Europe, Headlines, Human Rights

SOCIETY-SERBIA: Wars Over But Family Violence Continues

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, May 20 2004 (IPS) - Shelters for battered women and abused children are closing down all over Serbia for lack of money.

"There were only a few shelters in the country in the past four years and the last one, this in Belgrade, will have to close soon," Vesna Stojanovic from the Counseling Service for Victims of Family Violence told IPS.

The only remaining shelter left in Serbia in a quiet suburb of Belgrade has existed four years. It has given shelter over this period to about 200 women and 300 children for periods of four to eight months while they struggled to escape family violence and start a new life.

Seven women and their eight children are living here at present. "It is from here that children continued to go to school or to kindergarten," Stojanovic says. "It is from here that their mothers searched and found jobs."

The shelter needed about a thousand dollars a month to meet its expenses. After foreign donors cut that aid at the beginning of this year, it has found it hard to keep going.

"Finances were the main reason for a couple of other shelters to close down and we remain the last," Stojanovic says.

Appeals to authorities have not helped. They say they are short of funds, and the plea for aid has come too late because they have allocated funds already from the city budget.

The shelter houses only a handful now, but Stojanovic says about 3,000 women who have come to the counseling service over the past four years are only the tip of the iceberg.

"Family violence threatens to become the trademark of Serbia," says psychologist Jasna Milosevic. She was involved in an extensive research study on family violence published last year. It was the first such study in three decades.

"We found out that a third of women are regularly subjected to family violence," she told IPS. "Non-educated women believe it is the tradition, while the educated ones are aware of its real nature. Violence is often the third partner in many marriages."

Little or nothing is being done to prevent family violence despite a new law, experts agree. It is seen as a private family matter.

The new law introduced last year provides for 10 years imprisonment for grave assaults and up to 40 years if the crime is judged to be attempted murder. But the law does not seem to have brought a decline in family crimes.

Besides women, children fall victims to family violence and often to gross abuse that includes sexual molestation.

"Sexual abuse is an absolute taboo in this conservative society," says Marija Masanovic from Beosupport, an NGO for abused children. "But it is often connected to family violence."

Each year Beosupport receives about 1,000 phone calls reporting abuse of children. Some 25 percent of calls deal with sexual molestation, she says.

"That is what we know, but there are many hidden cases of course," Masanovic says. More and more younger people are emerging as victims.

"Psychologists can tell that they suspect sexual abuse only when children start school, as such kids have different behaviour, but the wall of silence cannot be broken and the molestation often continues through adolescence," she adds.

Rejection of the possibility of sexual abuse within a family often leads to the abused child being thrown out of the house rather than the perpetrator, Masanovic says.

It is not just family violence and abuse that threaten children in Serbia, experts say. These go hand in hand with the poverty that engulfed the country since the wars that tore former Yugoslavia apart in the 1990s.

A United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) report released last month says a third of two million children in Serbia are endangered in different ways, mostly by poverty.

The report ‘Poverty With Many Faces’ says about 600,000 children are living on the edge of the poverty line, while 200,000 are below it.

"This means that the potential of the country is in danger," UNICEF coordinator Anne Lisa Swenson said at a press conference last week. "This also represents the biggest challenge for the government, as the young and the current generation of 15 to 24 year olds is on the leading edge of the transition in Serbia and Montenegro."