Women and Children at Risk in the CIS

At a recent Kennan Institute talk, Clementine Fujimura, professor of language and culture studies at the United States Naval Academy, and Sally Stoecker, lead assessor at Shared Hope International, gave an overview of the economic, social, and moral factors influencing marginalized or at-risk groups in Russia and the former Soviet states. These include abandoned children, handicapped children, victims of human trafficking, and prisoners, among others.

Fujimura and Stoecker, along with Tatyana Sudakova, a criminologist and professor in Irkutsk, recently published the book Russia's Abandoned Children: An Intimate Understanding. Part of the motivation for writing the book, according to Fujimura, was to clarify the reasons for child abandonment in Russia. These include the ethnic and social marginalization of certain groups, widespread poverty, and breakdowns in traditional family bonds and kinship networks. These factors hold true in Russia and in other parts of the Soviet Union.

In her talk, Fujimura cited the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Russia and Georgia have both signed. Unfortunately, according to Fujimura, both countries are in violation of the convention, because their children are not provided for adequately. She cited the statistic that 40 percent of children who grew up in orphanages become alcoholics or develop drug addiction. There has also been a rise in juvenile delinquency among Russian youth, which has, in turn, caused a rise in the number of children incarcerated in Russia's prison system. These children are then exposed to an extremely harsh environment without any type of support system to help them.

Fujimura said that some measures are being taken to rectify the situation, such as the Russian Ministry of Education and Science's official Youth Policy drafted in the fall of 2005, but these efforts are severely underfunded. Western NGO aid is also often ineffective, due to cultural misunderstanding, and lack of consistent engagement. She argued that it was crucial to conduct more anthropological research on Russia, Georgia, and other formerly Soviet countries, because these places are misunderstood and are rapidly changing. Without this kind of cultural knowledge, even the best-intentioned Western NGOs can do little to change the situation.

Stoecker discussed the problem of human trafficking, drawing on her recent work analyzing the sex trade in Japan, Jamaica, the Netherlands, and the United States. The main reasons for the existence of this problem, according to her, are economic poverty, corrupt or indifferent officials, the sheer size of Russia's borders, and a lack of moral upbringing or ethical education. Although the problems of human trafficking and prostitution have existed since the Soviet period, it has only now become a topic of discussion among Russian officials.

One aspect of the problem that is particularly disheartening, Stoecker said, is the conspicuous lack of moral outrage on the part of the broader population of Russia and other countries of the region. She attributes this to a lack of moral or religious education in the post-Soviet states. Citing a recent survey, Stoecker said that when parents are asked what they want their children to be trained in, they rank religious and moral education at the bottom—they would rather have a good job, or get a good education in the secular sense. Unless these priorities change, Stoecker argued, there will be very little change in how children and women are treated.