WOMEN COUNT RUSSIA 2021

2022

Country/area: Russia

Organisation: Women’s Museum in Moscow

Organisation size: Small

Publication date: 16/10/2021

Credit: A.Mosheva, L.Gruntova, V.Danilchenko, N.Gadaeva, T.Pushkareva, S.Konaev, S.Karpov, A.Barantseva, A.Zobnina, L.-M.Taylor, L.Fein, S.Khasanova, A.Kapushenko, A.Kapalova, T.Isaeva and many other friends.

Biography:

Lyubava Malysheva is a poet, radical journalist, founder of the Moscow Women’s Museum and other cultural and political projects in Russia ans Norway. Author of books and articles about civic activism in different countries, researcher of femicide in Russia.

She was born in Russia in 1978, received a higher medical education (Moscow Medical Academy named after I.M.Sechenov ), worked as a psychiatrist-narcologist for 2 years (The Moscow Research and Practical Centre for Narcology). Then she began to create an independent project Hippy.ru, which became the first Internet archive of the Russian hippie movement and began to work as an opposition media. The project talked about initiatives that people could take to improve the situation with human rights in Russia. Now Hippy.ru is banned in Russia.

In 2009 she left Russia, lived in Norway, and received the prize of the Annual Women’s Conference on March 8 in Bergen for her book about activism in Bergen. In 2014-2021 she wrote articles on politics and culture for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

In 2012, Inspired by Norwegian feminists, she began to engage in the women’s historical movement in Russia. The initiatives were called Women’s Historical Night on May 8. In 2017, while continuing to remain in exile, she founded Women’s History Month in. Russia and the Moscow Women’s Museum. Recently, the project of the WWM – Women’s History for Children (6 books with new role models for girls, among the heroes of this series are political prisoner and artist Kersnovskaya, poet and human rights activist Gorbanevskaya, gypsy poet Papusha, researcher of xenophobia Kozhevnikova, poet-polistylist Iskrenko, journalist and human rights activist Politkovskaya) has been completed, and the project “The Journalist” opera has begun (Malysheva is the author of the idea and the libretto, the music was written by 16 female composers, the opera received a special diploma “Challenge of Time” at a significant competition of the Union of Composers in 2021). The Moscow Women’s Museum deals with the entire spectrum of women’s rights (including the history of Romani women in Russia, as well as the history of Russian women musicians, geologists etc) and studies international international experience. Since 2021, the Museum has received a small room in Moscow for free and will now have more offline presence than before.

In 2017, Lyubava Malysheva moved to Barcelona to study an anti-femicide project, in 2019 she founded femicid.net.

Project description:

A report on the femicide situation in Russia, based on femicid.net statistics, for the British Women’s Conference, October 16-17 in Porstmouth. Statistics have been collected manually by Lyubava Malysheva since 2019 without any funding. There is a Russian-language version of the report, more complete and published earlier. For the success of this work, many volunteers provided invaluable assistance. Доклад о ситуации с фемицидом в России, сделанный на базе статистики femicid.net для британской женской конференции, проходившей 16-17 октября в Порстмуте. Статистика собирается вручную Любавой Малышевой с 2019 года без всякого финансирования. Существует русскоязычная версия доклада, более полная и опубликованная раньше. Для

Impact reached:

A project that collects news about femicide from open sources, proved the existence of femicide in Russia (the official authorities deny femicide and do not even use this word), proved a high level of femicide (comparable to Latin American and African), contributed to the emergence of a classification of femicide, awareness of the influence of media on femicide and the discovery of new forms of struggle against femicide (in particular, the project Culture against femicide – the opera “The Journalist”). The femicid.net project is involved in an international network of feminist projects against femicide and creates reports on the situation in Russia for the UN. Specifically, this report, which we are submitting for the award, is rather a solemn demonstration of the results of our three-year work, which informed our foreign sisters and the international community about the dramatic situation in which the Russian women find themselves. It is also a story about the only photo memorial of femicide victims in Russia and an open database.

Techniques/technologies used:

google.com

translate.google.com

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1qe-1QNELEwwtdrgWG9Zf_LCAGPDF8TMRg5S_VeeYYcY/edit?usp=sharing

inoreader.com

What was the hardest part of this project?

Although there is help from volunteers and some donations, it is absolutely not sufficient for a country where there are thousands of femicides. The project is being done in spite of my very difficult personal life circumstances (emigration, illness, loneliness, unemployment) and without stopping for three years. Why am I not stopping? The project against femicide is extremely important for the future of women’s rights in Russia. Although several dozen articles appear annually mentioning femicid.net, the project received the first real professional recognition from foreign human rights defenders and from the UN (even the leading anti-xenophobic organization in Russia does not think that femicide can be calculated and does not support us in the form of recognizing the importance of of our work). A recognition from you would give us the opportunity to have greater social significance and better act against femicide in Russia, to reduce the number of murders of women. Now I am crowdfunding for the opera “The Journalist” against femicide, and I would give all the money to stage this opera in Moscow. We have been developing the idea of the opera for a very long time, created a lot of information materials that we will distribute along with the production, and we hope that a high-profile cultural project will allow us to use media as an effective remedy against femicide in conditions of paralyzed justice, as well as attract volunteers and donations to the Russian anti-femicide project.

What can others learn from this project?

1. News is a good source of data on femicide in cases where the government hides real statistics.

2. There are very affordable data collection and analysis tools that you can use. Thank you very much Google and Inoreader.

3. The femicid.net method is convenient and can be used in your country (I am ready to help ready to help to make a similar project in any country for free, just as we previously consulted activists from Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine).

4. The most important conclusion that I myself came to while working on the femicid.net project and studying the data of researchers from different countries – the media have a huge impact on society, this is an important fact, which is very difficult to believe for some journalists and editors. The work of journalists is key to solving social problems.

5. The report talks about the existence of specific femicidal and antifemicidal frames (concepts come from Canadian research), demonstrates the existence of an initial difference between statistical data on femicide and unsuccessful attempted murder of a woman (for the first time on Russian material), tells about non-trivial forms of interaction with society (“Сulture against femicide”). Thus, it provides ideas for further work for other journalists and human rights defenders .