Letter from Riga, Latvia, Nov. 23, 2006

There are many deep shadows along the cobbled streets of Riga. Shadows not only from the low sun on these short days of early winter, but the ones that cut much deeper from the years of Nazi and Soviet occupation.

Those shadows are mine to see for I think of my Grandmother on these streets when she was but eight or ten. Was this a building she stared at? A sidewalk she walked along? Were these stones the remains of the synagogue her family attended? Anna Zabezhinsky left around 1905, after one of the periodic pogroms against Jews, when her family had raised enough money for one boat passage. Only sixteen years old, she waved goodbye to her mother and father as her ship slipped away from the dock and into the Baltic Sea never to see them again. Most of her cousins, her aunts and her uncles were not so lucky: Were they among those herded into the Great Synagogue on July 4, 1941, to be burned alive? Into yet another synagogue to suffer the identical fate? Brought to a forest on the outskirts of the city and mowed down in waves of machine gun fire? Or were they among those who survived these massacres only to be deported to the extermination camps? I expect we shall never know.

But I am not in Riga for these shadows, nor the shadows of the Stalinist years, but yet others. They are the shadows of a terror that greets far too many women in Latvia when they come home at night. It is a country where the issue of violence against women is barely spoken about; where police can "arrest" a man who is beating his wife for three hours when they must let him go, presumably to return home; where a woman is murdered every twelve days; where men have decamped in at least 30% of the households; and where one of the fruits of their new capitalist economy is a flourishing sex industry: on one cab ride, it took the driver only thirty seconds to ask if I "wanted a girl." He later claimed that eighty percent of his foreign male passengers ask for prostitutes for that is why they have come here. There are organized tours from England; bachelor parties are apparently a specialty.

There are not many people working on these issues: a few women in government offices, a handful of brave women who are running crisis centers or shelters, a few men and women who have tried to get education efforts off the ground. But until recently, they tell me, their efforts haven't gotten far.

Now there are European Community funds which for the first time will help them study the extent of the problem. There are fresh demands for better laws. Another new initiative has been a White Ribbon Campaign started by the Equality Office of the Ministry of Labour. Their first action was a huge banner in downtown Riga. They organized for some prominent athletes to outline their hand on the banner as a statement that "this hand will not be used for violence." Within a week, on every free bit of cloth, there was a handprint: 1000 in all. Not a bad start for a country where the issue has been treated with silence.

While in Riga, I gave a talk at the university, met with colleagues to hear about their work and share ideas, and led a training workshop for a small group that included social workers, counselors, teachers, government employees, and activists. At the end, I listened to their plans with delight.

And on my last morning, in the hour before I left for my plane, I walked quickly across town in a drizzle and found a broken-down building where, a hundred years ago, my young grandmother and her siblings had lived. I looked up at the windows where she must have stared out at their world.

Letter from Istanbul, Turkey. Nov. 19, 2006

This city rises up the hillsides on both sides of the Bosporus, the wide channel from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, the divide between Europe and Asia. It is a city of domed mosques and pencil minarets, of the old bazaar and new shops selling Boss and Channel, of rambling old streets jammed with buses and cars and straight, new boulevards jammed with buses and cars, of the peoples and fashions of two continents. It is the largest city of a country which now, for the first time, is taking seriously the issue of violence against women.

Until two years ago, a small number of women's organizations remained quite isolated. Beyond their work, violence against women simply wasn't talked about or, when it was, the language was often one of approval: it was seen as natural and acceptable for a man to hit his wife. Each year men killed women - a wife, a sister, a daughter - supposedly to preserve the 'honor' of his family.

The work of these women finally paid off when Hurriyet, the countries major newspaper and also owner of CNN Turkey, joined with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), to launch a national campaign against this violence. Articles started appearing in newspapers and stories on TV. With the aid of the UNFPA, the army launched an incredible training program for all recruits. Each new soldier would spend a full day of basic training focusing on issues around reproductive health, family planning, safe sex, respect for women, and ending violence against women. Because every Turkish man does compulsory service, in time, every man in Turkey will go through this program: last year alone, 400,000 men did just that. Finally, just this fall, the president (from a moderate Islamic party that won the last national election in this secular country) signed a discussion paper that recognized the severity of the problem and the need for more effective action to bring it to an end.

I was in Istanbul for the second conference sponsored by Hurriyet, CNN, and the UNFPA. Speakers, including the governor of the Istanbul region, talked about the problem; in workshops, we explored solutions. My own role was to give the keynote address and to lead a day-and-a-half workshop on developing effective strategies to address and involve men and boys.

For me, one of the pleasures of the work was to see the progress that has been made in the past year since I last visited Turkey and to catch up with colleagues there. Another was the presence of members of White Ribbon Campaigns from Canada, Pakistan, Austria, and Norway as well as from an organization in the Netherlands that does some similar work. These men gave presentations on their campaigns. In a future blog, I'll talk more about some of what they are doing.

Off, now, to Riga, Latvia.