Violence against women

General

Published:

January 2003

INTRODUCTION

The violence against women was taken into account in international documents only since 1993, when the United Nations approved a declaration calling for the elimination of violence against women in all its forms, from violence within marriage and sexual harassment in the workplace to female genital mutilation and forced prostitution. These issues were discussed further at the UN Fourth Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995. At about the same time, the Council of Europe issued a declaration with strategies to fight violence against women in a democratic Europe. Through the World Health Organization, violence is viewed also as a female health issue.

According to the studies published, at least one in three women globally has been beaten, coerced into sex or experienced abuse in her lifetime; 4 million women and girls are trafficked annually; more than 90 million African women and girls are victims of female genital mutilation; 50% of battered women have been killed by their partners, while in some countries this number amounts up to 70% of all murdered women; women become the victims of their partners in more cases than in all the cases of car accidents, rapes and robberies together; almost two thirds of the victims endure long-term violence, while more than half of them experience violence daily.

Not all violence committed in the world is considered criminal in the sense that victims of violence are adequately protected by the legislative system or tradition. Domestic violence is often considered a private matter. Therefore, violence against women committed in the home is not always reported or considered a right issue. Two of the most common forms of violence against women are abuse and coerced sex by an intimate male partner.

Domestic violence is generally agreed to be the most under-reported crime as it is widely considered a private matter, and, therefore, the full extent of it in the family is not known.

The existing results of the available studies indicate also that gender-related violence has increased during the transition.

This research uses the experiences from the countries that have gone through or are still going through the process of transition in order to point out the existence of violence against women in all the segments of the society, and to give us a detailed and systemic insight into the legislature as well as the statistics concerning women victims of violence. This research also aims at sensitizing the public and the media, and thus presents our humble attempt to contribute to the efforts to finally begin treating violence as a serious societal problem.

THE DEFINITION OF THE PROBLEM

The UN Declaration of the elimination of violence against women defines violence as any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or private life.

Violence against women includes, but should not be limited to physical, sexual and psychological domestic violence (battering, sexual violence in the family, marital rape, female genital mutilation and other traditional practices harmful to women, non-spousal violence), violence in the community (rape, sexual abuse and/or harassment at the workplace, educational institutions or elsewhere, trafficking in women, and forced prostitution), and violence perpetrated or condoned by the state.

Violence is manifested in several basic ways, as physical, sexual, psychological, economic, structural and spiritual violence. The largest amount of violence is a combination of physical, sexual and psychological violence with the background of structural violence.

Physical violence includes: pushing, hair pulling, kicking and hitting, burning, biting, strangling, genital mutilation, torture, murder...

Sexual violence is any sexual act committed against the will of the other person, either in the case when the victim does not give the consent or when the perpetrator cannot get it because the victim is a child or a mentally challenged person. This sort of violence includes: sexual teasing, unwanted comments, exhibitionism, unwanted sexual proposals, coercion to participate or watch pornography, unwanted touches, coerced sexual intercourse, rape, incest, painful or humiliating sexual act, coerced pregnancy, trafficking in women and exploiting women in sex industry, procurement, sexual intercourse with a child, sexual intercourse by abusing the position, obscene acts…

Psychological violence consists of various forms of mocking, criticism, threats, isolation, tormenting, public assaults etc.

Economic violence in the first place refers to unequal control over the access to joint resources, denying / controlling the access to money, employment or education. In a wider sense it refers to the destruction of property and theft.

Structural violence includes invisible (but ever-present) obstacles in the realization of basic rights. Those obstacles are reproduced in the very social tissue, i.e. in the uneven distribution of power, which produces inequality and makes it legitimate

Spiritual violence refers to the destruction or devastation of women’s cultural or religious beliefs by ridicule, punishment and coercion to adopt a certain system of beliefs.

THE METHOD OF RESEARCH

This research has been conducted using the method of content analysis. The basic criteria for the choice of cases were the female sex, and an act of violence. The newspaper articles were then analyzed according to the content analysis pattern, which consists of 17 dimensions. In this way, the general data was gathered according to the heading under which the article is found, according to its visibility and the announcement on the front page, to the kind of graphical supplement and the geographical range, but also according to the data on the victim and the perpetrator, to the place and the type of violence, and to the legal status the article is reporting. The data was coded and processed in SPSS. The coding of the text was carried out as a manifest code, thus trying to increase the reliability of the data. Only descriptive analysis was used for the needs of this book.

The objective and the hypotheses of the research

This research aims to determine to what extent the media are covering the problem of violence against women, and the media space that is dedicated to it; what type of violence they most frequently deal with; the geographical range of violence; who the victims and the perpetrators are and what is their relationship. The long-term objective is to open discussions about this underestimated problem, to raise general awareness and to reduce the level of tolerance, especially towards some sorts of violence.

H1: Violence against women is most frequently manifested as physical and sexual violence

H2: Economic and psychological violence, although present in great extent, do not represent a significant sort of violence covered by the media

H3: Violence mostly takes place in a domestic environment, i.e. in the victim’s home

H4: The perpetrators are mostly persons known to the victims, with whom the victims share the same living space

H5: Most victims have experienced more than one type of violence, i.e. the act of violence has manifested itself through various incidents.

The working hypotheses as basic starting points of the research were mainly confirmed.

The problem which should be pointed out is that of not reporting, withholding and not registering of all sorts of violence against women, which makes it very hard to make a realistic estimate of the frequency and the extent of the violence against women, though it can justifiably be supposed that those numbers are large.

THE RESULTS OF THE RESEARCH
The research was conducted during the February 2003. The analysis included 43 daily papers in 9 Eastern European countries [1] (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Czech Republic, Kosovo, Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro + Vojvodina [2] , Slovakia and Ukraine). A total of 563 articles were processed.
As it can be seen in graph no. 1, the number of articles varies – from 13 articles in Kosovo to 123 articles in Croatia. Taking into account the small number of analyzed articles in the majority of the countries, it is obvious that violence against women is not an attractive topic for the media. Further analysis confirms this assumption, and points to the need for the reporting on this topic that is more systemic and of different content in all the countries of Eastern and Central Europe included in this research.
GRAPH 1:

The majority of analyzed articles – as many as 68% of them were found in the 'Black chronicle', and only 32% of them in other sections. If we take into account the subject of this research, such percentage is not surprising. It surely points out how the issue of the violence against women is approached through bare reporting of the facts: the identity of the victim and of the perpetrator, and the nature of the violent act. Very few (almost negligible number) of the articles treat violence against women as a social problem that should be regulated and sanctioned more harshly.
GRAPH 2:

Through the analysis of the cover pages and of the visibility of the articles, we came to the results on the space devoted by the media to covering the violence. As it can be seen in the Graph 3, the majority of the analyzed articles (89%) had not been announced on the cover page.
GRAPH 3:

Furthermore, the articles that cover violence, compared to the other articles in the same section, are in 39% of the cases ones of the less visible, and only in 14% of the cases the most visible.
GRAPH 4:

These facts as well indicate the insensitivity of the media for the issue of violence. As further analysis will show, the analyzed articles mostly report on the violent act that resulted in the murder of a woman. Often the articles cover the brutal murders that were preceded by some forms of physical assault, torture or rape. Judging according to the media space granted to these articles, we couldn’t be surprised at the high level of tolerance toward this problem in society. Such state of affairs also testifies to the need to educate the journalists, as well as to raise the tolerance for the women's issues and for the respect of women's rights.
As shown by the Graph 5, 61,6% of the analyzed articles does not contain a graphical supplement. The text was accompanied by photo in only 38,9% of the articles. The most frequent graphical supplement found in 15,1% of the articles belongs to the category ‘other’ that in most of the cases represents something neutral (the photo of the court or some other institution, the city etc.). The second most frequent supplement is the photo of the perpetrator (9,6%), followed by the photo of the crime scene (7,6%).
GRAPH 5:

The processed data report on the committed violence in 87% of the cases, while only 13% of the articles report on the attempted act of violence.
GRAPH 6:

In accordance with the basic theoretical assumptions, this research confirmed that violence is most frequently manifested as physical and sexual. Economic, and especially psychological violence, though present to great extent, is rarely reported, and thus, not present in newspaper articles. The results of the research show that women are most frequently the victims of physical violence (43,9%), followed by the high percentage of sexual violence (31,6%). Psychological violence was recorded in only 3,2% of the cases. In 11,9% of the cases, woman was the victim of combined forms of violence.
GRAPH 7:

When looking at the age distribution of the victims, we can conclude that women victims of violence belong to all age groups. In the majority of the analyzed articles (26%), the age of the victim is unknown, while in 19 % of the cases there were more victims. Those are mostly the articles that report on the issues of trafficking and prostitution, problems that most of the countries of this region face. Namely, the majority of the total number of women and children victims of trafficking (it is estimated that between 600 000 and 2 000 000 people become the victims of trafficking) comes from the transition countries.
In the Graph 8, it is noticeable that the number of victims decreases with the increase of age.
GRAPH 8:

If we disregard the category ‘unknown’, the data more clearly shows the connection between the number of victims and the victims’ age. Most of the victims of violence are found in the age group up to 18 years of age, which confirms the results of similar studies.
GRAPH 9:

Unlike the age distribution of the victims, most of the perpetrators are aged between 19 and 54. In fewer number of cases, the perpetrators are younger than 18 (4%), or older than 55 (3%). There are few differences in other categories.
GRAPH 10:

As shown in the chart below, the majority of the perpetrators belong to the category of ‘more perpetrators’ in 16,5% of the cases, followed by the category ‘husband, partner’ in 15,1%. WHO’s recently released World Report on Violence and Health notes that one of the most common forms of violence against women is that performed by a husband or a male partner. The “private” nature of this type of violence often makes it invisible since it happens behind closed doors or since legal systems and cultural norms often treat it not as a crime but as a family matter or a normal part of life. Furthermore, more than one third of the perpetrators (35,5%) belong to the category of current or ex-partner or relatives. If the category of acquaintance and co-workers is added to this percentage, data shows that in 51,2% of the cases the perpetrator is a person known to the victim.
GRAPH 11:

Our results also point to the shocking fact that an act of violence in 39,3% of the cases takes place in the victim’s home. This is followed by a public space, both outdoors and indoors.
GRAPH 12:

Under the category incidents, shown in the chart below, any form of violence the victim has been subjected to is registered - not only the final consequence. The most represented category of incidents here is murder, which appears in 19,9% of the articles, followed by theft (17,41%), rape (12,97%) and physical assault (11,9%). The graph gives a detailed insight into the range of violence the victims were subjected to.
GRAPH 13:

The chart 14 gives a short insight into the legal status of violence against women that was covered by the media during February. The majority of analyzed articles (28%) cover the reported cases of violence, followed by the investigation (27%) and the indictment (18%).
GRAPH 14:

CONCLUSION
Many countries of Eastern and Central Europe were swept away by the wave of crisis in the process of transition. The transition initiated swift and chaotic changes that resulted in a need for the redefinition of cultural and national values. The demand for joining the European Union, and the wish for involvement in multicultural, developed Europe, brought a series of problems that needed attention to the surface.
The situation of women in extremely patriarchal societies is marginalized on all levels of social existence, women are underrepresented in Parliaments, they are almost non-existent in the decision-making bodies, they make for the majority of the unemployed, they are paid less for the same amount of work and do not have equal opportunities to advance in their work. The mechanisms for developing the concept of equality, even if they exist, are not functional.
Violence against women, as one of the key problems that should be confronted by every society in a more serious and efficient way, is also greatly present in the countries included in this research. The analysis of 43 daily newspapers, and 563 articles from 9 countries, confirm the fact that this problem is marginalized in the media, and also emphasizes the need for sensitization and further education of the journalists.
Women become victims of violence regardless of their age; they are assaulted mostly by their intimate partners or persons known to them in their own homes. They are victims of all forms of violence, but this violence is most often manifested as physical and sexual violence, they are murdered, assaulted, tortured, raped.
We hope that the results of this research will at least partially contribute to the struggle against violence against women, and raise the public awareness in order to attempt to put an end to violence against women in the daily practice of the society we live in.

[1] Informational documentation center from Moldova also participated in the regional research, but during February not one case of violence against women was recorded.

[2] REWIND NET in Serbia and Monte Negro represent two centers that engaged in this research separately.

Violence against women

Violence against women

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