Female Alcoholism in Russia Understated Because Few Women Risk Seeking Help, Activists Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, December 7 – According to Russian officials, there is only one Russian woman with a drinking problem compared to four Russian men; but activists say the number of Russian women who drink excessively is far higher but almost always undercounted because women are more reluctant than men to seek help.

            Those who do so fear they may lose their parental rights or their jobs and so prefer to keep silent. As a result, their numbers are now growing “almost to the point of no return,” according to anti-alcohol activists outside of Moscow (7x7-journal.ru/articles/2020/12/08/u-zhenskogo-alkogolizma-pochti-net-tochki-nevozvrata-kak-nko-v-regionah-pomogayut-zhenshinam-spravitsya-s-zavisimostyu).

            With the support of an EU grant, St. Petersburg’s Center for Prevention of Drug Abuse has been working over the past year with 14 NGOs in ten regions of the Russian Federation to gain an insight into how many women and girls are descending into alcoholism and what might be done to help them.

            They made contact with some 10,000 women who have a drinking problem and were able to put more than 1,000 of them on the path to sobriety, the Center says.  But that is just the tip of the iceberg of a problem many Russians and Russian officials prefer to ignore rather than address.

            Many women welcome the fact that someone is paying attention to their problems and that that individual or group is independent of the state and thus far less likely to treat them as potential criminals. But a sizeable share isn’t interested in cooperating with anyone and in fact denies that its members have any problem, activists say.

            Russian experts and the NGO community are especially concerned about the rising tide of alcoholism among women because of the risk that they will give birth to children with fetal alcohol syndrome, something that will magnify the impact of their problems and extend them into another generation.

            But despite that concern, in many regions, there are programs for alcoholic men but not for alcoholic women; and in some, women with an alcohol problem are treated only alongside those with a drug problem, something that adds to the problems of attracting those who need help to such centers.

            The biggest problem, activists in the regions say, is that “drinking women more often than men refuse to admit they are ill.” Men more readily acknowledge that they drink too much, but women by tradition and out of fears of stigmatization and discrimination remain very reluctant to do so.

            As a result, it is often the case that by the time women do come to such centers, they are beyond the point of no return as far as a cure is concerned given the limited resources the centers have to address the plethora of problems that have driven them to alcoholism and that their alcoholism in turn produces.

             Far more needs to be done, the activists say, especially as work with women lags far behind that with men and is much less well-financed. The only way the situation can change is if Russians recognize that female alcoholism is a far larger problem than they imagine and if the state accepts that it is a social rather than just a criminal problem.

            As of now, many officials view it as only the latter, especially because female alcoholics who are incarcerated are far more likely to return to drinking and criminal activity after they are released.