Svetlana Anokhina, editor of the online women’s magazine Daptar. Photograph: Svetlana Anokhina
“Let me tell you a funny story,” says Svetlana Anokhina, wearing a black T-shirt bearing the image of a woman in a red headscarf holding a finger to her lips.
“The mother of somebody I know phoned to say that her relatives have actually a problem: the daughter is in the last months of pregnancy and her father thinks he had much better [kill her] to prevent shame. A believed suddenly struck my friend and he said: ‘Tell him or her that the punishment for this crime has actually been increased. He won’t grab off so easily’.
“His mother passed this on and the man relented. He found an additional method out. And I think, exactly what if he didn’t hope to kill his daughter, however the reality that these killings go unpunished and that everyone acts this method didn’t leave him or her any choice?”
Anokhina has actually lots of “funny” stories like this. As an editor of Daptar, an online women’s magazine in Dagestan that focuses on problems such as domestic violence, female genital mutilation and honour killings, it is her job to collect them.
Dagestan, a multi-ethnic mountainous region on the Caspian Sea, is section of Russia, however local tribal and Muslim codes often hold much more weight compared to Russian law.
Related: Russia’s hidden workers: the slaves of Dagestan
“Honour killings still happen among us here in Dagestan and a whole system exists for covering them up,” she says. “Doctors swap patients’ notes – ‘she joined bad health’, they write and they issue death certificates retrospectively. The villagers likewise protect the killer.”
It was these sorts of cover-ups that led Anokhina and Zakir Magomedov, the editor-in-chief of Daptar, to start the magazine.
“Imagine that you grab wind that something like this has actually happened,” she says. “As a journalist, it is your job to write concerning horrible things, to ‘raise the issue’. The whole time you have actually to take care to name no names, because otherwise, a excellent wail starts up: ‘What? This doesn’t happen here and never has. You are slandering our magnificent nation’, they say.”
But it does happen – all too often, she adds.
“I will certainly tell you an additional story. There was a murder – a girl killed her father along with a knife. An investigation found that the father had raped her for years on end. Eventually she reached the end of her tether and murdered him.
“Then some grey-bearded aqsaqals [male elders] said to the girl: ‘You are going to appear in court. however we ask you not to disclose exactly what happened. Say that you took to drink and your father couldn’t reconcile themselves to this. He tried to talk you round, punish, shame you … And you killed him’.”
Anokhina says she told this story to a scholar – “a man of terrific education and upbringing” – whose response revealed a lot concerning the reasons for this silence.
“He said: ‘Do you know, if they had come to me along with a request like that, I would certainly have actually believed long and hard however I would certainly likewise have actually gone and asked her not to show the truth. She is already from the picture, in any case – there is no life left for her in Dagestan. however she can easily still save the whole village. For if this story were made known, all the girls of the village would certainly discover it nearly impossible to discover a husband in future. A black stain would certainly linger on their faultless reputations’.”
Anokhina describes this as an “anthill mentality” that sees the weak repeatedly sacrificed for the strong. “Yesterday, I was sent details of a case, in which an uncle had raped his niece. She ran away, the story came out and his relatives disowned him. ‘Exactly how does he feel now?’ I asked. ‘He is a little upset,’ I was told. A little upset!”
“Faced along with the choice of either punishing the scoundrel or hushing the business up, they go for the latter. All education in Dagestan is based on one main principle – the fear of criticism and censure. exactly what will certainly the neighbours say? The relatives, the elders?”
Dagestan
Beauty salon, Makhachkala
A incident in a beauty salon offers insights in to the state of gender relations in Dagestan. 5 manicurists and 5 clients sit at little tables, laid out in a row. The air smells of nail varnish.
“exactly what colour are we going for then?” a manicurist asks one of the women, looking at her hands. “A claret red?”
“My husband forbids me from painting my nails such vulgar colours,” the woman replies. “If my dad saw me along with ‘hooker nails’ he would certainly kill me.” She phones her husband. “can easily I paint my nails beige? [pause] That’s not vulgar, it’s skin coloured. [pause] There is likewise the French manicure. Great, let’s go with that.” She puts down the phone and looks up: “My husband says that French is OK.”
Anokhina asks: “Tell me, was that merely an expression or did you mean it. Could he really kill you?”
The woman thinks for a while. “Well, yes, he Could kill me,” she replies. In various other places she may be joking, however in Dagestan there’s little doubt that she’s deadly serious.
Home videos
Daptar magazine was launched to write concerning these matters, however Anokhina says that there are some topics that even her correspondents don’t hope to cover. “One of them refused to write concerning incest,” she says, “and an additional concerning Estate videos”.
“Estate videos” is the innocuous term for the growing technique of recording compromising footage of young women and sharing it among male friends.
“Once I began to study this subject and watch the videos, I felt as though I had been poisoned,” says Anokhina. “The clips are of various kinds – there are some in which the girl is forced to have actually sex and others where she is blackmailed.”
A letter from a Daptar reader contained an interesting suggestion. “Why”, the letter asked, “are the men that film these clips not called to account under sharia law?”
“That was the very first time in our memory that a man of traditional upbringing had said a thing like that,” says Anokhina. “And that is Once we understood that we should actively involve men in our work, so that they stop this gender war.”
The magazine likewise draws attention to the technique of female genital mutilation (FGM).
“I was recently sent a link to a paper which said that FGM is Sunna [traditional Muslim law based on Muhammad’s words or acts]. I took exception to that and did some research and found that it is not true.”
Anokhina said that some of her correspondents had likewise refused to write concerning FGM, so she had started to investigate it herself.
Related: The fight to maintain Dagestan’s ancient tightrope tradition – in pictures
Amina’s story
Amina is an architect. The office in Izberbash, where she works, is bitterly cold. The table is piled higher along with papers covered in pencil lines. Amina swivels in her chair, gets up and strides about the room. It’s as if she can’t sit still.
“I don’t make a big deal from it,” she says. “If my name comes out, people are sure to have actually a laugh at my expense. Please write concerning it discreetly so that they can’t identify that the victim is.”
When she was a child, Amina lived in a village. Her mother worked in the city as a doctor, and sometimes took young Amina along with her to work. The neighbours did not approve of these freedoms, and criticised Amina for being “too energetic”. One day, Amina says, the neighbours organised for her to have actually FGM free of her parents’ knowledge.
“There were three various other girls along with me and it was barbaric,” she says. “The woman lifted up my skirt and cut off my clitoris along with the kind of clippers you use to shear sheep. She had passed them under a flame beforehand. various other girls took fright and ran away however I stayed put and in that sense, I’m a hero.”
Her mother was angry Once she found out, however was powerless to do anything concerning it. “She understood that there is no point going to swear at somebody Once the deed is done,” Amina says.
Shelter
Anokhina believes that journalism is not enough to counter the violence versus women and girls, and often intervenes to try to suggestions the women whose stories she tells.
“We now have actually a lawyer and a psychologist that job for free along with our women. We recently tried to save a woman from domestic violence. We even offered to rent an apartment for her in Moscow so that she could be far away from her husband however she refused. Why? very first off, because her will certainly had been crushed and secondly, because she was afraid of Moscow.”
She hopes to establish a network of shelters across the Caucasian republics. “We could send women to Kabardino-Balkaria for a period of rehabilitation and take women from Ossetia. The women would certainly still be within the Caucasus, from which they are afraid to distance themselves, however far from their families.”
Translated by Cameron Johnston
No comments:
Post a Comment