In September 2023, the Croatian authorities introduced amendments to the felony legislation code. They may introduce a brand new felony offence: femicide, or ”aggravated homicide of a feminine particular person”. From 2020 till the tip of September 2023, there have been 43 femicides dedicated in Croatia.
Aggravated homicide already options in Croatia’s felony code. In keeping with Article 111, paragraph 3, it’s the homicide of an individual near the perpetrator who has beforehand been abused by the perpetrator. It calls for a jail sentence of at the least 10 years.
The introduction of femicide as a separate felony offence has been advocated by girls’s rights advocates following circumstances of femicide and the state’s insufficient response to them. The concept behind introducing femicide into the felony code is to stop murders of girls and to indicate unequivocally that violence towards girls is unacceptable in Croatian society.
Again in 2021, the proposal was rejected by the present ruling social gathering, the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), after being put ahead by the Social Democrats. So why the change of coronary heart two years later? The obvious reply is the upcoming parliamentary elections in 2024, adopted by presidential elections in 2024 and 2025. The present prime minister, Andrej Plenković, has lengthy forged himself as a ”average” centre-right determine who favours EU insurance policies and is at odds with extra conservative, far-right figures.
This elevated curiosity in criminalising home and sexual violence will be seen as a helpful political agenda slightly than a real dedication to the problem. In 2019, Plenković took half within the first protest organised by the celebrity-led motion #Spasime [#SaveMe]. Since then, the initiative’s most well-known consultant, actress Jelena Veljača, has been a frequent interlocutor of the federal government. The #Spasime calls for for harsher penalties for perpetrators of home and sexual violence had been accepted by the federal government in 2019 and put into follow in 2020. Representatives of feminist NGOs and ladies’s shelters celebrated this as a hit, simply as they’re now celebrating the brand new legislation, as progress within the struggle towards gender-based violence.
I consider that this new authorized modification will do little or no to alter the socio-political local weather in Croatia, the place home violence thrives, the place victims are routinely disbelieved, and the place financial inequality prevents victims from escaping their predicament. Even when circumstances are dealt with shortly and effectively, and even when each report leads to a protracted jail sentence, the felony justice system can not give survivors what they actually need: monetary help, unwavering societal condemnation of rape and abuse, and radical change within the behaviour of the perpetrator.
Prisons can’t be seen as a feminist resolution to home and sexual violence: they’re permeated with violence, homophobia, misogyny and hatred. Prisons are additionally locations the place rape is structurally normalised. Moreover, prisons is not going to hold us secure – increased sentences for violent crime usually are not related to decrease charges of violent crime.
Within the former Yugoslavia, girls had alternatives totally free schooling and mass employment in state-supported industries. For the primary time within the area’s historical past, they might obtain monetary independence. At present, with the proliferation of low-paid and precarious part-time jobs, employment not ensures monetary independence. The normalisation of girls’s insecure employment places them at better danger of turning into economically depending on their companions, making it harder for them to depart or report circumstances of violence.
The struggle towards these abuses has been relegated nearly fully to the felony justice system, ignoring the socio-economic local weather through which such violence thrives. The feminist critique of the jail resolution has been an necessary part of the battle of black girls within the US and UK. It impressed the monikers ”abolition feminism” and ”anti-carceral feminism”. Put merely, carceral feminism is the heavy reliance by feminist teams on coercive state establishments equivalent to prisons and the police to deal with and stop crimes of gender violence. In southeastern Europe, the Feminist Autonomous Centre for Analysis (FAC), primarily based in Athens, argues in favour of other notions of justice that aren’t primarily based on state management, punishment and carceral logic.
What’s lacking from Croatian media narratives and opinion items on femicide is the truth that punitive populism has not produced the specified results of prevention. Media experiences are extra saturated with information of home violence than ever earlier than. Ladies’s organisations broadly acknowledge that what is required, along with harder sentences, is holistic prevention. This would come with early schooling programmes equivalent to civic, well being and sexual schooling for youngsters in main or pre-school programmes. However probably the most seen advocacy nonetheless focuses on sentencing and the judicial course of. The shortage of well-designed prevention programmes for each victims and perpetrators, delivered by professionals, appears to have been swept beneath the carpet in favour of harsher sentences as the answer.
Globally, crimes of sexual and home violence are underreported and so statistically underrepresented. Ladies all over the world face sufferer blaming, re-traumatisation, lack of monetary help and courtroom circumstances which might be time-consuming and expensive. In Croatia, the common rape trial can take between three and ten years. Home-violence trials typically contain child-custody proceedings, making it a merciless course of for victims. Survivors can face the chance of being killed once they lastly resolve to depart their abusive companions.
A survey performed in 2022 confirmed that 95% of girls in Croatia didn’t report rapes and tried rapes. Statistics additionally present that for each reported rape, there are 15 to twenty unreported circumstances. Many ladies don’t need to discuss concerning the abuse even to their closest kinfolk, not to mention to police, prosecutors and judges.
The affect of the Catholic Church in Croatia and the neoliberal agenda of privatisation and commodification have helped conventional gender attitudes to persist. Put up-war privatisation in Croatia led to the systematic devaluation and de-funding of public well being, schooling and welfare programmes. Social staff come beneath assault when circumstances of home violence are uncovered within the media, however there may be little acknowledgement that the whole welfare system has grow to be chronically ineffectual, unable to offer providers to those that want them.
I want to emphasise right here the semantic and ideological significance of labelling the homicide of girls as femicide, and the highly effective message it sends to society. Nevertheless, to advocate for legislative change alone can imply ignoring the foundation causes of patriarchal violence.
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Celeb-led, middle-class initiatives like #Spasime illustrate what political sociologist Alison Phipps, in her e book Me, Not You: The Bother with Mainstream Feminism, calls ”political whiteness”. This ”describes a set of values, orientations and behaviours that […] embody narcissism, threat-awareness and an accompanying will to energy”. Political whiteness can be produced by the interaction of supremacy and victimhood. In different phrases, it’s rooted in experiences of victimisation, however is usually practised by privileged individuals who help the established order. This features a black-and-white view of abuse, the place individuals will be victims or perpetrators, however not each. The state is seen as protecting slightly than repressive, and shaming and punishment are seen as efficient methods for stopping future violence.
In Croatia social staff are routinely on the receiving finish of abuse, however the identical therapy is never utilized to the police. Generally the identical law enforcement officials who’re known as upon to arrest perpetrators of abuse are themselves abusers and rapists. In August 2023, two law enforcement officials had been charged with raping and abusing an acquaintance a number of instances in Lika County. In September 2023, they had been launched from custody with out an injunction to ban them from approaching the sufferer. Within the UK, following the kidnapping, rape and homicide of Sarah Everard, a mass protest was held in London which led to extra police brutality towards the demonstrators.
No such protest was held in Croatia after the above-mentioned case of police rape. Equally, the arrest of peaceable local weather protesters outdoors the LNG terminal on the island of Krk was not broadly seen as an abuse of police energy in an effort to shield personal pursuits. And well-publicised experiences of police brutality towards migrants on the Bosnian border don’t appear to have led to better public scrutiny of the police both. The general public in Croatia doesn’t are inclined to query the legitimacy of state violence, even when there may be proof of police misconduct and brutality.
As an alternative of a conclusion – a name to motion
The place of liberal Croatian feminism is to refuse to criticise these in energy and to draw back from difficult the repressive organs of the state, as a result of its final goal is to not really change the established order. The felony justice system alone can not ship social justice, however it will possibly crush probably the most weak members of our communities, together with survivors of abuse. The issues of transphobia and advocacy for the abolition of intercourse work, that are necessary considerations amongst some Croatian feminists, partly clarify the benefit with which mainstream feminism has grow to be entangled with the felony justice system. In case your first precedence just isn’t the liberation of all, it turns into acceptable to throw probably the most marginalised members of our society beneath the bus. But when girls’s security can solely be assured by state violence and repression, then the violence that’s already normalised in patriarchal society will proceed.
We’d like a grassroots motion that understands the interconnectedness of struggles. The battle towards patriarchal violence can be the battle towards the repressive organs of the capitalist state.