“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 someone I know phoned to say that her relatives have a problem: the daughter is in the last months of pregnancy and her father thinks he had better [kill her] to avoid shame. A thought suddenly struck my friend and he said: ‘Tell him that the punishment for this crime has been increased. He won’t get off so easily’.

“His mother passed this on and the man relented. He found another way out. And I think, what if he didn’t want to kill his daughter, but the fact that these killings go unpunished and that everyone acts this way didn’t leave him any choice?”



Anokhina has many “funny” stories like this. As an editor of Daptar, an online women’s magazine in Dagestan that focuses on issues 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 part of Russia, but local tribal and Muslim codes often hold more weight than Russian law.

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“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 was in bad health’, they write and they issue death certificates retrospectively. The villagers also 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 get wind that something like this has happened,” she says. “As a journalist, it is your job to write about horrible things, to ‘raise the issue’. The whole time you have to take care to name no names, because otherwise, a great 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 tell you another story. There was a murder – a girl killed her father 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. But we ask you not to disclose what happened. Say that you took to drink and your father couldn’t reconcile himself 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 excellent education and upbringing” – whose response revealed a lot about the reasons for this silence.

“He said: ‘Do you know, if they had come to me with a request like that, I would have thought long and hard but I would also have gone and asked her not to reveal the truth. She is already out of the picture, in any case – there is no life left for her in Dagestan. But she can still save the whole village. For if this story were made known, all the girls of the village would find it nearly impossible to find a husband in future. A black stain would 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. ‘How does he feel now?’ I asked. ‘He is a little upset,’ I was told. A little upset!”

“Faced with the choice of either punishing the scoundrel or hushing the business up, they opt for the latter. All education in Dagestan is based on one main principle – the fear of criticism and censure. What will the neighbours say? The relatives, the elders?”

Beauty salon, Makhachkala

A incident in a beauty salon offers insights into the state of gender relations in Dagestan. Five manicurists and five clients sit at little tables, laid out in a row. The air smells of nail varnish.

“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 with ‘hooker nails’ he would kill me.” She phones her husband. “Can I paint my nails beige? [pause] That’s not vulgar, it’s skin coloured. [pause] There is also the French manicure. Great, let’s go for that.” She puts down the phone and looks up: “My husband says that French is OK.”

Anokhina asks: “Tell me, was that just an expression or did you mean it. Might he really kill you?”

The woman thinks for a while. “Well, yes, he might kill me,” she replies. In other places she might be joking, but in Dagestan there’s little doubt that she’s deadly serious.

Home videos

Daptar magazine was launched to write about these matters, but Anokhina says that there are some topics that even her correspondents don’t want to cover. “One of them refused to write about incest,” she says, “and another about home videos”.

“Home videos” is the innocuous term for the growing practice of recording compromising footage of young women and sharing it among male friends.

“When 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 sex and others where she is blackmailed.”

A letter from a Daptar reader contained an interesting suggestion. “Why”, the letter asked, “are the men who film these clips not called to account under sharia law?”

“That was the first time in our memory that a man of traditional upbringing had said a thing like that,” says Anokhina. “And that is when we understood that we need to actively involve men in our work, so that they stop this gender war.”

The magazine also draws attention to the practice 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 also refused to write about FGM, so she had started to investigate it herself.

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Amina’s story

Amina is an architect. The office in Izberbash, where she works, is bitterly cold. The table is piled high with papers covered in pencil lines. Amina swivels in her chair, gets up and strides around the room. It’s as if she can’t sit still.

“I don’t make a big deal out of it,” she says. “If my name comes out, people are sure to have a laugh at my expense. Please write about it discreetly so that they can’t identify who 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 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 FGM without her parents’ knowledge.

“There were three other girls with me and it was barbaric,” she says. “The woman lifted up my skirt and cut off my clitoris with the kind of clippers you use to shear sheep. She had passed them under a flame beforehand. Other girls took fright and ran away but I stayed put and in that sense, I’m a hero.”

Her mother was angry when she found out, but was powerless to do anything about it. “She understood that there is no point going to swear at someone when the deed is done,” Amina says.

Shelter

Anokhina believes that journalism is not enough to counter the violence against women and girls, and often intervenes to try to help the women whose stories she tells.

“We now have a lawyer and a psychologist who work for free 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 but she refused. Why? First off, because her will 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 still be within the Caucasus, from which they are afraid to distance themselves, but far from their families.”

A version of this article first appeared in Russian in Expert magazine. Translated by Cameron Johnston