November 20, 2019

Russia split over "home violence" bill

topic:	Human Rights
located:	Russia
editor:	Igor Serebryany

The bill criminalizing "home violence" has split Russian society nearly even, with the opposing parties accuse each other of "undermining traditional family values" or "protecting the practice of abuse of women".

Over the weekend, the 150-strong pro-bill rally took place at the entrance of the State Duma, the Parliament, which is set to discuss the law on Dec.1. The counter-rally of about the same number took place in the Moscow's "Hyde Park" Sokolniki.

Remarkably, both pro- and counter-rallies were attended by men and women in nearly similar proportion.

In early November, the federal Public Chamber held heated debates over the proposed law.

Most of the experts who attended the hearings had cautioned that the law might result in consequences for the Russian demography as grave as the laws about Internet censorship have had for the freedom of information in this country.

They warned that the bill's inaccurate wording puts at risk the marriage institution as such. They stressed the draft law as it is tabled opens floodgates for family members to criminally prosecute each other for such "offenses" like:

- refusal to split a bill in a restaurant;
- attempt to involve a third party into a family dispute;
- quizzical glance or critical remark toward the one's spouse

...and other similarly "abusive" acts.

After the debates, the public support of the bill dropped from initial 90 percent to 65 percent, according to the polls.

If the law is passed, it would blow up the Russian families, a member of the State Duma Family Committee's expert council Vladimir Akimkin worries.

"I am not sure that the bill's authors Oksana Pushkina and Alena Popova understand it clearly that their proposal destroys family as a cell of society. They are wrong that home violence is gender-based. The victims are men, women and, what's most regrettably, children, alike", he says.

Akimkin is convinced that if the bill becomes law, it will only degrade the situation in the families at risk zone.

"Deliberately or not, the bill's authors substitute notions. Family violence, nearly always, results from mutual abuse, physical or psychological. Someone provokes a conflict, the other party responses. And it's highly difficult to prove 'who stroke first'," he stresses.

The expert calls to seek for psychological rather than judicial ways to discharge tensions in such families.

"Unfortunately, the level of home violence has been inversely related to the level of the spouses' culture. If a wife and/or husband grew up in families where their parents used to sort the things out with fists, those "family values" are passed down to the next generation inevitably", he says.

The bill about family violence has been hanging in the Parliament since 2016. It had never made it farther than the first reading.

This time, however, the unusually powerful media campaign has been launched, director of the Center for Judicial and Lawmaking Expertise Olga Letkova notes. She was among the organizers of the anti-bill rally in Sokolniki park.

"Mass media are thirsty for reporting family wars. Especially if those are high-society families. Thanks to tabloids' coverage, the public creates an impression that home violence has been widespread in Russia. Which is completely false", she believes.

All November, Russian media have been absorbed with reporting the investigation of the murder committed in Saint-Petersburg by a well-known historian Oleg Sokolov. The 63-year-old university scientist shot his 24-year-old mistress, dismembered her body and downloaded the parts into the nearby canal.

Oksana Pushkina does not make it secret that her another attempt to table the bill about family violence into the State Duma has been triggered by that drama.

Letkova reminds that the Russian Criminal Code contains enough articles to codify nearly any count of abuse imaginable, be it rape, beatings, incitement to suicide, to name a few.

"The bill about family violence is not about beatings at all. No person justifies beatings. The bill is dangerous because it codifies any behavior as 'violent' should the other party desire to describe it as such. The law doesn't require a 'victim' to produce any evidence, an unsupported allegation is enough to charge an 'abuser'. Thus, any person will be able to blackmail whoever else," she warns.

"Say, a parent doesn't allow a teenage child to play videogames and insists on doing homework instead. This is enough to charge the parent of psychological abuse. Or a spouse refuses to pay his or her loved one a holiday trip. Here you are, committing an act of economic abuse", the expert gives the examples.

Still, as a worker of the Center for assistance to the victims of abuse Klavdia Nikitina puts it, not all victims understand they were abused.

"Many women believe that abuse is when a group of mobs attacks and rapes her in a dark sidestreet. Still, those women don't realize they are regularly abused by their husbands who could do it in a 'velvet way' so no one outside would even notice the violence", she says.

She admits that men are the victims of family violence as often as women. However, few men dare report such accidents, because such coming-outs are generally considered "unmanly" in Russia.