When the System Stays Silent, Women Die

“They killed my golden child!” In the Shtip dialect, almost breathless, worn out with pain, Slobodan Peshev repeats the same words several times, as if trying to convince himself that his daughter Emilija is no longer alive. She was killed by her partner at the moment she wanted to leave him, because the love they had was more painful than tender. Repeatedly abused, often physically and even more often psychologically, Emilija was unable to defend herself against the strong hands of her partner, who, after killing her, turned himself in to the police.

“He was in prison for 7–8 years. He’d been out for a year and was with her for 2–3 months. He’s not her husband,” Slobodan explains.

“We knew she was going out with him. He’d come, they’d go out, they’d argue, he beat her, he abused her. It was reported to social services, to the police – the police know everything! The police know everything. And social services. They said, Slobodan, this is your family business, a family problem. They told me, we’ll come if something happens,” Slobodan recalls.

About 500 kilometres from Shtip, where Emilija was killed, in Podgorica, Montenegro, at almost the same time – in November last year – 39-year-old Gorica Medojević was beaten to death. Three months earlier, in August the same year, 33-year-old Biljana Pavićević was stabbed to death by her former husband, Miljan Bošković. Twenty days before she was killed, Pavićević had filed a complaint against her former husband for threats he had made against her, after which Bošković was detained, but the prosecution stated that “Bošković’s actions did not contain elements of a criminal offence”. He was ordered to stay at least 50 metres away from her, which, after a verbal argument, he violated and killed her with a knife.

“In Montenegro, 16 women have been killed in the last five years, which means at least one woman is killed every four months. When we look at the region and talk about twenty, thirty or fifty women killed a year, we get the impression that this is not a serious problem in Montenegro. But if you compare the number of women killed with Montenegro’s population, we are at the top in Europe. What is a big problem when we talk about femicides is the fact that after every killing you can see that the women had often turned to institutions for help, but there was no adequate response and in the end they were killed. After women are killed, we still have no established practice of analysing cases to see what the shortcomings were and what needs to be corrected to make sure no more women are killed in future. What is also missing is that almost no one is ever held accountable. When failures are identified and it is found that certain institutions did not react, there is no defined personal responsibility, which sometimes makes people take a more relaxed attitude. They simply know, somewhere, that they will bear no responsibility if they don’t react adequately – and the essence lies in risk analysis and the assessment and safety plan, which must be adequate. After the last killing, in August last year, too, we have a situation where the murdered woman had reported violence and protective measures had been imposed – a restraining order and a ban on harassment – but she was killed twenty days after those measures were imposed. No one had a safety plan or a risk analysis, and we still have not received an answer as to why no one is held accountable,” says Nada Koprivica from the SOS Hotline for Victims of Violence in Nikšić.

After two prison sentences for physical abuse, a seventy-year-old mother in Srbobran, a small town in Serbia, could not save herself from her own child when her son killed her. This happened on Christmas Day, at the very start of the year, after 24 women had been killed in Serbia in 2024, according to Safe House data.

“When a woman reports violence, she first faces the police, where she gives a statement and so on, and the problem is that police officers are generally not sensitised in their work – and neither are those in the prosecution and the court, when we get to the proceedings later. This is a problem, and that is why we always stress that it is important for them to be trained to become more sensitive in their work, especially those who come into direct contact with the victim. On the other hand, the prosecution is very slow to launch proceedings. Also, in the end not enough sentences are handed down compared with the number of reported cases. The same applies to the court, when we talk about the length of the court proceedings themselves, which are very, very slow. In that case, Serbia needs to improve its protection mechanisms, given that it has signed and ratified the Istanbul Convention. However, we are still not sufficiently aligned with it. For example, statistics from 2023 show that in more than 28,000 reported cases of violence, the perpetrator was a man in more than 82 per cent of cases, while on the other hand, the person who suffered violence was female in more than 70 per cent of cases. In this context, Serbia still does not have good enough mechanisms. Also, compared with 2022, in 2023 there was a decrease in the filing of misdemeanour charges for violations of urgent measures or for extending urgent measures. That’s how it all works, and that’s what happens when a woman reports violence,” says Staša Ivković from the Association for the Empowerment and Development of Citizens “Ohrabreni”.

Femicide must be legally recognised as a separate criminal offence

In just eleven months of 2024, around 1,800 cases of domestic violence were processed in Montenegro. The Police Directorate registered almost 750 cases of domestic violence or similar criminal offences and around 1,050 misdemeanours. Because of the staggering data that “one in three women in Montenegro experiences some form of violence”, civil society has on several occasions called on the Government and the competent institutions to treat this as the most important social problem and to address both penalties for perpetrators and preventive measures.

Since practice has shown that prevention and protection of victims of violence have failed desperately, the NGO sector demanded that femicide be defined by law as a criminal offence, that penalties for repeat offenders be stricter, that victims be guaranteed protection if a restraining order is imposed on the perpetrator, and that enforcement of that order be strengthened. It is increasingly common for the ongoing violence women suffer to end in murder, even though the killer is registered as an abuser or has previously been held accountable in some way. Last week the Ministry of Justice announced a public consultation on a new Draft Criminal Code, under which femicide is to become a criminal offence, which has not been the case until now.

“For many years we advocated changes to the legal framework that would toughen penalties for gender-based violence against women and domestic violence, and now, with the latest Draft Criminal Code, which is in public consultation, femicide is recognised as a separate criminal offence – the killing of a woman because of her sex. However, we strongly advocate greater use of protective measures and risk assessment. Although it is commendable that the Ministry of Justice has recognised femicide as a separate criminal offence, I think what we lack is adequate prevention, and our primary concern is the protection of victims. To protect women’s lives, including through criminal law, I hope that penal policy will be significantly toughened,” says Maja Raičević, executive director of the Women’s Rights Centre in Podgorica.

The Center for Investigative Journalism of Serbia (CINS) analysed 117 cases of femicide between 2014 and the end of 2022 that reached court. According to that research, fewer than half of these cases were classified as aggravated murder. In almost 70 per cent of the verdicts, the men were sentenced to up to 15 years in prison or referred to psychiatric treatment. But neither the Ministry of Interior nor the judicial authorities have official data on the number of femicide cases. The reason is that femicide is not recognised as a criminal offence in Serbia.

The killing of a woman can be classified as aggravated murder, with sentences ranging from ten years to life imprisonment, or as domestic violence resulting in death – with sentences of up to a maximum of 15 years in prison. For a killing to be classified as aggravated, it must meet at least one of certain “criteria”.

Staša Ivković says it is important for femicide to be recognised as a criminal offence, because it is not an “ordinary” murder. It is the killing of a woman because she is a woman.

“Recognising the specific nature of this crime shows that femicide is not just a murder – an ‘ordinary’ murder – because it often involves patterns of behaviour historically conditioned by everything we have been taught, namely patriarchal values, attitudes, control, domination, the marginalisation of women and so on; a specific criminal offence makes it possible to see this context and call things by their real name. On the other hand, there is raising awareness of gender-based violence. So we will be aware of how harmful all these attitudes are – misogyny, sexism and marginalisation throughout history – and therefore, in the end, when we talk about sanctions, we will come up with appropriate sanctions for the perpetrators of this crime,” she concludes.

A battle against gender stereotypes too

In Macedonia the situation is much better, at least on paper. Significant improvements have been made to legislation on violence against women – not only the Law on Prevention of Violence against Women and Domestic Violence, but in 2023 the Criminal Code was also amended to align it with the requirements of the Istanbul Convention. Macedonia is the first country in the region to criminalise femicide as an aggravated form of murder, and institutions, authorities and the judiciary have a basis to use these qualifications when dealing with such cases – femicides, i.e. the killing of a woman simply because she is a woman.

“On the ground, the problem is again the weak implementation of the laws; the problem is again that in the judicial system we see very long and slow proceedings, and we see that the sentences handed down to perpetrators are very lenient. Further action on legislation must go in that direction: the Criminal Code needs to be made more precise and we need stricter sanctions. But if we don’t have gender-sensitive people – prosecutors and judges – to process all of it, in the end we still won’t see results. We will again end up with women who have reported many times to the Centre for Social Work, to the police and everywhere violence can be reported, and in the end someone will kill them with 40 stab wounds, almost in the street, in front of many people who witness it – and unfortunately they will even condemn the woman. That is, the question will again be asked: what did she do to provoke something like that?” says Sanela Shkriel, activist and former MP.

Court statistics for last year show that out of a total of 120 cases concerning the criminal offences of “inflicting bodily harm in the course of domestic violence” and “endangering security in the course of domestic violence”, 28 ended with the proceedings being dropped, 32 with a prison sentence, 45 with a suspended sentence, and the rest with a suspended sentence followed by either protective supervision or psychiatric treatment.

But for the families of those killed, no sentence is enough. What causes them even more pain is that they themselves can do nothing to punish the killer.

“The death penalty! The death penalty for all those sick people, not letting them walk free around town and abuse people. Violent people like that shouldn’t be walking around,” Emilija’s mother repeated several times through tears during the conversation.

What drives abusers to femicide? Abusers most often do it out of a sense of control, jealousy, hatred or deep-rooted patriarchal values that devalue women. Society often reacts with shock and condemnation, but systemic problems – ineffective protection, tolerance of violence and slow justice – lead to such cases being repeated.

Gender stereotypes also play a key role in sustaining a culture of violence and discrimination against women that can lead to femicide. Traditional beliefs that men should be dominant and women submissive create an environment in which violence against women is seen as “normal” or justified.

“We have witnessed many cases where women were killed in the most brutal, most monstrous way in the middle of the street. And what is even more frightening for me, if we follow the reactions after those events, is that even where we would expect empathy and compassion from those around us for what happened to these women, unfortunately we see condemnation even there. And that speaks of a bigger and deeper problem – the origin of why we are witnessing such cruel and monstrous killings. It is still a society full of gender stereotypes; we are still talking about an unequal distribution of power between men and women. So we still put women in certain frames – patriarchal society and those values put her in certain expected frames and roles – and women who try to step out of those frames and roles may face such situations and, unfortunately, end up like that,” explains Sanela Shkriel.

The same causes of femicide also appear in Montenegro.

“There are many towns in the north of Montenegro where the street is not a place to meet a woman. Why? Because it’s probably not considered moral for a woman to go about her business or to have a close or wider circle of friends – that’s another heresy here. If you look at these towns, you’ll see squares and promenades with 90 per cent men and 10 per cent women on the streets. That is ultimately the basis on which we can build the story further. In somewhat more developed communities today, economic violence against women is very common. Women earn money today, but who controls that money is a big unknown. The data, as I said, are desperate, because some of our internal research shows that women, despite their salaries and benefits, so to speak ‘steal’ 5, 10, 50 euros that they don’t declare to their husbands, so that they can maintain a basic illusion of some communication and social cohesion, so that they too can function unhindered in society,” says Rebeka Čilović from “Polygon for Women’s Excellence – Sofija”.

Serbia shows no difference in the causes of the killing of women either. One of the most comprehensive studies on the topic was carried out by the Autonomous Women’s Centre, an NGO founded to prevent violence against women. According to this research, between 2011 and 2023 as many as 406 women and girls were killed in Serbia. The largest number of femicides took place in Belgrade, just under 20 per cent. Most of the women killed were between 46 and 55 years old. Ivković explains that such data are a combination of different factors – social, economic, historical and cultural.

“First, I would definitely mention the culture that existed and is now suppressed, but is simply changing with generations: that violence used to be a source of shame. It still is, but to a much lesser extent. In other words, women kept silent above all because of the stigma in society, especially in smaller towns. Violence was something private, a private family matter, and anything that went further, outside the family, was simply shameful,” she says.

Our interviewee adds that in the past women were more economically dependent on men and tried to preserve their marriages at all costs – because of social norms.

The research also showed that the most unsafe place for a woman in Serbia is her home. Namely, 54.68 per cent of women were killed in the house or flat where they lived with their partner or with another person who killed them. In more than half of the cases, 52 per cent to be precise, women were killed by their partners.

They were most often killed with tools (37 per cent of cases) or weapons (32 per cent), or were beaten to death (22 per cent) or strangled (seven per cent of cases). After the killing, 117 perpetrators took their own lives immediately afterwards, and 44 attempted to.

Those whose lives were “burned” and who lost their loved ones to a violent person, regardless of where they live, are united in pain and send the same message as Emilija’s mother:

“There are many people like him. They should lock them up – the death penalty or life, or let them stay in a psychiatric hospital. Today it’s my child, tomorrow someone else’s, and every day there will be victims. As if there’s no law for them.”

This content was produced by the Institute of Communication Studies.

Journalists: Katerina Topalova Dejanovska, Aleksandra Mudreša (Montenegro), Dunja Marić (Serbia)

Camera: Sladjan Miloshevski, Sladjan Fatikj

Editing: Majda Boshnjak Atanasovska

The audio clips and charts in this article are in Macedonian.

This article was translated from Macedonian using artificial intelligence (AI). The original Macedonian version is available here.