The first recorded femicide in Serbia in 2024 was a double murder.
As reported in the media, a man under the influence of alcohol broke down the door of a house in the village of Rakovac, Vojvodina, and accosted his ex-wife and her mother.
He killed them both, called the police and waited at the scene of the crime.
The murder of women in the family home is not uncommon. Data from the organization Autonomous Women’s Center (AWC) show that this is precisely the least safe place for women victims of violence.
The figures also show that the majority of victims were aged 35 or older. Vanja Macanović from the AWC says this is to do with the patriarchy: even today, older women are ashamed to report violence or divorce.
“Media coverage brings to light: ‘Aha, the woman endured years and years of violence’. Everyone knew but said nothing. (…) These are women who have lived with violence for a long time.”
The Centre for Investigative Journalism of Serbia (CINS) previously analysed 117 femicides that were brought to court. Bizarre mitigating circumstances were cited in numerous cases, and sentences reduced.
When a man harassed his wife, threatened to kill her and ultimately beat her to death with a metal bar in the city of Kruševac, the court adduced the mitigating circumstance that he was “a family man, the father of two adult children with whom he lives in the same household”.
Kosana Beker from the organisation FemPlatz considers this problematic in the light of courts’ usual practice.
“Let’s say a man is found guilty of aggravated burglary. It’s common for his family and children to be treated as a mitigating circumstance when passing judgement. When it comes to femicide, the courts simply recycle that justification as they’ve done a hundred times before.”
The AWC data shows that women are most often killed by their current or former partners.
But there may be more such cases because Serbia does not keep statistics on the number of women murdered.
Organisations that deal with the issue arrive at information through media reports and police statements, but some instances remain far from the public eye, so nothing is known about those women.
These organisations have repeatedly demanded that the authorities participate in monitoring the problem so that it can be solved. Similar calls have recently come from institutions.
In July 2024, the Commissioner for the Protection of Equality, Brankica Janković, demanded that the Ministry of Justice establish a mechanism to monitor femicides.
“This data is a prerequisite for a proper understanding of violence, as well as for the planning of measures and activities aimed at preventing it, and also for the protection of victims – including potential future ones,” the letter to the Ministry states.
However, research by the European Data Journalism Network demonstrates that inadequate official data is a problem in the European Union as well. Nongovernmental organisations are shown to be better at monitoring femicide than public institutions. This was the case in Greece, Italy, France and Spain.
In partnership with the European Data Journalism Network
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