On November 25th – the international day dedicated to combating violence against women and the first day of the 16 Days of Activism against Gender Based Violence campaign – a symposium was organized in Vienna aimed at preventing murders of women just because they’re women.
Ambassador Paul Bekkers, the Director of the OSCE General Secretary’s Office stated on that occasion that we live in a society with entrenched inequality between men and women and as a consequence of that 43 600 women were murdered by their partners or family members across the world in 2012. That is almost four times the number of victims (11 133) from terrorist attacks that same year, Paul Bekkers noted.
Aldo Lale-Demoz, Deputy Director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, emphasized the importance of monitoring, documenting and publicizing cases of such murders world wide. Dubravka Simanovic, UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women, added that states should establish bodies (Femicide Watch) that will monitor and analyze femicide cases on national levels. States must gather, analyze data and report on femicide on national, regional and global levels, that is, they must base their policies for preventing and stopping violence against women on gathered and analyzed data, Simonovic added.
Tamar Dekanosidze from the association of young women lawyers in Georgia talked about the importance of conducting investigations, criminal prosecution and punishing femicide perpetrators and violence against women. Tamar reminded states that they must transparently name the root cause of male violence against women when they talk about it. State representatives must focus on the inequality of power between men and women when they talk about male violence against women, Dekanosidze noted.
Borjana Perunicic, from the Ombudsman’s Office in Serbia, noted the good cooperation between the Ombudsman’s Office and the Autonomous Women’s Center in relation to monitoring femicide in Serbia. Based on the complaints submitted by women’s organizations in cases where violence was reported to institutions prior to the woman being murdered, the Ombudsman begins an overview of the institution’s work, notes what omissions were made and issues recommendations that institutions should implement so as to avoid these omissions in future work. Institutions should inform the Ombudsman on what measures they take.
Ani Jilozyan, an activist from the Armenian Coalition to Stop Violence against Women noted that from 2010 to 2015 at least 30 women were murdered by their current or former partner in Armenia. Since 2010 most of the perpetrators of femicide have still not been charged or convicted to prison. The average jail sentence for femicide in Armenia is 9 years, Ani stated.
One of the conclusions reached at the conference is that support from international organizations should still center on women’s groups who first started working on the problem of violence against women and focused their work on this issue, imposed this problem on their governments and contributed to women realizing some of their basic human rights worldwide.
The symposium was organized by OSCE’s Gender Section in cooperation with the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the UN Academic Council (ACUNS), the Office of the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences, and the Women against Violence Europe (WAVE) Network.