In the period from October 30th to November 1st, the Europe’s Women against Violence Network organized an international conference in Budapest titled: “From counter effects to effective response: stand together to protect women and girls from all forms of violence”. The local women's organization NANE was in charge of the organization of the event, and the venue of the conference was chosen for the support and solidarity with women's (but also human rights in general) organizations in Hungary, which are subject to increasing control, political pressures and political pressures due to the growing wave of nationalism and rightwing attacks. A total of 20 activists from 11 organizations of the Women against Violence Network from Serbia were present at the conference.
One of the introductory speeches was delivered by Dubravka Šimonović, UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women, who stressed that the priority in the field of preventing violence against women should be the application of instruments and all other documents that already exist (CEDAW, Beijing Platform, Istanbul Convention).
The conference hosted more than 45 lectures, and the first day of the conference was dedicated to various topics from the implementation of the Istanbul Convention, through the use of new technologies for committing violence against women, the way in which violence affects women of members of multiple marginalized groups to protecting children in cases of intimate partner violence. Workshops organized the following day covered issues such as online violence, support for survivors of violence, the position of lesbian and transgender women, sexual violence, the role of the health care system in supporting women who survived violence, the development of an integrated response to different forms of violence against women, an approach based on the needs of the victim, showing the influence of women's organizations through data, the consequence of gender neutrality and the self-esteem of women's organizations. Representatives of the Women against Violence Network Aleksandra Nestorov from the Autonomous Women's Center and Zorica Šurlan from Roma Association Novi Bečej talked about the problem of femicide in Serbia with a special emphasis on the femicide of Roma women.
Conference program is available at: WAVE Conference 2017.pdf