I F FOREIGN ASSISTANCE combined with local and transnational feminist ac­tivism made the process of blaming and shaming more effective, perhaps more powerful intervention could be even more helpful in promoting global femi­nist change. In addition to the positive incentives of grants from large charitable foundations and international development agencies, strong states can employ more […]

In sum, despite these limitations, adding substantial assistance to the blame and shame of human rights advocates working with transnational feminists was much more effective than the blame and shame process alone. Foreigners gave local ac­tivists considerable financial support for their activism, for their campaigns to raise public awareness of domestic violence, and for their […]

Across Russia, in southwestern Siberia, the flurry of NGO activity in Barnaul that had produced new state social services targeted to both women and men in vio­lent relationships has been accompanied by a new coordinated community-like initiative. In 2001, the director of the Altai regional department of the medical — social and family-demographic problems championed […]

Crisis center activists in St. Petersburg turned very quickly to the state and got fast results. In 1995, after activists lobbied the progressive mayor, the city opened a city shelter to provide “social assistance to women in danger.’^4 The first director, a feminist academic, had been inspired to establish the shelter, because she “had been […]

To outsiders, it may look like nothing has changed. Amnesty’s (2005) critiques of state practice, based on data collected in late 2004 and early 2005, were similar to the early Human Rights Watch reports. They found police inaction (such as the failure to enter an apartment when the abuser refused entry or refusal to accept […]

Foreign intervention also came from programs explicitly designed to foster state- society collaboration along the model of coordinated community approach. One such program was through Vermont-based Project Harmony, which aims to pro­mote community partnerships and provides hands-on training for law enforce­ment officials. With funding from the U. S. State Department’s Bureau for In­ternational Narcotics and […]

From the mid 1990s, those human rights advocates concerned with violence against women have spotlighted the behavior of Russian law enforcement personnel. Hu­man Rights Watch reports in 1995 and 1997, the first such reports, covered the law enforcement failures regarding domestic violence almost as much as they con­demned law enforcement response to sexual violence. Police […]

In addition to this national initiative, there have also been some regional reforms, mostly a result of international pressure^2 In contrast to the national level, where there have been no criminal law reforms, at least two of the eighty-nine regions, the Republics of Chuvashiia in 2003 and Mordoviia in 2004, had modified their administrative codes […]

Interventions, backed up with foreign funding, have had a greater impact on the so-called soft ministries. The first sign was the 1998 U. S.-Russian conference on domestic violence (in Russian, “violence in the family”) held in coordination with the Russian Ministry of Labor and Social Development. Built upon U. S.- Russian connections made during the […]

There was less attention focused on reforming the criminal laws regarding domes­tic violence when the parliament was revising the Soviet-era criminal code in the mid-1990s. Neither the embryonic women’s crisis center movement, the Women of Russia faction, nor international human rights advocates were directing criti­cism toward the criminal assault articles for including no specific reference […]