Medica Zenica offers a client-based, holistic approach to women and girls traumatized and victims of violence (including war rape and all other forms of sexualized and gender-based violence) and lobbies at the local, regional and national levels for an improved status of women and girls. Work is provided by around forty (professionals and paraprofessionals, employed and volunteers), experts in different fields, organized in departments that are autonomous in the framework of Medica's Charter.

Fundamental Principles of our Work

As the project grew, some fundamental principles crystallized on which the practical work of women gathered in the project:

• To relate to each woman as a human being, not thinking about her as a victim of violence but rather as a survivor of violence
• To extend to women solidarity and unconditional trust - psychotherapeutic work with her personally without asking her to prove her story. She does not have to earn the right to receive our help
• Protection for women against sensationalism, political exploitation, or other forces that do not directly help in their recovery
• Promoting a woman’s right to choose
• Support and help to women to achieve their right to choose
• Offering help to women regardless of nationality
• Each honest human engagement has its own therapeutic impact
• This work has an indispensable role in broader community work

The activities of the organization:

Services:

• Shelter for women and girls victims/survivors of violence (incl. rape and trafficking in women)
• Psychological work with clients - therapy and counseling (incl. rape and trafficking in women)
• SOS telephone for women and children victims of GBV
• Medical (gynecologic assistance) outreach work to remote rural areas in Bosnia-Herzegovina
• Childcare
• Vocational trainings

Education and trainings in community:

• Psychosocial education sessions for helpers in communities
• Training for non violent conflict transformation and reconciliation
• Psychosocial training of professionals working in governmental and public institutions / services, such as: police, health sector, social sector, schools, courts, judiciary…

Policy advocacy

• Promotion of women’s human rights
• Policy advocacy for the right of women to live without violence
• Policy advocacy for specific social and other rights women survivors of war rape
• Policy advocacy for gender sensible and gender specific institutional practice, laws and it's implementation, state policies and gender equality
• Networking with local, national and international NGOs and international organizations (Incl. BH anti-trafficking network RING, Safe House Network, REWINDnet, WICZnet, StopVaw, WAVE, East West Women, etc.)

Information, documentation and resource Centre

• Library
• Assistance to students, scholars, researchers etc.
• Research on gender/women specific issues
• Media monitoring

Duska Andric-Ruzicic will take the leading role in managing the STOPVAW country page for Bosnia and Herzegovina. Duska worked in the field of marketing and management assistance in several companies from 1985-1990 and as a self-employed marketing consultant from 1990-1992. From 1993 to the present, she has been an activist in Medica Zenica, and has been working professionally for Medica since 1995. Duska has been been trained in gender-based violence and its causes, forms and consequences, policy advocacy, monitoring and evaluation, group dynamics and NGO development, gender/women and development, gender/women identities. Her main area of interest lies in institutional and community changes to combat and prevent violence and other forms of discrimination against women and girls.


 Medica Organizational Structure  
 Medica Contacts