By the beginning of the 2000s, women’s crisis centers were much less focused on sexual assault. While others continued to address the issue as part of their other work, only one crisis center (Syostri) remained that was devoted to combating sexual assault. The issue also disappeared from women’s crisis center campaigns.
Whereas a 1994 article by a Russian activist titled “Violence against Women” addressed only sexual violence, a 2002 well-received dictionary of gender terminology included no entry on rape or sexual violence.14 By 2002, most women’s crisis centers identified themselves as addressing violence against women but meant, in practice, primarily nonsexual domestic violence.
Part of the problem was the extensive resistance to discussing sex, which evolved into a moral panic under Putin.15 But this retrenchment also reflected shifts in funding possibilities for such activism. Until 1999, donors were at least as willing to fund organizations addressing sexual violence as those funding domestic violence; however, the USAID funds that helped the movement grow were designated only for those organizations that address domestic violence. While a tremendous boon to the women’s crisis center movement, this decision left organizations such as Syostri that focused on sexual violence with few resources.
Attention toward sexual harassment also waned somewhat. By the late 1990s, the center Diana, which had been providing information about “moral” businesses, had closed (Suchland 2005, 178). Similarly, the women’s crisis center in Tula appears to have done nothing further on the issue. Yet, because harassment remains a common feature of post-Soviet women’s lives, new interest emerged; another organization in Rostov-on-Don had a sexual harassment hotline, which in 2005 reported receiving one hundred calls a month (Duban 2006, 85). In Kazan in 2004, a one-woman dynamo was teaching groups of unemployed women who were involved in a fifty-four-hour job retraining program with the regional Ministry of Labor about the global women’s movement and sexual harassment^6