Balkan women on their own against domestic abuse
BELGRADE: In a safe house in Belgrade, Aleksandra describes the violence unleashed on her by her partner. Like many women across the Balkan region, she struggled to get help from the authorities. “A policeman said he saw no evidence of abuse and that he was neither a doctor nor a psychologist, so he could not help me,” the 33-year-old Serbian mother said. “It is your word against his word, there is nothing you can do,” she recalled the policeman saying. Ahead of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, which falls on Saturday, activists warn that the scourge of domestic abuse remains deep-seated across the Balkans-and that not enough is being done to stop it.
“Police react slowly and insufficiently, but the worst is the judiciary, which is very slow. Judges are not sensitized enough to the problem of domestic violence,” said Vesna Stanojevic, who runs the Belgrade safe house. Aleksandra, whose name has been changed to protect her identity, eventually got help after she insisted that she would press charges, and social services sent her and her baby to the safe house. But others are not so lucky.
Within one week in July this year, two men killed their wives at social care centers in Belgrade, prompting calls for urgent measures to tackle such violence. One man beat his wife to death with a stone in front of their three sons, the first time he had seen his family since his release from prison. A few days later, a man stabbed his wife to death and strangled their four-year-old son, while injuring three social service workers who had tried to stop him. A new Serbian law in June threatens penalties for authorities who fail to deal with domestic abuse, but activists say police remain under-trained and legal proceedings still lag.
According to Serbia’s Women Against Violence Network, a coalition of NGOs, 33 women were killed last year in the country-home to about seven million people-by abusive partners or male family members. Bosnia’s human rights ministry says more than half of women and girls over the age of 15 have been victims of some form of violence. Nearly 70 percent of women have suffered domestic violence in Kosovo, according to a 2015 survey by the Kosovo Women’s Network.And in Albania, police recorded nearly 3,000 cases of domestic violence and issued 1,643 protection orders across the population of 2.8 million between January and September. Across these countries, activists say they believe the true extent of abuse is under-reported owing to the lack of support and awareness. “Mentalities in Albania today are still largely influenced by the patriarchal model, putting the man in a position of dominance over the submissive woman,” said Ana Ruci of Refleksione, a women’s association in Tirana.