Ministry of Education of Russian Federation

Ministry of Education of Russian Federation

Pomor State University named after M.V. Lomonosov

Centre for Women’s Studies and Gender Research, Pomor State University

Series “Gender research: methodology and practice”
Volume 5

NCRB

A Network for Crisis Centres
for Women in the Barents Region

Report of the Nordic - Russian Development Project,
1999-2002

Aino Saarinen, Olga Liapounova, Irina Drachova (eds.)

The publication is financed
by the Ministry of Industry, Employment and Communication,
Division for Gender Equality in Sweden

Arkhangelsk

Pomor State University named after M.V. Lomonosov
2003

УДК 316.346.2-055.2

ББК 60.550.53 я43

N 46

The series editorial board:

Dr. of philosophy, prof. E.V. Kudriashova (editor-in-chief); Dr. of biology, prof. R.I. Danilova; director of the Norwegian-Pomor centre M.R. Kalinina; PhD in philosophy, ass. prof. N.N. Koukarenko; PhD in psychology, ass. prof. O.E. Liapounova; PhD in pedagogics, ass. prof. I.R. Lugovskaia; PhD in pedagogics, ass. prof. L.S. Malik; PhD in pedagogics, ass. prof. E.N. Starostina

The book editorial board: A. Saarinen, O. Liapounova, I. Drachova

N 46 NCRB – A Network for Crisis Centres for Women in the Barents Region. Report of the Nordic – Russian Development Project, 1999-2002. Vol. 5 / Editorial board A. Saarinen, O. Liapounova, I. Drachova. – Arkhangelsk: Pomor state university, 2003. – 248 p.; il.

ISBN 5-88086-385-9

This book presents the materials on the development and research project “A Network for Crisis Centres for Women in the Barents Region, 1999-2002”. It also contains the articles by the experts from different crisis centres in Finland, Sweden, Norway and Russia.

The book is intended for researchers and PhD students, studying the problems of violence against women, as well as for specialists of crisis centres.

УДК 316.346.2-055.2

ББК 60.550.53 я43

ISBN 5-88086-385-9 / © Pomor state university named after M.V. Lomonosov, 2003

1

Contents

Aino Saarinen, Olga Liapounova, Irina Drachova
NCRB project......

Preface...... 7

Background – roots at multiple levels......

1. Global movement......

2. Crisis centres in Barents; Femina Borealis......

NCRB project......

1. Initiative......

2. Project plan......

3. Funding......

Implementation......

1. Backbone of the project – training programme; closing seminar......

2. Campaigning – on the move towards a transregional community......

3. Ambitious IT programme......

4. Exchange programme in 2003-2004......

5. Funding strategy for the Russian centres......

Evaluation and future prospects; NCRB II......

1. Building a transregional East/West community
for crisis centres in the Barents region......

2. Transitional space? The second NCRB period – towards
‘Russian models’ for crisis centres?......

3. Progress at the transregional level depends on developments in Russia......

Marit Stamland
Evaluation of the contribution of the Northern Feminist University
to the training courses of the NCRB project 1999 – 2002......

Materials from the closing seminar at Oulu and Rovaniemi,
November 2001......

Albina Pashina (Moscow, Russia)

The movement of women crisis centres in Russia: features, success and problems

Riitta Pohjoisvirta (Oulu, Finland)

Finnish crisis centres and ways to develop their operation......

Gunilla Nordenfors (Umeå, Sweden)

What is best for the mother is best for the children......

Reports from individual crisis centres......

Russia

Lada Karitskaya (Severomorsk)

The crisis centre Severyanka: a woman in the world of men’s laws......

Lubov Shtyleva (Murmansk)

Gender education programme for volunteers improved the work
of the crisis centre in Murmansk......

Svetlana Mekhedova (Apatity)

From work experience of the volunteers’ service in the Apatity crisis centre

Natalia Potapova (Arkhangelsk)

From experience of the crisis centre for women Bridges of Mercy

Elena Merzova (Petrozavodsk)

Development of crisis centres – social partnership.
The experience of the crisis centre Maja (Petrozavodsk)

Ludmila Volga (St. Petersburg)

Art therapy as a way of rehabilitation after sexual violence......

Nikolai Drembach (Murmansk)

Murmansk centre for men Alternative

Maxim Kostenko (Barnaul)

Work with batterers in the Altay regional centre for men......

The Nordic countries

Annik Eriksson (Kirkenes, Norway)

A Report on the Nora centre in Kirkenes (Norway)......

Mildred Hedberg (Luleå, Sweden)

Why shelters for young women?......

Cecilia Wickman & Monica Larsson (Umeå, Sweden)

“Umeå women’s shelter – one of its kind!”
Experiences in running a legal aid centre for women......

Aino Saarinen, Irina Drachova, Olga Liapounova
Crisis centres in the Barents region – questionnaire report......

Aim of the questionnaire; carrying out the inquiry......

A. Structure and administration......

B. Goals and aims, objectives and activities......

C. People who are involved in the centre......

D. Work with clients......

E. Information, contacts and campaigning......

F. Resources......

G. Immigration issues......

Summary......

Appendices......

The Authors......

NCRB member units......

1

Aino Saarinen & Olga Liapounova & Irina DrachovaTHE NCRB Project Report

1

Preface

Thise publication at hand is the a report of the three-year Nordic-NW Russian development project titled NCRB – A Network for Crisis Centres for Women in the Russian Barents Region (and in the Barents region as a whole). NCRB was being planned in 1998 and carried out in 1999-2002 between co-operatively by 12 NW Russian and 7 Nordic units located in the subregions of Murmansk, Arkhangelsk, Karelia and St. Petersburg in NW Russia; Finnmark, Tromsø and Nordland in Norway; Norrbotten and Västerbotten in Sweden; and Lapland and Oulu in Finland. The second project period ofor 2002-2005 will gather involve the 15 units existoperating in NW Russia today, out of which one is from the newest Barents area, the Republic of Komi.

The project to increase awareness of violence against women and children and to promote combating it in various ways within the new type of East-West transregion of Barents is part of women’s mobilisation – contacts, collaboration and institution building – across the state borders since the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War in 1991. At the background of NCRB, there is, on the one hand, bi-local Norwegian and Swedish and NW Russian collaboration that resulted in new crisis centres in the Russian Barents and, on the other hand, the Femina Borealis network for women-friendly regional policies operative in the region since the early 1990s. Bringing together activists, educators and women scholars into a genuine transregional development project and a related research network made NCRB a unique enterprise, which, in our opinion, is worth of further analysis as well. We are assured that it will can be best appreciated best by approaching it both from below, as a grassroot project, and from above, in the context of women’s global networking, which has been especially inspired by processes around and within the United Nations especially.

***

Thise report hwas been written to document what was done, to evaluate what was reached and to analyse the challenges met all the way in starting and carrying out NCRB. In At the end of the first project period, we have all trust in working within aare all confident about the benefits of networking form, and we do hope that the report will encourage people committed to the second project period, too, to continue along these lines.

The report resembles the NCRB project inby being as multi-voiced as the project itself. NCRB has been run in the spirit of participatory, process-oriented development projects, in which ideas and energies are mobilised from all over the wide spectrum of the involved actors. In brief, the presentation and evaluation of the project – the process of networking, the training and campaigning programmes and the supportive IT programme – is have been written by the NCRB staff, Aino Saarinen, the Finnish project director, Olga Liapounova, the Russian project manager, and Irina Drachova, the Russian IT specialist. Apart from that, the report includes texts from some key persons in the collaborative institutions, most importantly, Marit Stemland from the key partner institution, the Northern Feminist University, and, in addition, reports from individual crisis centres concerning their innovative practices and evaluations of past developments and future prospects.

In all ways, NCRB was a real challenge – hard and inspiring, taking a lot but also giving a lot to all persons involved. A very special feature was that it included crisis centres not only from four national contexts but also across three institutional boundaries, that is, autonomous, affiliated and public units, which was exceptional when thinking about the ‘boundary work’ within the crisis centre movements in general. This Aall-inclusiveness made all of us aware of both the differences and the unity in differences and gave ‘food for thoughts’ through a variety of views and insights, experiences, and visions.

We hope that the report will give credits to all member institutions of the network and to individual persons – the crisis centre directors and those who shareding with us the responsibility in infor arranging the NCRB training courses. Among the previous NCRB staff, we would likeant to thank Riikka Pötsönen and Maria Novikova, who worked for NCRB till 2000 and 2001 and, most of all, Leena Teräs, who was involved with the IT programme till early 2002. Very special thanks go, besides Marit Stemland, to Eva Engman and Mildred Hedberg from Iris at Luleå and Natalia Khodyreva from INGI in St. Petersburg for their work in the course work group. Furthermore, Helena Tiuraniemi from the Lapland Mother and Child Home and Shelter at Rovaniemi and Natalia Gutsol from the Kola Science Centre at Apatity gave major contributions to NCRB as well – we would like to thank you everyone of youall personally. At the University of Oulu, Ulla Sala has been a constantinual support person in administering the many funds and related networks. We also want to mention with thanks Riekje Kok and Margreet Wegelin from the crisis centre Toevluchtsoord crisis centre from in the Netherlands for their contributions and encouragement to NCRB. Vappu Sunnari at Oulu and Raissa Danilova at Arkhangelsk were, thanks to their commitment and enthusiasm especially in the starting phase, persons who both deserve our heartiwarmest thanks.

It goes without saying that we are in deep gratitude to all the authors in of this report – Marit Stemland, Riitta Pohjoisvirta, Gunilla Nordenfors, Albina Pashina, Annik Eriksson, Cecilia Wickman and Monica Larsson, Mildred Hedberg, Lada Karitskaya, Lubov Shtyleva, Svetlana Mekhedova, Natalia Potapova, Elena Merzova, Ludmila Volga, Nikolai Drembach and Maxim Kostenko. Natalia Koukarenko at Arkhangelsk, Natalia Sandlund at Luleå and Sirkka Leinonen at Oulu are worth of special mentioningacknowledged for translating and revising the English. language of the manuscript.

***

The project was carried out to its end by enthusiasm at the grassroots – against all odds. As a large project, it had to lean on multilateral funding, which became one of the major obstacles in the way. The turbulences at the upper levels resulted in severe delays of financing both in Finland and in Norway, meaning that the time and energies needed for this ‘patch work’ went beyond any reason. The last part of the main EU funding was granted more than half a yearsix months after the closing seminar, that isi.e., two years later than anticipated when startingat the baseline of the project. The large number ofat there were so many financing institutions also meant also that the project workers and participants had to navigate in-between different prescriptions and restrictions concerning the overall aims, the geographic lines of demarcations, not to mention the detailed practices in accounting practices, etc.

Irrespective of this, we feel that the formal institutions – the Nordic Council of Ministers, the Ministry for Social Affairs and Health, including the Council for Equality, and the Regional Council of Ostrobothnia in Finland, and the Barents Secretariat and the Foreign Ministry in Norway, and the US- based Eurasia Foundation, the Federation of Mother and Child Homes and Shelters in Finland, the Swedish Institute and the Industrial Ministry and the Council for Equality in Sweden all were warmly in favour of the project and its aims. Our warmest thanks go to numerous individual co-workers in these institutions, especially to Marianne Laxén, Carita Peltonen and Leila Räsänen, for their additional efforts in guaranteeing the funding during the hazardous period since following the second project year.

And lLast, but not least, we want to thank the follow-up group of the project nominated by the Regional Council of Ostrobothnia and the Ministry for Social Affairs and Health, whichthat was, for 1999-2000, consistedmprised of Paavo Kettunen and Pirkko Kiviaho, and for 2002-03, of Marko Ruokangas and Kari Gröhn, who all also made great efforts also into secureing our funding, and Elena Kudriashova, who was the supervisor of the sub-contract between the University of Oulu and the Pomor University from the side of the last mentionedon behalf of the latter unit.

***

With NCRB, we believe, we have taken many important steps in towards overcoming the long-lastinged separateness of women actors in the West vs. the East and transforming it into a vivid and more and more reciprocal collaboration across the borders. We look forward to the second NCRB closing seminar in 2005 and welcome you all to give your contributions to evaluations of the work done thuis far and to present your own visions ofn fruitful continual collaboration of between women across the borders in the northernmost Europe!

Aino Saarinen, Olga Liapounova, Irina Drachova

Oulu and Arkhangelsk, May 2003

1

Background –
roots at multiple levels

1. A gGlobal movement

The NCRB project, which was planned in 1998 and launched in 1999, has multiple roots at global, sub/regional, national and local levels.

In most general terms, NCRB is part of a movement within a movement – the crisis centre movement that has its origin in the so-what is called the Second Wave of women’s movements, since the turn of the 1960s-70s. The Second Wave was committed to exposing women’s everyday life through intimate consciousness-raising groups working out painful and vulnerable experiences. The informal self-help forums that changed helped victims into become survivors grew into action groups that wanted to break the silence, stop blaming the victims and convert “the personal into political”. At a rapid space, they were further transformed into institutions with a dual role of support and advocacy, first in England, Central Europe, North America and Australia, then throughout the territory covered by the Second Wave. Mobilisation for and around crisis centres soon became intertwined with the processes towards creating a global agenda around the new issues that now were now defined from women’s perspective, those of ‘violence against women’, ‘gender-based violence’ or ‘gendered violence’. The initial starting- point at the grassroots was the First International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women with participants from 40 countries in Brussels in 1976. The tribunal gathered recruited Nordic women as well, and in no time, the first autonomous centres were established in the Scandinavian countries and Iceland. In Finland, the development took another route, as the majority of Finnish centres are affiliated to a pre-existing organisation for single mothers dating back to the 1940s.

Gendered violence was placed Oonto to the United Nations (UN) agendas gendered violence was placed in the 1980-90s through the a series of conferences on women. From the global perspective, athe turning point was the UN Nairobi conference in 1985 and its the Forward-Looking Strategies for 1985-2000. In 1993, the mobilisationg of women’s networks and organisations and lobbying – also around the UN World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna in 1993 – lcaused the UN General Assembly to adopt the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women (DEVAW) with an interpretation of gendered violence as violation of women’s human rights. In Beijing in 1995, violence against women was defined as one of the twelve critical areas of concern included in the Platform for Action for 1995-2000. With these resolutions, an important step had been taken to go furtherproceed from the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) from 1979 and, of course, the UN Declaration of Human Rights from 1948[1].

2. The cCrisis centres in Barents; Femina Borealis

The UN conferences also familiarised also the women activists within the socialist East with the issue, so thatand after the dissolution of the socialist regime at the turn of the 1980-90s, the crisis centre movement gained ground in the transitional countries within just a few years. The pioneering institutions in Russia were established in Moscow and St. Petersburg in the early 1990s.

In the Barents region, too, activism around gendered violence was on the rise. Since the first years of the 1990s, Norway especially Norway promoted the East-West collaboration – the BEAR, Barents Euro-Arctic Region is a Norwegian initiative from the spheres of ‘high politics’. Women on the move at the grassroots were able to benefit from these formal developments. The first crisis centre in the Russian Barents was established in co-operation between Norwegian and Russian women at Tromsø and Murmansk in 1996 right onwith support from the Barents Secretariat. Simultaneously, women activists at Luleå, too, integrated combating violence into the Swedish programmes in Barents, which resulted in two crisis centres located at Polyarnye Zori and Apatity. In the same years, the centre at Petrozavodsk was about to take its first steps with outside aid from further away, e.g.for instance, the United States. At Arkhangelsk, too, a crisis centre was put onto the planning agenda[2].

Finally, in at the end of the 1990s, the evolving crisis centre movement in Barents was joined by another type of actor, the Femina Borealis network, which had been set up by women scholars, educators and other women activists to promote women-friendly regional policies. It was originally planned within the Nordic frames, the so-called the North Calotte collaboration, for the northern parts of Norway, Sweden and Finland. However, from since its actual beginning on in 1993, it became soon expanded to NW Russia thanks to encouragement from above, the Barents Secretariat. In the first few years, the network centred around research-related activities and made use of various forums offered by the women’s movements. The list of activities included in the mid-1990s included, among others, a workshop at the women’s Nordic Forum at Turku in 1994, a research seminar at the University of Oulu in 1995, an audio and videoconference on the International Women’s Day in 1995, which broughtbringing together activists in from the whole of the circumpolar region, and the second circumpolar Northern Women, Northern Lives conference arranged by the Northern Feminist University and the University of Tromsø in 1997. NCRB became the first Femina Borealis development project for 1998/1999-2002[3].