People in Moscow from the North Caucasus Demand Their Daughters Follow Traditional Way of Life, Kitezh Center Head Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, August 27 – Alena Yeltsova, head of the Kitezh Crisis Center in Moscow, says that many middle-aged people from the North Caucasus who come to work in the Russian capital are very secular but demand that their daughters follow a traditional way of life, perhaps in compensation for what they feel they have given up.

            Thus, instead of tolerating secular behavior among their daughters, such parents are insisting that the daughters revive the pattern they themselves have left behind, a pattern that leads to conflict and abuse, the woman who has rescued numerous women from all ethnic groups who have suffered abuse says (daptar.ru/2021/08/27/zhenschinyi-na-severnom-kavkaze-mnogo-vyiuchennoy-bespomoschnosti/).

            This sets the stage for conflicts and abuse as well, and sometimes that abuse may be as bad or worse than the abuse women who come from families who have never left the North Caucasus and where parents and children are more likely to share common values. There the abusers of women are likely to be not parents or husbands but brothers.

            Brothers take it upon themselves to be the defenders of tradition, Yeltsova says; and they intervene often with violence where parents and husbands do not. Many North Caucasian women assume they have no choice but to live with this because they have been inculcated with the idea that they have no power to make decisions for themselves.

            When women from either group decide to flee tragic situations, the Kitezh Center head says, they often choose to move abroad because they do not believe that they can be secure in any place in the Russian Federation. There, the options for secularism are greater and are more widely accepted by North Caucasus men in the diasporas.