Together, these studies show that very little has changed since the first Human Rights Watch reports. Official rape rates are even lower because women had learned not to expect assistance from the authorities at all levelsV Although law enforcement remains plagued by widespread corruption, inclined toward abusive practice, and without legitimacy (Beck and Roberston 2005), […]

Although these feminist entrepreneurs and women’s crisis centers worked tire­lessly, there is only so much that a small number of individuals can do in such an immense country. Their inability to reach the high levels of government was evident in the 2002 exchange between the CEDAW committee and government officials over Russia’s CEDAW report (Russian […]

Other attempts at reform came from feminist entrepreneurs, notably a take- no-prisoners feminist, Dianne Post, the gender expert at the ABA-CEELI, who hoped to skip the rigmarole of working with high-level officials in the still heav­ily bureaucratized Russia and focus directly on the line staff who respond to gen­der violence. From 1998 to 2000, Post […]

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 […]

Even without formal legal reform, the state response to gender violence can be transformed through pressure on the state to change its procedures or on the in­dividual state agents immediately involved with responding to gender violence. In other places, pressure from women’s organizations, what Merry calls the “so­cial service approach,” is supplemented by a “human […]

A few years later, when legislators got serious about revising the Criminal Proce­dure Code, crisis center Syostri again raised concerns with Russian policymak­ers and international observers about how reforms would impact rape victims.32 The Soviet code, as an essential part of the totalitarian system, had what legal scholars call an accusatorial bias, in reality a […]

Since rape and sexual harassment are regulated by criminal law in Russia, the post-Soviet revisions of the Russian criminal and the criminal procedure codes are the most likely location for reform.24 Expressing global feminist concern, Russian activists leveled two critiques of the rape laws in both the Soviet-period and draft codes.25 First, they argued that […]

As the women’s crisis center movement was not successful at localizing activism and as the public perception of sexual assault had shifted so little, public pressure from Russians themselves to reform policy would be unlikely, even if the Russian political system were not so closed. Nevertheless, foreign intervention, especially from those international organizations that advocate […]

The media coverage and public reaction to two high-profile events illustrate how Soviet-period skepticism toward sexual assault has lingered. The first is the story of Aleksandra Ivannikova, who, following a common practice, flagged down a car in Moscow in 2003 to ask for a ride home in exchange for a small fee. Ac­cording to Ivannikova, […]

More important for global feminists would be a shift in the ways the public un­derstands sexual assault. Unfortunately, since sexual harassment was not seen as a problem by mainstream sociologists, there is limited survey data and no data that is comparable over time. The little available data suggests some growing con­cern for sexual harassment, especially […]