Violence against women awareness-raising event
at the University of Banja Luka, Republic of Srpska
In honour of International Women’s Day (March 8), the medical students’ association of the University of Banja Luka (SaMSIC) invited students of the Faculty of Medicine and other interested persons to their violence against women awareness-raising event on Saturday March 12, 2016. Some 60 people attended the event, organised by SaMSIC’s human rights and peace (SCORP) coordinator Yamen Hrekes and his team, with the support of SaMSIC president Kristina Rendić, the University of Banja Luka, local NGO Udružene Žene, and the kind assistance of UNFPA and UNWOMEN, as well as a number of local commercial organisations.
Yamen Hrekes opened the event ‘Violence against Women and their Rights’, a topic that continues to pose a serious threat to women and girls’ well-being around the world. Bosnia and Herzegovina signed the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (Istanbul Convention) in 2013, which entered into force in 2014. Various national organisations are working together with international actors to start implementing programmes that focus on the prevention of and the response to violence against women.
On the rainy Saturday morning, the audience was warmly welcomed by Valerija Šaula, vice-rector for international cooperation of the University of Banja Luka. She officially opened the event, and said that it was already a success, considering the sizable number of interested attendees as well as the efficient organisation by SaMSIC.
Yamen introduced the first speaker; Dr. Amela Lolić, vice-minister of Health and Social Welfare of the Republic of Srpska. She presented us with an elaborate report of the Resource Package for Health Care Service Providers’ Response to GBV in Republic of Srpska, which was developed in collaboration with UNFPA Bosnia and Herzegovina. This resource package recognises the important role of the healthcare system, and contributes to a coordinated and multi-sectoral response to gender-based violence, and the development of healthcare quality standards.
The second speaker, Dijana Đurić, a psychologist at Udružene Žene (‘United Women’), an NGO dedicated to the prevention of violence against women and which also offers safe houses for women and child victims of violence, spoke about the types of violence and the psychological impact of violence on women and children. She elaborated on the psychological profiles of both victims and aggressors, and addressed the risk factors for violence on the individual, family, and society-levels. Dijana Đurić also spoke of victims’ ‘survival mechanisms’ when in abusive relationships, such as extreme sympathy towards the aggressor (explaining and justifying his behaviour), and a profound passivity.
Women should take the lead in addressing violence. Dijana Đurić observed how some 80% of attendees were female, similar to the gender division in the Faculty of Medicine. If we want to effectively address violence against women however, efforts must focus on raising awareness among men. Women can do that, they can educate their brothers and their sons. She also asserted that in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as in many other places around the world, domestic violence/intimate partner violence is often seen as a private matter, in which the police or others should not interfere. Lana Jajčević from Udružene Žene, who was present in the audience, confirmed that many women do not call the police when they experience violence.
As the third speaker, I presented an international perspective on violence against women, illustrating the various forms in which violence against women occurs in different regions of the world. I spoke about intimate partner violence – the WHO estimates that 1 in 3 women will experience some form of intimate partner violence in her life – and intimate femicide, when violence escalates to such an extent that a woman is murdered by her current or ex-intimate partner. Some studies in South Africa have made the uncanny conclusion that every six hours, a woman dies at the hands of her partner or ex-partner. I further illustrated this with bride-burning and acid attacks, examples of particularly cruel forms of intimate partner violence that occur primarily in India and other countries in Asia. I talked about honour-based violence and forced virginity tests in the Middle East and northern Africa, where the war between honour and shame is played out on women’s bodies. I also addressed a topic that I have a particular interest in, sexual violence in conflict, which has increasingly received international attention since the 1990s, and after the 2014 Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict in particular. I wanted to emphasise here that although there is a general consensus that sexual violence in conflict impacts women and girls disproportionately, men and boys are also victims and survivors, whose needs must be addressed. Another bitter form of violence against women I addressed was sex-selective abortion and female infanticide, fairly common in China and India. The idea underlying the abortion of killing of female infants, is that not only are girls ‘worth less’, it is economically more viable to have boy children. So-called dowry systems around the world force parents of the bride to transfer a portion of their wealth to the groom and his family. Simply put; a girl costs money, and a boy generates it. This is different in parts of southern Africa, where the groom is supposed to pay ‘Lobola’, or ‘bride-price’ as a compensation to her family. Finally, I spoke about female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C), the painful and dangerous procedure of cutting away young girls’ genital organs such as the labia and clitoris, common in various parts of (east) Africa and the Middle East. Traditional beliefs of what the body of a woman should look like and male control over her sexuality underlie such practices.
As my audience consisted primarily of students of the Faculty of Medicine, I decided to share my own thoughts on the role of the healthcare system in addressing violence against women – in particular intimate partner violence. In 2014, I carried out a study as part of my MSc degree at the Gender, Health & Justice Research Unit at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, a research unit that conducts inter-disciplinary projects aimed at decreasing violence against women in the southern Africa region. The aim of this project was to find out whether South African healthcare practitioners (doctors, nurses) have had any training on intimate partner violence, their beliefs on intimate partner violence, and whether they would or would not screen patients for intimate partner violence and why. It turned out that whereas doctors and nurses were very willing to help, they simply did not know how to; they had no training on intimate partner violence, not in medical school nor in continued professional development training programmes. This made them feel uncomfortable asking questions that they thought might only worsen things. Moreover, there was no effective collaboration between relevant stakeholders, such as the healthcare system, government, criminal justice system, psychologists and social workers, and shelters. And frankly, this holds true for every other country in the world. If the Republic of Srpska wants to effectively address violence against women, the government needs to work together with the hospital, psychologists and social workers, the police and courts, safe houses, and the women themselves, and establish effective communication between these parties. The Resource Package for Health Care Service Providers’ Response to GBV in Republic of Srpska is a good start.
After the presentation, vice-rector Valerija Šaula asked me whether I ever thought that the fight against violence against women ever felt like a ‘mission impossible’. Still when I read women’s stories about the violence they have survived in their homes or in warzones and refugee camps, or when I watch documentaries such as ‘India’s Daughter’, then yes – at times, the fight feels like a mission impossible. But on the other hand, we also see that increasingly, women around the world are organising themselves into groups and organisations, taking a stand against violence. We see that women no longer accept the systematic violation of their rights. That gives me great hope.
When all questions had been asked and answered, Yamen Hrekes concluded the event by emphasising the importance of raising the awareness of violence against women, especially during conflict. He illustrated this idea by sharing his own experience about the empowered position of women in his home country Syria before the war, and the continuous violation of women’s rights in the on-going war. As long as these violent situations continue to exist, we must keep raising awareness, and we must keep fighting. Yamen asserted that is it women themselves, who must take a leading role in this, because “If you educate a man; you educate one person. If you educate a woman; you educate a nation”.
For more information:
Violence against women in Bosnia and Herzegovina
http://www.stopvaw.org/bosnia_and_herzegovina
International Women’s Day
http://www.internationalwomensday.com/
Republic of Srpska, Ministry of Health and Social Welfare http://www.vladars.net/eng/vlada/ministries/MHSW/Pages/default.aspx
Resource Package for Health Care Service Providers’ Response to GBV in Republic of Srpska
http://www.unfpa.ba/novost/9708/resource-package-for-health-care-service-providers-response-to-gbv-in-republic-of-srpska-
Udružene Žene
http://unitedwomenbl.org/
University of Banja Luka, Republic of Srpska
http://www.unibl.org/en
UNFPA in Bosnia and Herzegovina
http://ba.one.un.org/content/unct/bosnia_and_herzegovina/en/home/un-agencies/unfpa.html or http://www.unfpa.ba/
UNWOMEN in Bosnia and Herzegovina
http://ba.one.un.org/content/unct/bosnia_and_herzegovina/en/home/un-agencies/unwomen.html or http://eca.unwomen.org/en/where-we-are/bosnia-and-herzegovina
Gender, Health & Justice Research Unit, University of Cape Town, South Africa
http://ghjru.uct.ac.za/
Rosanne Anholt 