Activists and journalists from Bosnia and Herzegovina, thirty-one of them, reacted publicly today on the occasion of the murder of a woman the day before yesterday in Gračanica, with the aim of greater visibility of femicide and better familiarization of the public with the significance of its causes and consequences.
We transmit the reaction as a whole:
“Although it has become painful and humiliating to count the women who were killed, first of all out of respect for their families and friends who live with a huge loss, it is impossible to remain silent about the murder of a woman. For the family and the closest, it does not matter whether their mother, daughter, sister or friend is the first, sixth or fifteenth victim in the statistics.
For them, she was the only one.
According to media reports, five murders of women, one child and two attempted murders have been recorded in Bosnia and Herzegovina since the beginning of the year. The youngest victim was two years old, and the oldest was 79 years old. Four murders were committed with firearms. Three murders were committed by the current spouse, one by the ex-partner, one by the father, and one by the victim’s brother-in-law. In five cases, the perpetrators committed suicide after the murder. This means that on average every month we lose one woman, one life. After every murder, the same question is asked – could it have been prevented?
However, we never get an answer. Serious, independent and comprehensive analyzes of the actions of all competent institutions are not carried out in order to determine whether there were failures, who bears responsibility and what measures need to be improved in order to prevent future murders. Instead, the debate most often boils down to demands for tougher penalties. Although adequate sanctions are important, they alone cannot solve the problem. In a large number of cases, the perpetrators commit suicide after the murder. They are not deterred by the length of the sentence because they commit murder out of the belief that they have the right to decide on another person’s life, that they own a woman, that they can punish her decisions, her freedom or her departure. Such killings are not the result of a momentary loss of control, but of deep-rooted beliefs about power, control and the right to violence.
Equally worrying are the beliefs that we as a society often tacitly accept, that violence happens to other women, that it cannot happen to “good women”, that women remain in violent relationships because they want to, that it is normal to grow up with violence or that the victims themselves are in some way responsible for what happened to them. Such attitudes are not only wrong. They are inhumane, dangerous and directly contribute to social tolerance of violence.
That’s why we demand that every murder of a woman be the occasion for an independent analysis of the actions of all relevant institutions – the police, prosecutor’s offices, courts, centers for social work, health institutions and other services that may have had contact with the victim or the perpetrator. Only by identifying possible omissions and responsibilities can we build a system that will prevent the next murder. Establishing an efficient system of protection and seeking responsibility is not a question of the interests of individual organizations or only women who have survived violence. It is a question of the safety of all citizens, a question of trust in institutions and a question of what kind of society we want to be.
It’s time to stop using euphemisms. When a partner, ex-husband, father or son-in-law kills a woman, it is not a private drama or a “crime of passion”. It is femicide, the killing of a woman because she is a woman, an act of ultimate demonstration of power and ownership. This is a political problem of the first order, not an internal issue of the four walls. A state that does not treat this as a state of emergency is directly complicit in the crime,” states the public reaction of 31 activists and journalists from Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Numbers for help and support
1265 Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina
1264 Republika Srpska
