No more silence on domestic violence!

The root cause of femicides is a general culture of silence when it comes to violence against women. More than half of all women between the ages of 15 and 72 reported having experienced some form of violence in their lives in a 2018 INSTAT survey, most often intimate violence from a partner or husband. Not only does women’s economic position make them vulnerable to mistreatment (the husband is often the only one with an income); at the societal level, intimate violence is completely normalized.

The latest OECD domestic violence survey from 2018 supports this conclusion. It states that 47 percent of Albanian women surveyed indicated that a good wife obeys her husband even when she disagrees with him. In addition, 19 percent of the women surveyed agreed that it is a wife’s duty to sleep with her husband even if she does not feel like it. Among men, that percentage is most likely a lot higher.

As long as intimate violence remains a private matter, society cannot effectively intervene to combat it. Take, for example, the case of Albana Dedaj. Even though her husband already had to go to prison once for abuse, she was not offered any help from the authorities to protect her from him. After he was released again, he ran into her one day, grabbed her, poured gasoline over her and himself, and then tried to set them on fire with a lighter. Dedaj narrowly escaped and went to work. Her co-workers wondered where the gasoline smell was coming from, but she couldn’t bring herself to tell them what had just happened. She fled to the restroom and put on her work clothes, but the smell didn’t dissipate. In desperation, she went to the outhouse and called the emergency number, but the police refused to pick her up. ‘We are not a cab service, we are the police,’ the man on the other end of the line replied. ‘If you get a chance, take a cab or a bus to the police station.’

Things worked out for Dedaj, but her story is indicative of the lack of help and support for women who are victims of intimate violence. Hence why Young Volunteers, with support from The Action Fund, campaigned against intimate violence last spring. Campaigners held demonstrations against femicide and distributed information in both urban and rural areas about where women can actually go for support if they are experiencing intimate violence.

The Action Fund is proud to support Young Volunteers. Femicide is a large-scale problem that is far from limited to Albania. In the Netherlands, a woman is murdered every eight days, according to the NGO WOMEN Inc. More than half of the perpetrators are the presumed (ex-)partner. This has to change, and now!