Crisis Center Proliferation
In the late 1990s, most women’s crisis centers expanded their activities. In 1998, Moscow-based ANNA was a thriving crisis center with twelve staff members and dozens of volunteers providing hotline and some group consultations, helping over two hundred women a month (Henderson 2001). By 2001, ANNA’s leaders had become national advocates, having participated in a whirlwind of interactive conferences on domestic violence across Russia. These conferences, facilitated by the Moscow-based American Bar Association Central European and Eurasian Law Initiative (ABA-CEELI) gender program, brought together social service providers (psychologists, social workers, healthcare providers), law enforcement, and women activists. ANNA also ran two large national media and public education campaigns. The growth of other already existing crisis centers was less dramatic, but many took on new roles, such as social accompaniment programs, encouraged by Women, Law, and Development International and then ABA-CEELI, in which crisis center activists would accompany domestic violence or rape survivors.
Most dramatically, this period was marked by an escalation in the rate at which activists established new women’s crisis centers. Reflecting this growth, the RACCW network expanded to forty members by the summer of 2002, but there were dozens of other centers that self-identified as crisis centers to international donors or to the Russian women’s movement. In 2002, one RACCW leader estimated that there were 120 organizations across Russia involved in addressing gender violence.15
The proliferation of crisis centers can be illustrated by developments in Barnaul, a southwestern Siberian city of 780,000 residents a few hundred miles from Kazakhstan, China, and Mongolia, where not one but three centers emerged (Johnson 2006). Barnaul—and the region of Altai of which Barnaul is the capital—represents fairly typical post-Soviet Russian urban life since the collapse of Soviet rule: an economically depressed region that must rely on financial subsidies from the federal government.
The Women’s Alliance in Barnaul (Zhenskii Al’ians), founded by Nataliia Sereda in 1998, was the result of the restructuring of a women’s organization first founded in 1993.16 Inspired by and modeled on the first-generation crisis centers, this second-generation crisis center’s primary activity was a hotline, but Sereda and her staff continued other services, including on-site counseling and support groups, from the original women’s organization. With support and training from ABA-CEELI, she added a program to escort victims to the police and court. Between 1998 and 2002, with only a handful of paid staff and no more than a dozen volunteers loosely affiliated with the center, the center had helped “6,500 victims—most of them female victims of violence.” 17 The Women’s Alliance is the best-case scenario of crisis centers that emerged in this periodd8
The two other new centers were Response (Otklik), a project of the local public university’s sociology department, and the Altai Crisis Center for Men, a state social service that was revamped to also address domestic violence (Johnson 2006). The latter—not a women’s crisis center but headed by a man affiliated with the movement (Kostenko 2003)—was particularly remarkable for being the first crisis center for men and illustrated a new kind of responsibility for taking action against gender violence. That so many organizations chose to focus on domestic violence illustrates just how popular the issue had become. On the other hand, these organizations were hybrids—part state, part NGO—receiving public funding while simultaneously representing themselves to donors as NGOs.19 By 2004, RACCW leaders acknowledged that one-third of organizations affiliated with the RACCW, which had once resisted state centers, were similar types of hybrids. By the end of 2001, the Russian Ministry of Labor and Social Development was supporting fifteen government crisis centers to address violence in the family (Zabelina et al. 2007, 103).
Although these hybrid organizations have been obstacles to grassroots feminist organizing in other similar contexts (Hrycak 2006), in Russian practice they extended mobilization against gender violence. In a resource-poor environment, activists found new ways to fund activism, illustrating the power of even relatively small grants in terms of increasing not just financial capital, but reputation and legitimacy.20 In a contrast to the Western advice to privatize social support, these hybrid organizations represented new responsibilities for the Russian state and drew funds to do so from the very government (the United States) that was advocating the dismantling of the Russian welfare state. Further, hybrid organizing also brought in new blood, including more traditional women and men who worked with the state and who became politicized by contacts with the autonomous women’s crisis centers. The risk, however, is that these kinds of entities contribute to the corruption and lack of transparency that plague Russian politics and that Russian citizens, taught to be clever discerners of government deception, will understand this maneuvering and be even more suspicious of the foreign — funded women’s crisis center movement.
Even religiously affiliated organizations got into the game. In 1997, the Presbyterian Church, as part of its missionary outreach to Russia, created a training center, Opora (Support), in Moscow, which provides counseling training for Russian social service providers on treating alcohol and drug addiction, sometimes in collaboration with federal and local government social services^1 Geared toward all types of Christians (but open to atheists), the extensive training includes a module on domestic violence. Similarly, Project Kesher, a network based on the post-Soviet Jewish communities, began to take the once-taboo issue of domestic violence more seriously in its women’s groups across Russia.22
Another important trend was the explosion of new crisis centers in Northwest Russia, an area that was one of the most militarized during the Cold War. Whereas arctic Murmansk hosted a first-generation crisis center, by 2001, there were at least ten women’s crisis centers in the Barents regions of Karelia, Murmansk, and Arkhangelsk (Liapounova and Drachova 2004). Six were autonomous NGOs, and four were municipal institutions. Three of the ten had shortterm shelter space, for a total of nineteen individuals at one time.
In 2000, scholar-activists affiliated with these northwestern Russian developments conducted a detailed survey of these centers plus two others in St. Petersburg that provides a snapshot of the women’s crisis center movement (Liapounova and Drachova 2004)d3 All had hotlines and provided psychological counseling; ten out of twelve (83%) also offered legal counseling and self-help groups, and included volunteers in addition to social, psychological, and legal professionals. Not the sister-to-sister groups advocated in global feminism, they construed their assistance as professional and were not particularly concerned about overriding the wishes of the client in some circumstances (Liapounova and Drachova 2004, 65; Saarinen, Liapounova, and Drachova 2003a). Although focused on domestic violence, almost all centers also addressed sexual abuse, incest, rape, and, less often, sexual harassment. While “advocating women’s rights,” Russian activists understood that the central problems facing women were financial problems, housing, and unemployment.
They also found notable differences between government and autonomous crisis centers in Russia (Liapounova and Drachova 2004). The autonomous crisis centers tended to be more activist oriented: slightly more likely to identify as feminist and much more likely to have links to women’s movements abroad (46). They also tended to be more flexible and less hierarchical than government centers, but not without hierarchy (especially in terms of information distribution) and conflict (47). Their success was highly dependent on the management and fundraising abilities of the director(s). On the other hand, government centers benefited from more constant (albeit often very limited) funding, but were heavily regulated by higher authorities and were subject to the whims of the politicians who funded them (48). Liapounova and Drachova (2004) also argued that personnel at the government centers were less competent, having received no training on gender violence prior to the center’s opening. In terms of funding, the government centers had received no grants, and only one autonomous crisis center had received (limited) municipal funding. One crisis center was completely dependent on unpaid work.
By 2001, relative to Russia’s weak society, the crisis centers were success stories. There was committed leadership spread out in a dozen organizations that had been around for more than five years. Although not meeting the ideal form of social movement with a broad constituency observed in the 1970s in Western societies, the women’s crisis centers were well networked through flexible as well as more enduring coalitions and had an effective mobilizing structure. These women were in the marginalized third sector, the housework of politics, but they were also organizing as women (instead of returning to the home), and most saw themselves as activists if not feminists. Further, they were supported by other organizations in the women’s movement, government crisis centers, and religious interests in addressing gender violence.