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Bending the Bow: Targeting Women's Human Rights and Opportunities Violence Against Women Violence against women encompasses "any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivations of liberty, whether occurring in public or private life." Violence against women can be seen as both a measure of women's vulnerability and a critical social mechanism for maintaining women's inequality. Gender equality will never be realized as long as women live in fear of violence. For many countries, the transition to a market economy has exposed previously hidden gender-based violence, including domestic violence and rape, and fostered other kinds of gender violence, such as trafficking in women and forced prostitution. The alarming declines in the economic well-being of the region's women contribute to the steady rise of violence against women in both the public and private spheres. Out from the Shadows One of the primary points of reference for the international women's movement, the Beijing Platform for Action charges governments to take active steps to eliminate violence against women, including raising public awareness of gender violence as a human rights issue, making women aware of their legal rights, sensitizing judicial and law enforcement personnel to gender violence, and providing shelter and services for survivors. Governments in most countries in the region, however, have done little beyond acknowledging violence against women as an area of concern. Women are usually unaware of their rights under existing laws, which for the most part offer inadequate protection. Judicial and law enforcement officials, as well as medical and psychological professionals, operate within outdated frameworks that regard women as the cause of violence perpetrated against them. In addition, governments fail to adequately document gender-based violence and the response of the law enforcement system to its victims. The antiviolence initiative of the Network Women's Program empowers women in the region to make all forms of violence against women, including trafficking, visible and recognized as a violation of women's human rights. In 1993, only a few countries, such as Poland, Russia, and Slovenia, had antiviolence services, mostly limited to hotlines and counseling. Today, women have organized in every country in the network to confront gender-based violence, providing safety and services to women who have experienced it and demanding government accountability for ending it. In Yugoslavia, for example, there are now more than 30 women's grassroots organizations dealing with domestic violence. Many of them have joined in a coalition to advocate for broader changes, including government accountability. Trafficking in women, which governments once denied, is now a concern of individual governments, as well as multilateral institutions such as the United Nations, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and the International Organization for Migration (IOM). Violence against women is no longer ignored. Stopping Trafficking in Women The documentary film Bought & Sold opens in a Moscow living room, where a woman and a man are talking about a job opportunity abroad that she is considering. The man explains that the visa, the apartment, and transportation there and back will be paid so all she will have to buy is food. "Everything sounds good," she says. Then she adds: "But I have heard that a lot of girls go abroad and they never make it back." Bought & Sold, produced by Gillian Caldwell and Steven Galster of Global Survival Network and supported by the Soros Documentary Fund, describes a two-year undercover investigation of trafficking in Russian women, as well as women from other former Soviet countries. Caldwell and Galster interviewed recruiters, pimps, health officers, counselors, trafficking experts, and Russian, Latvian, and Ukrainian women caught in the trafficking web. The women thought they were getting a chance for a new life abroad and instead found themselves working as indentured servants in the sex industry in countries such as Germany, China, Japan, Australia, and the United States. The film broke the silence over this new phenomenon by disclosing the elaborate methods used by international mafia networks to recruit and exploit thousands of young women from the region. In cooperation with Global Survival Network, the Women's Program helped to raise awareness of the issue among governments, NGOs, and the general public by screening and discussing the video at international conferences and organizing focused training sessions followed by a small grants program. It has been translated into several regional languages as well as English. The Women's Program also supported the publication and dissemination of Crime & Servitude, a report that accompanies the film as an educational and advocacy tool. Trafficking in women is a new phenomenon in post-communist countries, which had no history of trafficking during Soviet times. By 1995, when Caldwell and Galster began work on their investigative film, trafficking had become a thriving practice in many of these countries, including Russia. Yet few people were aware that it was happening. Governments refused to acknowledge it as a problem, with many officials denying or trivializing its existence. Russia's interior minister said that Western feminists "help make a fuss about the issue" and "disseminate information that does not correspond to reality." The reality is that lack of work, gender and racial discrimination, desperate poverty, and the abandonment of state-funded safety nets force women to flee their countries to survive. Typically women are deceived into thinking they are leaving for jobs as waitresses, dancers, or home companions. Many are young and especially vulnerable. Once they discover that they have been deceived, women who have been trafficked have almost nowhere to turn. They have no knowledge of their rights in the foreign countries where they work. They owe large sums to recruiting agencies and are unable to protect themselves against employers. Above all, they fear deportation, which would leave them destitute and prey to traffickers who go after them for unpaid debts. "My clients didn't earn any money," a counselor explained in Bought & Sold. Instead, 50 percent of their wages go to the recruiter or pimp, 50 percent to the bar owner. This is a modern form of slavery. Organized crime networks dealing in trafficking operate in many countries and areas of Central and Eastern Europe, including Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Kosovo, Macedonia, Poland, Romania, and Serbia as well as Russia. Advocates in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are now working on trafficking, demonstrating that the problem is spreading to Central Asia. Governments are also complicit, as Bought & Sold demonstrates. Individuals in government provide protection, or "roofs." Masha, co-owner of a modeling agency trafficking in Russian women, said: "The best 'roof' is the government criminals. They take care of any problems from other 'roofs.'" According to Crime & Servitude, many Russian mafia members are former employees of the Soviet security agency, the KGB. They combine their intimidation experience with high-level political and law-enforcement connections and ties to groups in Europe, the United States, and Israel. Thus, "traffickers in women from the countries of CIS . . . operate more and more openly, cynically and practically with impunity."7 Thus, curtailing the practice requires changes in national and international laws as well as transnational political cooperation. Above all, it demands "rethinking about the position of the trafficked person in the receiving country": "A trafficked person must be treated not as a criminal but as a fully empowered human being." The Women's Program has encouraged educational campaigns in both sending and receiving countries about the perils and abuses involved in the trafficking of women. Bought & Sold has had an enormous impact. In 1997, CNN broadcast a special program using footage from the investigation. After seeing the film, the UN Human Rights Commission issued a finding on trafficking women for prostitution as a violation of Article 8 prohibiting slavery. The film's premiere at an international conference in Moscow in October 1997 resulted in front-page coverage in the Russian and international press. Following its showing in Ukraine in 1998, the Ukrainian Parliament outlawed the trade in human beings. The U.S. government uses it to sensitize INS and State Department officials as well as embassy and consulate personnel about the issue. In 2000, the U.S. Congress passed the Trafficking Victims Protections Act. Government action has come about as a result of constant pressure from women and women's NGOs. To support such efforts, in June 1998, the Women's Program and the Soros foundations joined with the Global Survival Network and the Global Fund for Women to sponsor a transnational training seminar in Budapest, "STOP Trafficking in Women." Addressing over 100 NGO representatives from 33 countries, Mary Robinson, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, pledged to combat this global human rights crisis. The Women's Program provided funding to help NGOs in participating countries launch national antitrafficking campaigns. As a result of the explosion in international attention to trafficking in women in the region, the Women's Program, having helped place the issue on the international agenda through strategic funding, has shifted to encouraging other donor agencies to continue funding this important work. A number of Soros foundations in the region are supporting efforts in their countries. Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Domestic violence, like trafficking, is hard to document in transition countries. The difficulty is not that it is new to the region, or denied by governments, but rather that it is so commonplace. In Kyrgyzstan, a survey of 1,000 women in Bishkek found that 89.2 percent had been abused—by husbands, partners, children, or relatives. In Ukraine, where according to available data nearly one woman in two was beaten in childhood, such violence is not seen as a problem, "because it is so widespread in both private and social environments that there is the impression that 'non-violent existence' is impossible." Studies reporting a high prevalence of domestic violence in the countries of the region indicate that a woman's religious or ethnic group, age, social class, or level of education seems to matter little in terms of vulnerability to abuse. Women's economic dependency appears to be the determining factor. In Albania, for example, 55.7 percent of housewives reported having been abused, compared to only 35.2 percent of women who worked outside the home. Often when women decide to leave home they become even more vulnerable. In Hungary, women who are most at risk are those who have declared their intention to file for divorce, and the highest percentage (57 percent) of abused women was among divorced women. In 1997 in Russia, according to Human Rights Watch, police had registered over four million men as potential abusers of family members, based on reports of prior abuse or threats. This remarkably high number may actually be an underestimate. Women face numerous obstacles in reporting domestic violence and rape, including indifference or hostility from authorities, the refusal of police to take statements or their failure to respond to emergency calls. Rape goes largely unreported across the region. The act of rape is surrounded by pejorative stereotypes: women ask for it, they provoke it by their dress or behavior, or they cry rape to take revenge on a man; normal men do not commit rape, and so on. In addition, reporting procedures, at the police station and again in the courts, are complicated and degrading. In most cases, if a woman reports being raped, she is regarded with suspicion and rarely believed; she lacks any form of police or court protection, leaving her vulnerable to retaliation—either from the offender or, in some cases, from members of her family, who feel she has brought them dishonor. Another obstacle to women's willingness to speak out about sexual violence is the reinstatement of the "traditional" male-dominated family throughout the region. Governments often collude with culture in this reinstatement. For example in 1997, the Polish government canceled a scheduled UNDP-assisted program to set up NGO-run crisis centers offering shelter, medical care, psychological help, and legal and economic assistance. The government declared flatly that "offering help to women and children outside their family home contributes to a break up of that family." Traditional "family values" weigh heavily on women who have experienced domestic violence or rape in war and conflict areas. After the conflicts in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Kosovo, women agonized over whether to report rapes, fearing that not only would they face personal and familial shame, but that their speaking out could be construed as a threat to the ethnic or nationalist agendas of victimized communities. Though rape has finally been recognized as a war crime, few individuals or governments have been held accountable. Challenging the Culture of Domestic Violence One of the most successful responses to violence is the creation of a broad support system: a network of hotlines, battered women's shelters, crisis centers, and counseling and legal services. In November 1998, for example, the Women's Program, working with participating Soros foundations, launched a Host-Visitor Exchange Program on gender-based violence that allowed experienced NGOs to share their knowledge, resources, and expertise with less experienced organizations. Host countries for the six-month program included Bulgaria, Hungary, Mongolia, Russia, and Yugoslavia; visitors came from Albania, Armenia, Estonia, Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia, Moldova, Russia, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. Visitors included domestic violence activists, child support advocates, family planning specialists, human rights advocates, scholars, and journalists. Host NGOs in Hungary and Russia conducted training programs on establishing volunteer hotlines, including counseling skills and media and public relations work. NGOs in Bulgaria, Mongolia, Russia, and Yugoslavia offered training in setting up shelters and developing support services for women who experience domestic violence, including legal and psychological counseling. In Mongolia, they shared skills in working with child victims of violence and with violent men. And in Russia, a psychological center for women offered an intensive psychological training program for people involved in counseling domestic violence survivors. NGOs in a number of participating countries, including Croatia, Hungary, Poland, and Russia, have successfully set up networks of hotlines, shelters, and counseling centers. Networks are beginning to emerge in several Central Asian countries. Women in Uzbekistan are seeking ways to sustain women's shelters by linking them to micro-enterprise projects. In many countries, those charged with the protection of women against gender-based violence, including judges, lawyers, police, and even medical personnel, share the gender stereotypes and assumptions of the general public and regard violence against women as a private matter. Police lack any special training and are often insensitive to the needs of women who have been beaten, raped, or abused. Often, police are seen as part of the problem, taking advantage of victims rather than helping them. An NGO survey in Kazakhstan reported this incident: "I have a neighbor whose father drinks. When the girl called the district policeman for help, he came and asked her for a sexual service, in return for which he would detain her father for a long time. How in this case should one appeal to a district policeman and to the police in general?" Such attitudes endure in countries and communities that condone violence against women as a part of daily life. In some places, the goal of the community is "to save the family." Women are told: "Go back to your husbands. Do you want to make your children orphans?" In many cases, society teaches women that they are at least partly responsible for provoking the violence against them. "Good wives" seldom get beaten. And when they do, it's excused as a sign of affection. As a Russian proverb puts it, "No beatings means there's no love." The role of the community in condoning or combating gender-based violence has inspired a training program for practitioners and activists to shift responsibility for ending violence from the victim to the community. The Community Coordinated Response to Violence Against Women, developed in Duluth, Minnesota, focuses attention not on the behavior of the individual perpetrator or victim of gender-based violence, but on the way in which the police, courts, and human service providers respond to such cases and to the individuals involved. It conveys the message that the community as a whole will no longer tolerate domestic violence. This model, which is a winner of the Innovations in Government Award, sponsored by the Ford Foundation and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, has enabled literally hundreds of victims to free themselves from violent relationships in countries and communities worldwide. To bring this internationally recognized approach to countries of the region, the Women's Program and developers of the Community Coordinated Response designed a demonstration training seminar for teams from 19 countries. Participants in the 1998 seminar helped to adapt the program in culturally and nationally appropriate ways. Teams comprised women NGO activists, practitioners in the criminal and civil justice system (police officers, prosecutors, probation officers, judges), medical and human service providers, and community leaders. Participating countries included Albania, Armenia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Mongolia, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Yugoslavia. At a follow-up seminar, 16 country teams presented their national strategy plans. Some teams, including those from Armenia and Tajikistan, focused on organizing the community toward meet dire needs, such as securing shelters for victims of violence. Others focused on changing the attitudes of police toward victims of gender-based violence. The Bulgarian team has worked with the regional police department to increase police sensitivity to and respect for women who have experienced gender violence. Some country teams worked for legislative or policy change: sensitizing women members of Parliament to domestic violence issues in Kyrgyzstan, lobbying the legislature for a new domestic violence law in Croatia, and working with the government on a conference and policy paper in Kazakhstan. The Polish team pursued a multifaceted strategy, centered in Targowek, a district in Warsaw. They translated and used many of the Community Coordinated Response materials in all facets of their work. In addition to running a shelter and counseling service, the Women's Rights Center cooperated with police, prosecutors, and the district's social work agency. They held a forum on institutional cooperation that brought together police, prosecutors, judges, probation officers, social work agencies, and NGOs. Ursula Nowakowska, director of the Women's Rights Center, noted, "As a result of the Budapest training and our own training based on the materials, the police and prosecutors' offices reevaluated their policy on domestic violence cases and implemented a new program. Police and prosecutors have started to play a more active role in tackling domestic violence cases. Now police officers have guidelines they should follow in case of domestic violence intervention." "The main impact of our work, thus far," said Nowakowska, "was in convincing the police to intervene more seriously in domestic violence cases, to collect evidence and document cases more carefully." An evaluation of the project revealed "a big statistical difference concerning investigation of domestic violence incidents." According to Nowakowska, "there was a significant increase in the number of cases reported to the police and handled appropriately." The Polish team also initiated counseling work for perpetrators, an innovative approach for the region. Now courts are sending increasing numbers of men for treatment. In the legal arena, Polish antiviolence activists continue to press for the legal introduction and use of restraining orders but they can also see some progress in more sensitive and creative applications of existing laws to protect women and children. Engaging the Media After initial successes with the Community Coordinated Response, the Women's Program sought partnerships with other OSI programs to deepen its impact. The Women's Program and the Network Media Program provided support to extend gender-sensitive training sessions to educators and journalists in several countries. In September 2000, with the Network Child Abuse Prevention Program, they convened a five-day training seminar on domestic violence and child abuse in Budapest. Teams from each country included one or more police officers, a prosecutor, activists working with abused women, and a journalist or media representative. In addition to sessions for all participants on domestic violence and the community coordinated approach, the seminar featured a special training for police officers on how to work with abused children, and a parallel session for media representatives and women activists who work with abused women. Police learned how to improve their sensitivity in handling domestic violence calls along with practical models for conducting interviews with children in cases of child abuse and neglect, writing effective reports, and investigating charges of stalking and harassment. The activists learned how to facilitate educational sessions about domestic violence and child abuse as well as how to sensitize the media on these issues. The Women's Program also reviewed and provided technical assistance to the Constitutional and Legal Policy Institute (COLPI) on a domestic violence curriculum they were developing for police training. An emerging network of increasingly sophisticated antiviolence advocates in the region turned logically to the next step—raising national awareness and challenging the culture of violence through media advocacy. After an initial pilot effort in 1999, the Women's Program and the Network Media Program began to sponsor an annual grants competition for national public awareness campaigns, using all forms of media. In 2000, the Program encouraged participants in the Community Coordinated Response program to take part in the international "16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence" campaign conducted annually between November 25 (International Day Against Violence Against Women) and December 10 (International Human Rights Day). Initiated by the Center for Women's Global Leadership in 1995, the campaign makes a crucial symbolic link by emphasizing that violence against women is a violation of human rights. Participation of women's NGOs in the region in the 16 Days campaign is helping to achieve one of the Women's Program's goals—to make women from the region visible once again in the international women's movement as they are becoming more effective in their advocacy work. Croatia's B.a.B.e. (Be Active. Be Emancipated.), one of the few women's NGOs in the region to participate in the global campaign since its early days, is seeing the results of its persistent work. Sanja Sarnavka, a linguist who analyzes press clippings of B.a.B.e.'s antiviolence campaigns, sees a "difference in how domestic violence issues were covered in Croatia five years ago. They are 200 percent better today." Now mainstream media contact the organization in advance of the annual campaign to see which audiences and issues they are targeting. "If you take a look at media coverage from the 2001 campaign, you'll see how serious the issue really is." In addition to the grants program, in May 2001, the Women's Program added a workshop component to strengthen the skills and improve the quality of the media campaigns. Applicants with the best proposals for media campaign projects attended a workshop that included analysis of the effectiveness of the pilot projects/campaigns. The campaigns focused on changing attitudes and behaviors that perpetuate violence; motivating governments to develop and/or change policies, legislation, and practices to prevent violence against women and girls; and strengthening the capacity of civil society organizations to effectively advocate for and implement violence prevention programs. Nebojsa Radic, one of the workshop trainers, said, "Participants were quick to embrace the basics of effective communication concepts. Advocacy campaign plans rewritten after the workshop had more clearly defined objectives and target audiences, leading to more effective campaigns." The NGO League for Family from Montenegro is a good example of the workshop's success. The campaign as originally planned would have consisted of a television show on violence against women. After the seminar, the NGO members rewrote their plan and organized a campaign focused on "macho" men. The campaign message, "Show your strength but not on women," was delivered in places where men were most likely to receive it. For example, before their matches in Podgorica, players from the basketball and volleyball teams walked around the court carrying a banner with the campaign message, while greeted by thousands of cheering men in the audience. In countries such as Slovakia, where national anti-violence awareness campaigns are new, advocates are making surprisingly swift progress. With their 16 Days campaign slogan—"Every fifth woman is battered"—the Slovakian NGO Fenestra garnered significant radio and TV coverage. Within a month after the launch of the campaign, Fenestra also received over 1,000 calls on its information support line. Laco Oravec of Fenestra said, "Our main success is that our society is slowly starting to understand and accept that domestic violence is a problem for many women in Slovakia." Meetings with politicians in advance of the September 2002 national elections also seemed promising. Oravec and his colleagues at Fenestra "believe that for the first time in Slovak history, we will have a statement from a politician that he or she rejects violence." Fenestra and the National Association of Women Judges are cooperating to fight for passage of a new law on domestic violence that has been introduced in the Parliament. Oravec thinks "that all the parties except the Christian party will support this initiative and it could really help battered women." The national media campaigns and the Community Coordinated Response program are starting to bring about institutional change. Like so many other governments in the region, the government of Georgia insisted that domestic violence "does not exist in Georgia." After a comprehensive antiviolence media and action campaign involving 160 organizations that conducted 85 events throughout the country, the government seemed "to be ready to participate in our programs concerning domestic violence and to find a new approach to the problem," reported Ketevan Tsurtsumia of WomenAid. As a first step, a lawyers' association in Georgia organized free legal consultations in 13 regions and 11 districts of Tbilisi. Future Directions Such successes indicate that women's NGOs in the region have a great deal of knowledge and experience to share. Starting in 2002, the Women's Program will establish an antiviolence coordinating committee comprised of media workshop participants from the most successful NGOs in Georgia, Poland, Slovakia, Ukraine, and Yugoslavia. The committee will analyze campaign materials and results, and create a web-based resource bank containing campaign-related materials and reports produced by grantees in 2001. The resource bank and a listserv will enable planning for a region-wide media campaign. NGOs that participated in the 16 Days campaign requested support for a region-wide campaign to capitalize on the momentum generated at the national level. In 2001, the 16 Days grants competition was extended to all Soros network countries. The Women's Program envisions future exchanges of experience that link the regions globally. Exchanges will focus on such challenging issues as working in multiethnic contexts, meeting resistance from traditional religious authorities, and including men as antiviolence allies. The Program's exchange, training, and grants programs have had a cumulative impact in helping women's NGOs working on gender-based violence to provide services and encourage governments to make this a priority in the region. NGO efforts have been critical in getting the issue of gender violence onto the public agenda, internationally and nationally, yet only governments have the resources to eliminate gender violence in their societies. Nevertheless, public awareness and pressure are integral to this effort. The Program's priority for the future is to support advocacy efforts that continue to raise the public's awareness and to pressure governments into taking responsibility for preventing and eradicating all forms of gender-based violence. |