities at all levelsV Although law enforcement remains plagued by widespread corruption, inclined toward abusive practice, and without legitimacy (Beck and Roberston 2005), their failure to help women who have been victims of sexual assault reflects continued skepticism toward women and sexual assault. For example, a recent informal poll of male prosecutors in Irkutsk revealed that 81 percent thought that women often change their minds after consenting to sex and then falsely accuse their partners of rape (Duban 2006, 105). Police and prosecutors continue to ask repeated, humiliating questions of women alleging rape that exhibit their belief that women are almost solely responsible for preventing their rape. Unsurprisingly, rape cases are not initiated if the victim is a prostitute because consent to all men is assumed.38 As before, virtually no women pursue criminal or legal options when they experience sexual harassment (86).
Instead of effectively pressuring law enforcement to respond better, the independent and government crisis centers have unwittingly become excuses for the police to do nothing. According to the ABA-CEELI (Duban 2006), staff at government crisis centers recommend that women not report rape to police (arguing the process would be too traumatic) while providing minimal psychological or legal support, in essence leaving women to fend for themselves. Similarly, some local police were handing out Syostri’s phone number, but only after telling women that there was nothing the police could do.39 At the same time, the police were no longer allowing Syostri to conduct trainings at the police academy. More so than under the totalitarian state, sexual assault was privatized as women’s individual misfortune.
assessing the impact of global norms
In sum, blame and shame is not enough. Scores of individuals and a hundred organizations, both foreign and domestic, have been involved in the campaign against sexual assault in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Feminist entrepreneurs and other activists have given heroic amounts of time and energy to learning more about sexual assault, trying to raise public awareness and shift public blame from women, and influencing state policy and practice. For more than a decade, international human rights advocates have been monitoring the Russian response to sexual assault, and now even Russian human rights advocates have taken on some concern for gender violence.
From the perspective of global feminists, the results have been frustratingly little, so much so that, in the mid 2000s, human rights monitors began a new round of blame and shame. The new talk about gender violence by government officials in the CEDAW process—what might appear as a success—is undermined by their inaction and their tendency, when they do focus on gender violence, to mean only domestic violence. Putin’s 2006 off-the-cuff remarks seemingly congratulating the Israeli president—under investigation for harassing and assaulting several women—for his sexual prowess illuminate the powerful resistance to global feminist norms.40 (According to one Russian report, Putin, who thought the microphone was turned off, said that the Israeli president “turned out to be quite a powerful man. He raped ten women. I never expected it from him. He surprised all of us. We all envy him.”) Even if this was a joke, as Putin asserts, it was callous, and this kind of callousness about gender violence is widespread.
Foreign intervention was designed to support reform “from below” by stimulating local activism, but this kind of intervention could not sustain activism in Russia’s inhospitable environment. Foreign intervention to encourage reform “from above”—such as monitoring policy and practice—led to no meaningful reform for sexual assault. Local women’s crisis centers, although networked transnationally, were not strong enough to create successful collaborations with Russian human rights organizations. Even now, there is little sense among these Russian human rights advocates that women’s rights or gender violence are an essential part of human rights. More significant, by 2006, women who had been sexually assaulted were worse off vis-a-vis the criminal justice system than when the Soviet Union fell apart.
CHAPTER FIVE