In the early years, women’s crisis centers were remarkably successful at getting cov­erage in local, regional, and national newspapers. For example, in 1997, accord­ing to their files, the work of Syostri or Syostri’s founders was reported in fifteen English-language articles, in United States and Russian news, and thirty-nine Russian-language articles, dating from a 1991 publication. […]

Did these new campaigns transform society’s awareness of sexual assault? Were these new norms reflected in the media? Did they penetrate into people’s opin­ions or change the dominant discourses about rape and sexual harassment? For the answers, I examine the impact of the anti—gender violence campaigns on public awareness by reviewing newspaper coverage of the […]

By the beginning of the 2000s, women’s crisis centers were much less focused on sexual assault. While others continued to address the issue as part of their other work, only one crisis center (Syostri) remained that was devoted to combating sexual assault. The issue also disappeared from women’s crisis center campaigns. Whereas a 1994 article […]

After receiving distress calls from women, by the mid 1990s Russian women’s movement scholars and activists also grew concerned with the issue of sexual ha­rassment (e. g., Khodyreva 1996; Pisklakova 1996). For example, at a 1993 seminar on women’s unemployment at the Moscow Center for Gender Studies (MCGS), one attendee publicly requested consideration of the […]

The issue of sexual violence was raised in 1991 at the very beginning of the post­Soviet women’s movement in Russia. It was one of the issues of violence against women that was unscheduled, but added to the agenda of the watershed event in the Russian women’s movement, the First Independent Women’s Forum in 1991 (Nechemias […]

Activists also have a history of challenging sexual harassment in the workplace. In post-Revolution Russia, Bolshevik feminists were concerned about employers forcing women to have sex, leading early Soviet leaders to criminalize this behav­ior as part of other sexual violence (Juviler 1977). But it was not until U. S. activ­ists took up the issue in […]

For centuries, women’s movements around the world have made sexual assault, especially rape, a central concern. In Russia, the mid-nineteenth-century women nihilists and the revolutionary feminist Alexandra Kollontai even advocated ab­solute equality in love and sex; they created alternative forms of relationships, from loveless, sexless fictitious marriages that allowed women unusual indepen­dence from their parents […]

Т ИБ 1998 PUBLICATION of Margaret Keck and Kathyrn Sikkink’s Activ­ists beyond Borders affirmed global activists’ hopes that new global norms, such as those that frame gender violence as human rights violations, could have important long-term impact on state behavior. Aspirations more than real­ity, such norms represent a new transnational consensus about what it means […]

Of the three interventions, assistance through international development agen­cies and large charitable foundations was clearly the most effective at fostering feminist mobilization. Global feminism and transnational feminist networking helped the movement get off the ground, but it took feminist alliances with de­mocracy assistance donors to create a women’s crisis center movement, an unusu­ally successful segment […]

The most stable base for feminist women’s crisis centers is probably affiliation with public universities. Such support had long been a part of the crisis centers’ resources as many of the founders were academics.60 Some crisis centers, such as Moscow-based Yaroslavna, had been built within universities, while others, such in Tver, seemed to be moving […]