International human rights advocates quickly brought attention to the problem of sexual assault in Russia. The Women’s Rights Project of U. S.-based Human
Rights Watch, a product of the alliance between transnational feminists and human rights organizations in the United States, released the first critique in 1995 as part of a larger study of employment discrimination. Appalled by government attitudes toward gender violence, researchers returned to Russia in 1996 to produce the more extensive report “Too Little, Too Late: State Response to Violence against Women” (1997). Using typical human rights monitoring strategies, this report laid out Russia’s obligations to international law, examined Russia’s laws pertaining to domestic and sexual violence, and, based on extensive interviews, summarized the criminal-legal system’s negligence of violence against women.
These reports helped enlist the U. S. State Department and USAID in the human rights advocacy-friendly environment of the Clinton administration (which brought funding to the women’s crisis centers), but they also inserted the United States into Russia’s gender-violence politics. The American lens on sexual assault framed the problems as mostly criminal issues rather than results of the shrinking welfare state, sidelined sexual harassment (which in the United States is distinct from sexual violence), and dismissed Russians’ assertions that translation was required to fit the Russian context. In the long run, paradoxically, this American involvement also helped shift the attention away from sexual assault toward other gender violence issues, such as domestic violence and then trafficking in women, which became more salient for the United States.