As earlier, transnational feminist networking was necessary to this stage in the women’s crisis center movement development, though the source of attention shifted toward Europe with the creation of the Vienna-based Women against Violence Europe (WAVE, www. wave-network. org). After receiving start-up funding in 1997, WAVE has linked activists, policymakers, and others with an interest in reducing violence against women in nearly all European countries (Brunell and Johnson 2007). It serves as a discursive space for information exchange among professionals and activists, a library and archive, and a database of addresses, as well as a resource for women who are victims of domestic violence to find help within specific countries. From the beginning Russian crisis centers, including Syostri and later ANNA as the Russian focal point, were involved, solidifying the Russian crisis center movement’s participation in global feminism.
More crucial was democracy assistance, which expanded and reshaped the movement.24 Funding began to pour in from a variety of charitable foundations and development agencies. One deep-pocketed donor was the New York-based Ford Foundation, which had been funding women’s organizations in Russia since 1994, but turned to women’s crisis centers in 1998 (see table 3.2). For instance, through Ford’s human rights program, ANNA, the Moscow-based crisis center whose activities were greatly expanded during this stage, received more than half a million U. S. dollars from 1998 to 2001, a relationship that would continue. Another quarter of a million was dispersed to centers in Irkutsk and St. Petersburg. A second big donor was USAID.25 In 1998, Hillary Clinton had traveled to Moscow for a Russia-United States conference on domestic violence and promised support for the women’s crisis centers. The result was almost one million dollars in aid, from discretionary funds, distributed between 1999 and 2002 to thirty-five crisis centers across Russia, for start-up and expansion of advocacy.26
A third important initiative—an innovative mix of transnational feminist networking and democracy assistance—came from the Nordic countries, where in 1999 activists created the Network for Crisis Centres for Women in the Barents Region (NCRB) (Saarinen, Liapounova, and Drachova 2003b). Since some Nordic countries had been late to join the European Union and Norway and Iceland remain nonmembers, the Nordic countries, which are close to northwest Russia, had their own multilateral relations with Russia. Built upon an already existing transnational feminist network, Femina Borealis, NCRB came with approximately $300,000 from European Union and Nordic sources, some of which went directly to the women’s crisis centers in northwest Russia.27 This aid was sister — to-sister, part of a collaboration of organizations addressing domestic violence in Finland, Sweden, Norway, and northwest Russia through conferences and information technology.28 The NCRB drove the expansion of the movement into the Russian Northwest.
As expected, some funding explicitly designed to foster mobilization did not produce the intended results. For instance, a 2001 EU Tacis grant of approximately $200,000 was given to the Italian Association for Women in Development (AIDOS) and their Russian partner, Focus, for the “[c]reation of a Russian network to fight gender based violence.’^9 Though they partnered with several already existing women’s crisis centers, translated a handful of American psychological texts on sexual and domestic violence, and held a 2003 conference, they did not create an effective new network or deepen existing networks. Focus’s report on this primary goal even justifies their limited focus and impact on women’s mobilization: “Russian women are very patient, and as long as they continue to tolerate violence, its scale will not decrease’ regardless of changes in the state response.30 In contrast to the NCRB, AIDOS appeared as global feminist opportunists. AIDOS was a gender and development NGO that had no previous experience working with domestic and sexual violence and no experience in Russia. They took advantage of the new global commitment to addressing gender violence but came from a parafeminist perspective in which gender violence could be cast as a psychological problem requiring only a state social service response.
For the most part, though, the infusion of funds greatly supported the crisis centers’ “viability,” “capacity,” and “governance,” categories that Sarah Henderson (2003, ch. 4) used to evaluate the effectiveness of foreign aid on Russia’s civil
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TABLE 3.2. Ford Foundation Grants to Gender Violence Activism in Russia, 1998—2006
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Note: Not adjusted for inflation.
* To establish 10 new crisis centers in Siberia and the Far East.
л MSU=Moscow State University. The grant was to research the incidence of domestic violence in Russia.
Source:
a Henderson (2003, 128-29)
b Ford Foundation annual reports, available online through http://www. fordfound. org/. The most recent are searchable, online at http://www. fordfound. org/grants_db/view_grant_detaili. cfm [accessed February 6, 2006].
society. Centers, which without this support would probably have shut down following Russia’s 1998 economic crisis, paid more staff and expanded their activities. New centers were founded, sometimes with some government support. All centers, relative to other post-Soviet NGOs, interacted with the population. While also causing some problems found in the broader women’s movement and civil society—such as fostering oligarchical leadership, “building unsocial capital” (distrust between organizations), and “mission drift”—funding to women’s crisis centers was some of the most effective (Henderson 2003, ch. 5). While NGO-ized and somewhat fragmented, women’s crisis centers were also political and networking. For the critics who studied civil society as a whole and who knew of the women’s crisis centers movement, the women’s crisis centers were different, perhaps even “a moderate success story” because so many provided necessary social services and advocated for social and political change (Richter 2002, 79; Sundstrom 2002; Henderson 2003). For Henderson (2003), “the support for the crisis centers was most effective in that centers established other sources of support, developed a cadre of dedicated volunteers, and were slowly implementing mechanisms for affecting public policy” (147).
Other places suffered without transnational feminist networking and funding. In Orel, another regional capital just five hours by train from Moscow, a rural Russian woman, based on her experiences with abuse and activism in her village, linked up with the gender expert at ABA-CEELI. Although the resulting conference in 1999 led to much attention from the media and the local administration, without local feminists, TFN involvement, or foreign assistance no women’s crisis center was founded. In Kaluga, only a few hours by car or train from Moscow, a crisis center was thriving in 1999, so much so that they enticed one of the most powerful woman politicians in Russia to a conference on domestic violence. But though they received one small grant from IREX, they could not sustain their funders when USAID decided that they were not sufficiently professional, and by 2004 the center had vanished.
de-funding feminism, loo!—?