For Russian and international activists alike, the most important legal reform would be comprehensive legislation on domestic violence.40 The pressure began one year before the 1995 U. N. conference in Beijing and was surprisingly success­ful. In 1994, the Women of Russia faction introduced draft domestic violence legislation into the Duma’s Committee on Women, Family, and […]

Media treatment of the second survey (Gorshkova and Shurygina 2003) illus­trates the increased attention mixed with lingering nonfeminist views about do­mestic violence.39 Upon release, the survey received serious attention and genuine curiosity about the problem of domestic violence from two progressive newspa­pers and only one story that reported on the survey as validating the Russian […]

More importantly, the available survey data suggest a shift in public conscious­ness of domestic violence. A 2001—2002 survey, funded by UNIFEM and con­ducted by a scholar-activist at the Moscow Humanities University, found wide­spread awareness that domestic violence was a national problem (Zabelina 2002). In contrast to earlier skepticism and confusion over the new terminology, 92 […]

From the early years of domestic violence activism, Russian activists were re­markably successful at getting coverage in newspapers relative to their organi­zational strength. In the mid 1990s, crisis centers secured sympathetic coverage in English-language Moscow — and St. Petersburg-based newspapers, as well as in a variety of popular Russian newspapers.30 Coverage then seems to have […]

All along, some crisis centers had been invoking ideas more consonant with domi­nant ways of thinking about women in Russia. Regional crisis centers, even those that identified as feminist and drew upon human rights rhetoric, were more likely than those in St. Petersburg or Moscow to employ neotraditional, especially ma- ternalist, gender ideologies, often signified […]

Whereas Russian sexual assault activists struggled to raise awareness with little funding, three donors stepped in to support three sizable domestic violence cam­paigns that would not have been possible without their support. In 1997, with a grant from the Ford Foundation, crisis centers in Moscow and St. Petersburg coordinated the first attempt to raise consciousness […]

As with sexual assault, the issue of domestic violence was raised at the watershed event of the women’s movement in Russia, the First Independent Women’s Fo­rum in 1991, and activism began in earnest following the Second Women’s Forum in 1992 (Racioppi and See 1997; Sperling 1999). From the onset, activists under­stood a central first task […]

By the mid to late 1990s, domestic violence became the gender violence issue that donors most wanted to fund. International development agencies’ willingness reflected a new sense among many industrialized long-term democracies about the need for national legislation on domestic violence.5 In the United States, the biggest donor to Russia,6 attention from USAID to domestic […]

As with sexual assault, a critique of domestic violence has become a global femi­nist norm, the cornerstone of the broader concept of gender violence crafted by global feminists. For more than two centuries, women in the West and in Russia had fought for more rights within marriage, including the right to divorce to es­cape violence […]

I F GLOBAL NORMS and foreign intervention to help monitor, blame, and shame a government for its failure to address gender violence are not sufficient, perhaps more intrusive interventions could promote increased awareness and reform of policy and practice. Development agencies and large charitable foundations may join human rights advocates and transnational feminist networks, provid­ing […]