Men in crisis or in critical need of support? insights from Russia and the UK

Abstract

The idea that men are ‘in crisis’ has become popular in many societies. Yet the provision of targeted, gender-aware services for men is relatively underdeveloped. Negative trends in male health and employment offer the clearest evidence of crisis among men in Russia and the UK. These are occurring in the context of socio-economic change and a backlash against women's ‘emancipation’, both of which have particular implications for men. The shoring up of rigid expectations of male and female roles and behaviour, combined with increased economic insecurity, has contributed to a view of men as ‘failures’. In the Altai Region of Western Siberia, a system of social support for working-age men has been developed. Unique in Russia, the Altai Regional Crisis Centre for Men is part of a small but growing international phenomenon of support projects for men and may have potential as a model for similar developments in other parts of the world.

Notes

1. Michael Kimmel, ‘The Contemporary “Crisis” of Masculinity in Historical Perspective’, in Harry Brod (ed.), The Making of Masculinities: The New Men's Studies (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1987), pp.121–54; Robert Connell, The Men and the Boys (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000); M. O'Donnell and S. Sharpe, Uncertain Masculinities: Youth, Ethnicity and Class in Contemporary Britain (London: Routledge, 2000); Sandy Ruxton (ed.), Gender Equality and Men: Learning from Practice (Oxford: Oxfam GB, 2004).

2. See Moya Flynn and Jonathan Oldfield's introduction to this collection for a more detailed discussion of the concept of Transnationalism and its relevance to and role in the discussions of this series of seminars.

3. For a full discussion of this project and its findings see Rebecca Kay, Men in Contemporary Russia: The Fallen Heroes of Post-Soviet Change? (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). For details of earlier research with women, some of the data from which is drawn on in this article, see Rebecca Kay, Russian Women and their Organizations: Gender, Discrimination and Grassroots Women's Organizations 1991–96 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000).

4. Sandy Ruxton, ‘Introduction’, in Ruxton (ed.), Gender Equality and Men, p.1.

5. Sandy Ruxton, Men, Masculinities and Poverty in the UK (Oxford: Oxfam, 2002); Helen Buhaenko, Vikki Butler, Charlotte Flower and Sue Smith, What Men and Women Want: A Practical Guide to Gender and Participation (Oxford: Oxfam GB, 2004).

6. Kimmel, ‘The Contemporary “Crisis” of Masculinity’; Veronica McGivney, Excluded Men: Men Who are Missing from Education and Training (Leicester: National Institute of Adult Continuing Education, 1999); Julia Hartley-Brewer, ‘“Laddish Ideal” Helps Drive Men to Suicide as More Women Turn to Drink’, The Guardian, 19 April 2000, p.9; Ruxton, Men, Masculinities and Poverty.

7. Andrew Buncombe and Sheldon Miller, ‘Hopes Rise in Village Where Life is the Pits’, The Independent, 2 Dec. 1998, p.4; Pete Alcock, Christine Beatty, Stephen Fothergill, Rob Macmillan and Sue Yeandle, Work to Welfare: How Men Became Detached from the Labour Force (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

8. Ruxton, Men, Masculinities and Poverty, p.10.

9. Sue Yeandle, ‘The International Context’, in Alcock et al., Work to Welfare, pp.25–56 (p.55).

10. Melissa Benn, ‘The Future is Female’, The Guardian Saturday Review, 8 Aug. 1998, pp.1–2.

11. Ruxton, Men, Masculinities and Poverty, p.35.

12. Kay, Men in Contemporary Russia.

13. Sarah Ashwin and Tatyana Lytkina, ‘Men in Crisis in Russia: The Role of Domestic Marginalization’, Gender and Society, Vol.18, No.2 (2004), pp.189–206.

14. Kay, Russian Women and their Organizations, pp.47–50; Kay, Men in Contemporary Russia.

15. Sarah Ashwin, ‘Introduction: Gender, State and Society in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia’, in Sarah Ashwin (ed.), Gender, State and Society in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia (London: Routledge, 2000), pp.1–29 (pp.20–21); Marina Kiblitskaya ‘“Once We Were Kings”: Male Experiences of Loss of Status at Work in Post-Communist Russia’, in Ashwin (ed.), Gender, State and Society, pp.90–104 (pp.96–103); Elena Meshcherkina, ‘Bytie muzhskogo soznaniya: opyt rekonstruktsii maskulinnoi identichnosti srednogo i rabochego klassa’, in Sergei Ushakin (ed.), O Muzhe(N)stvennosti (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2002), pp.268–87; Ol'ga Shchevchenko, ‘“Esli ty takoi umnyi, to pochemu takoi bednyi?” Utverzhdaya muzhestvennost’ tekhnicheskoi intelligentsii', in Ushakin (ed.), O Muzhe(N)stvennosti, pp.288–302.

16. McGivney, Excluded Men.

17. Sue Smith, ‘Tackling Male Exclusion in Post-Industrialised Settings: Lessons from the UK’, in Caroline Sweetman (ed.), Beyond Rhetoric: Men's Involvement in Gender and Development Policy and Practice (Oxford: Oxfam GB, 2001), pp.56–8; Ruxton, Men, Masculinities and Poverty.

18. Ruxton, Men, Masculinities and Poverty, p.17.

19. F.C. Notzon, Y.M. Komarov, S.P. Ermakov et al., ‘Vital and Health Statistics: Russian Federation and United States, Selected Years 1985–2000 with an Overview of Russian Mortality in the 1990s’, National Centre for Health Statistics. Vital Health Statistics, Series 5, No. 11 (2003), p.47.

20. Ibid., p.10.

21. Nikolai Gerasimenko, ‘Pochemu my tak malo zhivem?’, Moskovskii komsomolets na Altae, 9–16 Aug. 2001, p.12.

22. Ibid.

23. Notzon et al., ‘Vital and Health Statistics: Russian Federation and United States’, pp.50–51.

24. Office for National Statistics, Social Focus on Men (London: The Stationery Office, 2001).

25. Nina Fedorova and Eduard Fomin, ‘The Quality of Life and Health’, Idaentutkimus: The Finnish Review of East European Studies, Vol.7, No.2 (2000), pp.23–34 (p.27); Ruxton, Men, Masculinities and Poverty, pp.48–9.

26. Ruxton, Men, Masculinities and Poverty; Gaetane Le Grange, ‘Taking the Bull by the Horns: Working with Young Men on HIV/AIDS in South Africa’, in Sandy Ruxton (ed.), Gender Equality and Men, pp.101–12.

27. Richard Mitchell, Mary Shaw and Danny Dorling, Inequalitites in Life and Death: What if Britain Were More Equal? (Bristol: Policy Press, 2000).

28. Kay, Men in Contemporary Russia.

29. Vladimir Kuzin, ‘Ne umiraite, muzhiki, ne umiraite! … ’, Sel'skaya nov', 2003, No.11, p.11.

30. Tatyana Polyakova, “I snova o tom, chto muzhchin nado berech”, Nadezhda plyus, 21 Jan. 1999, p.1.

31. Mikhail Vorobyov, ‘Beer Ads are Going into the Night’, Vremya novostei, 2 Aug. 2004, p.2, translated in The Current Digest of the Post-Soviet Press, Vol.56, No.31 (2004).

32. India Knight, ‘The Price of Girl Power’, The Sunday Times, 10 Sept. 2000, p.3.

33. Home Office, ‘Supporting Families: A Consultation Document’ (1998), cited in Ruxton, Men, Masculinities and Poverty, p.5.

34. Ruxton, Men, Masculinities and Poverty, pp.79–82.

35. Charlie Lewis, A Man's Place in the Home: Fathers and Families in the UK, Foundations 440 (Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2000), at <www.jrf.org.uk/knowledge/findings/foundations/440.htm>, accessed 20 June 2000.

36. Hartley-Brewer, ‘“Laddish Ideal”’; Ruxton, Men, Masculinities and Poverty, p.69.

37. James Riordan and Susan Bridger, Dear Comrade Editor: Readers' Letters to the Soviet Press under Perestroika (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992).

38. Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika. New Thinking for Our Country and the World (London: Fontana, 1988), p.117.

39. Lynne Attwood, The New Soviet Man and Woman: Sex-role Socialization in the USSR (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), p.167.

40. More recently a handful of similar projects have been set up in cities as diverse as St. Petersburg, Murmansk in the Far North and Petrozavodsk in the Repubic of Karelia.

41. For a more detailed description of the origins and development of the Crisis Centre see Kay, Men in Contemporary Russia.

42. The term ‘screening out’ has been used in analyses of UK social service provision, particularly family services, where practitioners and policies are found to focus primarily on women's roles and needs, thus making men's contributions and requirements invisible: see Jeanette Edwards, ‘Screening Out Men or “Has Mum Changed her Washing Powder Recently”’, in Jennie Popay, Jeff Hearn and Jeanette Edwards (eds.), Men, Gender Divisions and Welfare (London: Routledge, 1998), pp.259–86.

43. Maksim Kostenko, ‘ … Tol'ko dlya muzhchin!’, Altaiskaya Pravda, 7 Oct. 1997, p.7.

44. ‘My rabotaem … ’, Kraevoi krizisnyi tsentr dlya muzhchin: Vestnik, 2001, No.10 (Oct.), pp.2–4 (p.2).

45. Details of the Crisis Centre's current projects are regularly updated and made available on its website: <http://www.amitel.ru/∼criscentr>.

46. Maksim Kostenko, Sotsial'naya rabota s muzhchinami (Barnaul: publisher unidentified, 2003), pp.68–71; Ruxton (ed.), Gender Equality and Men, pp.10, 211.

47. Moya Flynn, Migrant Resettlement in the Russian Federation: Reconstructing Homes and Homelands (London: Anthem, 2004), p.130.

48. ‘Oni ne gnutsya, oni lomayutsya’, Vechernyi Barnaul, 24 Feb. 2001, p.4.

49. The 24-hour crisis line offers an opportunity for even more anonymous consultations with counsellors and specialists and was established in response to the Centre's findings that some groups of men were reluctant to come to the Centre at all for any kind of face-to-face interaction.

50. ‘My rabotaem … ’, p.2.

51. Research of this nature is conducted regularly by Centre staff. Findings are used as a form of internal monitoring and as a knowledge base from which to develop the Centre's work further. In some cases findings are published externally: see for example Kostenko, Sotsial'naya rabota s muzhchinami; however, this is not always the case.

52. Previous research with Russian grassroots women's organizations has suggested that this phenomenon may not only be based on understandings and identities of gender, but may also have more general social and cultural roots in post-Soviet Russia. Women involved in such groups in the mid-1990s frequently stressed their desire for pragmatic support and information and described emotional issues, introspection and consciousness-raising activities as something that only more affluent western women would have time for: see Kay, Russian Women and their Organizations, p.119.

53. Ol'ga Pol'shchikova, ‘“Muzhskoi razgovor” – protiv nasiliya’, Altaiskaya pravda, 6 March 2003, p.9; Ol'ga Pol'shchikova, ‘Vmeste s batyushkoi i uchastkovym’, Altaiskaya pravda, 29 May 2003, p.5.

54. In 2001, prior to the opening of the first provincial branch, 371 of the Centre's 2,476 clients lived in provincial towns and 223 in villages. In 2002, with the opening of the first branch, of the total 6,662 clients served by all branches and departments of the Centre, 799 were from provincial towns and 533 from villages. The opening of two more branches in 2003 saw the numbers of provincial men using the Centre's services rise to 2,791, with 598 rural men also amongst its 9,967 clients: see <http://www.amitel.ru/∼criscentr/Obrashen.htm> (accessed 17 Nov. 2005).

55. See Ruxton, Men, Masculinities and Poverty, for an overview of a range of locally based UK projects and initiative set up to support men in relation to a variety of specific issues.

56. Ruxton, Men, Masculinities and Poverty.

57. In 2004–05 Oxfam UK's ‘Gender Equality and Men’ project, for example, was particularly concerned to gather working materials and practical resources from projects working with men. This was undertaken with a view to producing a central resource of practical tools and guidance on male involvement programming in order to convert theoretical concepts and local insight and experience into practical programme strategies at a wider international level: personal communication with Jake Grout-Smith, Gender Consultant and Programme and Policy Researcher, Gender Equity and Men Policy Department, Oxfam GB.

58. Amelia Hill, ‘When It's Not Just Women Who are Victims’, The Observer, 7 Dec. 2003, p.16.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rebecca Kay

Rebecca Kay is senior lecturer in Russian Culture, Politics and Society at the Department of Central and East European Studies, University of Glasgow. She is author of Men in Contemporary Russia: The Fallen Heroes of Post-Soviet Change? (2006) and of Russian Women and Their Organizations: Gender, Discrimination and Grassroots Women's Organizations 1991–96 (2000), winner of the Heldt Prize for the best book in Slavic Women's Studies in 2000. In addition, she is author of a series of articles on issues relating to gender and women's and men's experiences of social, economic and political change in contemporary Russian society.

Maxim Kostenko

Maxim Kostenko is lecturer in psychology and social work in the department of Social Work at Altai State University. He was director of the Altai Regional Crisis Centre for Men, 1997–2002, and has been deputy chairperson of the Altai Regional Committee for Social Protection since leaving this post. He is author of a range of research articles and practical methodological handbooks on social work and support projects for men. His monograph, Sotsial'naya rabota s muzhchinami (2003), was published with the support of the SOROS Open Society Foundation and the MacArthur Fund.