My four day visit to Pskov was coordinated by Elena Yablochkina, a psychologist and domestic violence victim advocate who is one of the lead staff of the Independent Social Women’s Center in Pskov, Russia. Pskov is a city of 200,000 located in Western Russia near the border with Estonia. This region of Russia was a home to Pushkin and has a wealth of cultural history with a Kremlin that dates back to the 12th century and survived WWII untouched.
The Independent Social Women’s Center in Pskov provides counseling, psychological therapy, social services support, shelter, and case management support connecting the Center’s domestic violence clients with resources throughout the Pskov community to help domestic violence victims and their children heal and rebuild their lives. The Center runs Pskov’s domestic violence hotline, convenes events that inform women in Pskov about the issue of domestic violence and the help available to victims. They are the lead trainer of a wide range of professionals who encounter domestic and dating violence victims in their work including: lawyers, health care and prenatal care providers, programs working with youth in schools on issues that include bullying and dating violence, police, prosecutors and the courts. Elena Yablochkina leads the Center’s victim services, therapy, and training work. I will be assisting Elena in identifying foundations in the U.S. that could be potential donors to support the work of the Center and collaborations with the Center’s partners.
Elena Yablochkina and Leslye E. Orloff
The Center’s Director Natalia Vasilyeva is the founder of the Center and is the Deputy Chair of Pskov’s Public Counsel of the Pskov Regional Police Under the Ministry of the Interior of the Russian Federation. Ms. Vasilyeva was the founding Chair of this coordinating council for Pskov’s work on violence against women and justice system work affecting other vulnerable populations. My discussions with Natalia and Elena included reviewing and verbally interpreting into Russian several videos that had been developed by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). They were interested in seeing examples of videos that could be developed in collaboration with government agencies on violence against women issues and learning about legal protections available for Russian immigrant women living in the U.S. I was able to show them several videos that NIWAP assisted DHS in developing on immigration related abuse as part of the power and control dynamics used against Russian and other immigrant women in the U.S.; a video on identification of human trafficking victims and a training video of state and local police on U visa certification.
They also had some great suggestions about how we could most effectively convey information to Russian speaking immigrant women in the United States about their legal rights under U.S. immigration, domestic violence, family and public benefits laws. Suggestions included providing information about immigration law protections for victims in the Customs areas where people wait in line to go through passport control. This is an issue NIWAP has recently raised with U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officials. They also suggested that once we complete the translations of the legal rights materials we promised ANNA (Association Against Violence) we would translate, that we work with Russian victim advocacy programs to see if the materials could be posted on vk.ru or odnoklassniki.ru.
Natalia Vasilyeva and Elena Yablochkina
My trip to Pskov included visits with many organizations supplemented by visits to Pushkin’s Family Estate and the Pskov Kremlin.
I met with Marina Zaknodnova the Deputy to the head medical doctor at the Pskov Regional Center of Medical Prevention and Irina Gayduk, Head of the Department of Prevention and their Healthy Life program. These programs work with youth in a variety of ways. The Center of Medical Prevention provides health care and prevention education to youth including prenatal care, contraception, reproductive health care, domestic violence, child abuse and dating violence. The Department of Prevention specializes in educating youth regarding Healthy Life choices and has an anti-bullying program. The work of the anti-bullying program includes work on prevention of dating violence among teen-agers and works closely with the Center training youth and the professionals that serve youth (psychologists, social workers, teachers) about domestic violence prevention. Both programs work closely with Elena at the Women’s Center.
The health care providers were interested in hearing about the tools for screening for domestic violence in health care settings that have been developed in the U.S. Upon my return to the U.S., I will send the set of model questions and supportive materials recommended by Futures Without Violence that is being used extensively in the United States. We also had a long discussion about the danger assessment tool developed by Jacquelyn Campbell at Johns Hopkins University and the benefits that each of these two agencies and the Women’s Center could gain from use of this tool in their safety planning work with victims domestic violence and dating violence. I agreed to determine whether the danger assessment and the evaluation tool for the danger assessment is available in Russian and will look into whether Dr. Campbell would be able to share these tools with health care providers and domestic violence victim advocates in Russia. If the tool is not already available in Russian, my organization NIWAP would work on obtaining a Russian translation.
Marina Zaknodnova , Leslye E. Orloff, Elena Yablochkina, and Irina Gayduk
These discussions were also productive in illustrating and sharing stories about the important role providers of prenatal care and women’s health care can play in detecting both current domestic violence and histories of child abuse and child sexual abuse. These meetings also provided insight on the role health care professionals could play in the U.S. in distributing information to youth about VAWA immigration protections. When I return to the U.S., NIWAP will develop informational materials for health care and other service providers who regularly work with young people to inform them and enlist their assistance in identifying immigrant youth who suffered child abuse, sexual assault or incest prior to the age of 21 who have until age 25 to file Violence Against Women Act self-petitions.
Other meetings included a meeting with the Pskov Legal Advisors Association and a local community development organization working on small business development with women in the Pskov region. In these meetings I learned more detail about legal options for battered women in custody and child support cases including how Russia prevents travel abroad of citizens who have child support arrears. The collaboration that the Legal Advisors Association has with Women’s Center's clients working together on cases of battered women who need legal assistance will be one of the areas of work I will be looking at to identify U.S. based private foundations that may support this work.
With regard to the work that the Center for the Sustainable Development of the Pskov Region is doing, we had a long discussion about the approaches taken by women’s economic development programs in India, El Salvador, Mexico and Nicaragua and the useful information about those successful programs that may provide helpful examples for the program being developed in Russia. Upon my return to the U.S., I will contact allies I know working on women’s economic development and will forward materials on economic development and micro lending programs for women.
Nelya Lebedea, Simon Nikonov, and Elena Yablochkina
Finally my meetings included a visit with Father Alexander at the Brook Rehabilitation Center for Drug and Alcohol Addicted persons. Father Alexander is both a priest and a trained psychologist. We had the opportunity to sit in on a training in which he presented a very interesting tool for understanding stages of emotional development that both I and Elena thought would be extremely useful in our work with battered women. Our interpreter, Suhrob Nurov, assisted me in translating the scale and I provided a copy of my handwritten notes in English on the scale Father Alexander described in his lecture to Elena at the Women’s Center upon our return from the visit at the Brooks Center.
For more photos from this visit see the photo gallery section of this website.
"The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of SEE or Eurasia Foundation".
More to come
Leslye