Contributed by: Biljana Brankovic, Serbia National VAW Monitor

The Ministry of Labor, Employment and Social Policy of the Republic of Serbia prepared a framework for the National Strategy for Combating Violence (draft version). Analyses and recommendations provided relate to different forms of violence (violence against children, women, elderly, disabled, refugees, etc.).

The Ministry has created a Task Force, which is responsible for designing and writing this Framework. The Task Force is composed of twelve persons: eleven state officials (representatives of ministries and other relevant state institutions) and just one member of the NGO sector (even this person was a representative of an NGO active in protection of children’s rights). Women’s groups active in providing support to victims were not represented in the Task Force. On the other hand, members of women’s NGOs wrote many studies, statistics and other data quoted in this Framework.

The framework contains description of legal provisions, statistical data on the current situation regarding the prevalence of different forms of violence, information on projects on protection and prevention, and recommendations. In the chapter devoted to the analysis of the current situation (scope and forms of violence), the authors of the Framework admitted that a low sensitivity of employees in Centers for Social Work and medical centers contributes to the low visibility of domestic violence. Precisely, it said, “Data about violence against women, children, elderly and disabled that could be found in social and medical institutions are even less complete and less systematized. The main reason is a lack of standardized/uniform mechanism and criteria for registering these data. However, a low sensitivity of employees in these institutions for recognizing this phenomenon certainly also contributes to its insufficient visibility” (cited in: Ministry of Labor, Employment and Social Policy, 2005).

The entire text of the Framework is available in Serbian.