In September 2023, the Croatian authorities introduced amendments to the prison regulation code. They’ll introduce a brand new prison offence: femicide, or “aggravated homicide of a feminine particular person”. From 2020 till the top of September 2023, there have been 43 femicides dedicated in Croatia.
Aggravated homicide already options in Croatia’s prison code. In accordance 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 very least 10 years.
The introduction of femicide as a separate prison offence has been advocated by girls’s rights advocates following circumstances of femicide and the state’s insufficient response to them. The thought behind introducing femicide into the prison code is to forestall murders of ladies 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 solid himself as a “reasonable” 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 quite than a real dedication to the difficulty. 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 have been accepted by the federal government in 2019 and put into observe in 2020. Representatives of feminist NGOs and ladies’s shelters celebrated this as a hit, simply as they’re now celebrating the brand new regulation, as progress within the struggle towards gender-based violence.
I consider that this new authorized modification will do little or no to vary 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 rapidly and effectively, and even when each report ends in an extended jail sentence, the prison justice system can’t give survivors what they really want: 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 answer 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 won’t preserve us secure – greater sentences for violent crime will not be related to decrease charges of violent crime.
Within the former Yugoslavia, girls had alternatives free of charge schooling and mass employment in state-supported industries. For the primary time within the area’s historical past, they might obtain monetary independence. As we speak, with the proliferation of low-paid and precarious part-time jobs, employment now not ensures monetary independence. The normalisation of ladies’s insecure employment places them at larger danger of turning into economically depending on their companions, making it tougher for them to go away or report circumstances of violence.
The struggle towards these abuses has been relegated virtually totally to the prison justice system, ignoring the socio-economic local weather through which such violence thrives. The feminist critique of the jail answer has been an necessary element of the wrestle 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 comparable to prisons and the police to handle and forestall crimes of gender violence. In southeastern Europe, the Feminist Autonomous Centre for Analysis (FAC), based mostly in Athens, argues in favour of other notions of justice that aren’t based mostly 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 reviews are extra saturated with information of home violence than ever earlier than. Girls’s organisations broadly acknowledge that what is required, along with harder sentences, is holistic prevention. This would come with early schooling programmes comparable to civic, well being and sexual schooling for kids in main or pre-school programmes. However essentially the most seen advocacy nonetheless focuses on sentencing and the judicial course of. The dearth of well-designed prevention programmes for each victims and perpetrators, delivered by professionals, appears to have been swept underneath the carpet in favour of harsher sentences as the answer.
Globally, crimes of sexual and home violence are underreported and so statistically underrepresented. Girls around the globe face sufferer blaming, re-traumatisation, lack of monetary help and courtroom circumstances which are 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 danger of being killed after they lastly resolve to go away their abusive companions.
A survey performed in 2022 confirmed that 95% of ladies 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 speak in regards to the abuse even to their closest kin, 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. Submit-war privatisation in Croatia led to the systematic devaluation and de-funding of public well being, schooling and welfare programmes. Social employees come underneath assault when circumstances of home violence are uncovered within the media, however there may be little acknowledgement that your complete welfare system has change into chronically ineffectual, unable to offer companies to those that want them.
I want to emphasise right here the semantic and ideological significance of labelling the homicide of ladies as femicide, and the highly effective message it sends to society. Nevertheless, to advocate for legislative change alone can imply ignoring the basis causes of patriarchal violence.
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Movie star-led, middle-class initiatives like #Spasime illustrate what political sociologist Alison Phipps, in her e-book Me, Not You: The Hassle with Mainstream Feminism, calls “political whiteness”. This “describes a set of values, orientations and behaviours that […] embrace 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 commonly 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 quite than repressive, and shaming and punishment are seen as efficient methods for stopping future violence.
In Croatia social employees are routinely on the receiving finish of abuse, however the identical therapy isn’t utilized to the police. Typically the identical law enforcement officials who’re referred to as upon to arrest perpetrators of abuse are themselves abusers and rapists. In August 2023, two law enforcement officials have been charged with raping and abusing an acquaintance a number of instances in Lika County. In September 2023, they have 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 resulted in 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 so as to shield non-public pursuits. And well-publicised reviews of police brutality towards migrants on the Bosnian border don’t appear to have led to larger 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 a substitute 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 intention is to not actually change the established order. The prison justice system alone can’t ship social justice, however it may possibly crush essentially the most susceptible members of our communities, together with survivors of abuse. The issues of transphobia and advocacy for the abolition of intercourse work, that are necessary issues amongst some Croatian feminists, partly clarify the convenience with which mainstream feminism has change into entangled with the prison justice system. In case your first precedence isn’t the liberation of all, it turns into acceptable to throw essentially the most marginalised members of our society underneath the bus. But when girls’s security can solely be assured by way of 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 wrestle towards patriarchal violence can be the wrestle towards the repressive organs of the capitalist state.
