100 Time March 15/March 22, 2021
SPECIAL REPORT
WOMEN and the PANDEMIC
FINDING
A WAY OUT
To combat skyrocketing
DOMESTIC VIOLENCE,
women in Russia are doing
what their government won’t
BY MADELINE ROACHE
As NAsTyA wAiTs for her husbANd Kirill To come home
from work, thoughts run through her head. She smooths the
creases from the tablecloth and lays the table in the dimly lit
kitchen of their apartment in Moscow, careful to place the knife
and fork perfectly straight next to Kirill’s plate. “Sometimes
he loses his temper, but no one’s perfect,” she thinks. “I can’t
do anything right.”
When Kirill returns, he stares at the food his wife has pre
pared, then, when she asks what’s wrong, begins hurling in
sults. “You’re useless, even in the kitchen,” he says, becoming
more aggressive as Nastya tries to reason with him, grabbing
her and pushing her to the ground. She calls the police beg
ging for help but knows they won’t come. When she calls her
father, Kirill grabs the phone and convinces him everything is
fine. “She’s just being dramatic,” Kirill says, pressing his hand
over Nastya’s mouth to silence her.
Nastya and Kirill aren’t real—they are characters in an inter
active exercise—but they might as well be. Game 116, as it’s
called, was launched in 2018, but it’s perhaps even more rel
evant now than it was then. The exercise, which puts users in
Nastya’s shoes and asks them to choose options to handle Kirill’s
wrath, is an attempt to highlight domestic violence that activ
ists say has soared in Russia during the pandemic.
That’s true around the world. As lockdowns trapped women
at home with abusers, advocates and authorities report that
calls for help from abuse victims doubled and tripled. In re
sponse, more than 120 countries have strengthened services
for female survivors of violence during the COVID19 crisis.
Russia is an exception, taking little concrete action. In
April, the Kremlin denied that domestic violence was a prob
lem and claimed it had decreased, even as Russian organiza
tions reported they were struggling to keep up with a spike in
calls for help. With shelters across the country closed because
of the pandemic, some women were even fined for violating
quarantine rules by fleeing their abusers. It wasn’t until May
that the government declared domestic violence an emergency
that allowed someone to break quarantine.
Though Russia has since lifted mandatory lockdowns, un
employment and economic despair sparked by the pandemic
portend dangerous times ahead. “When
a cycle of violence begins, it’s not going
to go away just because the pandemic
goes down,” says Marina Pisklakova
Parker, director of ANNA, one of the
non profits led by women that are work
ing to fill the vacuum left by Russia’s fail
ure to address the problem.
Game 116 is the brainchild of a Mos
cow advertising agency, Room 485, which
created it in collaboration with women’s
rights activists, including Pisklakova●
Anna Rivina,
in the Moscow
office of
Nasiliu.net, a
nonprofit that
supports victims
of domestic
violence