|
Transforming Power: Addressing Violence in a Russian town
Friends House Moscow has been promoting the Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP) in Russia since 1994. Trained AVP facilitators encourage workshop participants to be open to transforming power, the power which seeks to do no ill, the power which can help to manage difficult situations and heal relationships by building the confidence to respond to the good in the other, and by working on communication skills and the awareness of alternatives. Supported by Friends House Moscow, AVP workshops have been held in Dzerzhinsk since 1999 as a long-term project of the youth organisation Little Prince. In this provincial town 350km east of Moscow, people are no better or worse than anywhere else. They offend one another with an ill-chosen word or careless action wherever they are - on the neat tree-lined streets, in the noisy courtyards and in the shops and bars on the ground floors of residential apartment blocks. A decade ago Dzerzhinsk was renowned as the centre of Russia’s chemical industry. Today many of the industrial plants stand idle. There are not enough jobs now in the factories and people here are mostly poor. Forced inactivity can breed violence.
A Family Situation (names of family members have been changed) In Russia 50% of children fall victim to physical or psychological violence at some point in their lives. Parents do not have to be alcoholics or suffer from mental health conditions to be violent towards their children. It is difficult to say which is worse – physical violence or humiliation: both can leave the child psychologically scarred. As soon as their daughter was born, Marina and her husband forgot about Ivan, the son they had adopted from an orphanage. Ivan understood that his mother was much busier now that she had a baby to look after but he did not understand why his every word and deed seemed to aggravate her. His father ceased talking to him altogether. They did not sit together in the lounge to watch television as they used to do. Nobody was interested in Ivan’s achievements at school or what he and his friends had been up to. One day Ivan went into the baby’s room, to have a closer look at the little girl. Following him into the room and seeing him close to her daughter’s cot, his mother became enraged. At school the next day, Ivan’s teacher noticed a bruise on her pupil’s neck and asked him what had happened. The seven-year old hurriedly pulled up the collar of his shirt to cover the mark on his neck and muttered ‘I fell.’ After that first incident he began to ‘fall’ more and more often Ivan’s parents refused to respond to the urgent requests from his teacher that they come in to the school to talk to her. Finally the school administration officially gave evidence that the young boy was coming into school covered in bruises and took the matter to court. In court Ivan’s mother fiercely denied all charges, maintaining that her adopted son had made everything up. The court delayed passing a final verdict on the case. What became of Ivan and his adoptive family after the court hearing? It was clear that after such a traumatic experience the young boy would need psychological support from a professional. Specialists from the Municipal Centre of Psychology and Pedagogy, with the help of AVP facilitators, devised a special programme for him. He is gradually recovering and is now less frightened of adults. The parents, who still retain custody of Ivan, attended a basic level Alternatives to Violence workshop, in which facilitators helped the young couple to identify the underlying reasons for their aggressive behaviour towards their child. For a long time the couple could not understand why these workshops were necessary. In the supportive and understanding environment of the AVP workshops they found it much more difficult to communicate than they had in the confrontational setting of the courtroom. ‘I now understand why, after my daughter was born, my feelings towards Ivan changed.’ Marina admitted. ‘The AVP trainers helped me to understand myself better: there was not enough space in my heart for both my birth daughter and my adopted son at the same time. I am trying to find the strength in myself to change the way both I and my husband respond to the situation and most of all to change our relationship with Ivan.’
Our workshops are by no means the final stage in this process. Marina and her husband, I am sure, will listen to their hearts much more carefully from now on. ‘We have done everything we can to ensure that when Ivan grows up he will not feel inclined to take his feelings out on his adoptive parents. We do not want the young boy to harbour violence in his soul and continue the vicious circle of violence of which he himself was a victim.’ A School Situation ‘Dima, a boy in my class, is a difficult pupil,’ Elena told us. ‘He’s not stupid but he’s just not interested in working. He doesn’t do his homework, thinks up all manner of foolish reasons for not responding in class and he takes a disrespectful tone with his teachers. ‘One day Dima overstepped the line: we were doing individual study and everybody had been given a separate assignment to do and had settled down to work. Dima stood up demonstratively and announced ‘I’m not doing anything!’ He then left his usual seat and sat down at the back of the room with an insolent expression.’ Elena had been attending AVP workshops in Dzerzhinsk. Even before participating in AVP she had not been one to act impulsively in a conflict or to get wound up by a single offensive remark: she did not allow herself to raise a storm in a teacup. ‘I could have given Dima a two, that’s to say, the lowest mark in the Russian grading system, and left it at that. I would have liked to have done just that. I thought to myself: ‘I’ll tell him right now that I’m going to give him the 2 he deserves, maybe then he’ll start to do the work properly.’ 'It’s remarkable how the Alternatives to Violence workshops influence personality, not least the personality of a teacher! Often the school routine wears us out and we don’t have time to stop and analyse the inner life of an individual pupil or our own for that matter. Although I’d been attending workshops for a while, I hadn’t noticed the effect they had had on me until then. It seems that, without knowing it, the process of analysing my emotions and resisting giving way to the first surge of emotion had become almost intuitive to me. ‘Looking at Dima the thought suddenly struck me: yes he hardly ever does his homework, he’s undisciplined and rude. But today he spoke to me not only rudely but with a tone of despair. What if something has happened to him? That was the moment when I realised that I was starting to see the world from Dima’s perspective.’ Having handed round work to the other pupils Elena approached the problem pupil. He was sitting with his back to the class gazing out of the window and chewing on a stick of gum with a resolute look on his face. ‘Are you feeling tired?’ asked Elena ‘If you’re tired you may have a rest for a while. But individual study is very important so it would be best if you nevertheless did it when you’re feeling better.’ Dima seemed not to hear his teacher. He sat in that attitude all lesson, turned towards the window in silence. But in the break when there was no-one else left in the class he went up to Elena of his own accord and apologised for his behaviour for the first time in a very long time. He also told Elena that the previous evening his father had been taken to hospital and that the family had had no news about his condition. ‘I expect that, had I not felt the need to understand Dima but had forcibly tried to make him do the work or given him a 2, the situation would have spiralled out of control,’ Elena reflected. ‘In that frame of mind Dima would have been capable of being still ruder to me and I might not then have been able to restrain myself. It seems to me that we were half a step away from an aggressive conflict. ‘Now, thanks to the reflex of containing my emotions and driving all hostility and animosity from my heart (I acquired this reflex at AVP workshops), I have found the key to this headstrong pupil. After that first conversation Dima and I have started to understand each other much better and this has affected the atmosphere in the class as a whole.’ Expect the best! How can we reduce the number of children who suffer violence at the hands of adults? How can we encourage adults to adopt the ways of peace instead of the ways of violence? One answer is the Alternatives to Violence Project. It is well known that there are some issues which we must talk about at the top of our collective voice so that all around us hear the message. AVP is that collective voice. Participants in Dzerzhinsk workshops agree: Tatiana Vasilievna, deputy director of the Dzerzhinsk Pedagogical College: ‘There’s no question that we need to study the problem of violence. We frequently try to close our eyes to the injustice, rudeness, injury and pain around us. But it is our wilful blindness that keeps violence alive. The only solution I believe is belief in the best.’ Tatiana (workshop participant): ‘I’m glad to have taken part in the AVP workshops. The facilitators and other participants have helped me to view many things in a new light. I won’t say that I changed straight away. But I began to take a more sombre view of many manifestations of violence, which previously I hadn’t considered as violence. It turned out not to be so difficult to put myself in someone else’s position and to try to think like them.’ Natalya (workshop organiser): ‘I think we are engaged in an important task. We try to help a person to see things more honestly. The ability to understand the other person is often lacking in all spheres of human interaction, be it between parents and their children or managers and their staff. And I believe that within each person is an energy, which is capable of making manifest that person’s best qualities.
Translated by Claire Jewkes, Friends House Moscow intern
|
||
Adapted from an article by Oxana Belyanskaya and Natalya Shvetsova, of the
Little Prince Youth
Organisation , Dzerzhinsk, Nizhny Novgorod
