We cannot punish our way out of femicide
Every time a woman is murdered in Kosovo, we demand harsher punishments. But what if we have been asking the wrong questions all along?
Regardless of whether a perpetrator receives 20 years, 30 years or life imprisonment, the woman he has murdered is not coming back.
I think we need to have a particularly uncomfortable conversation about the role of Centers for Social Work and the professionals involved in protecting victims.
We need professionals who understand the dynamics of domestic violence, who can recognize coercion and assess risk, who are capable of maintaining professional independence and who understand that their responsibility is to protect victims.
If she has no income, no housing and no meaningful support, what alternatives are we actually offering her?
Why are we so focused on teaching girls how not to become victims, instead of also teaching boys how not to become perpetrators?
Kosovo would benefit from an independent, multidisciplinary mechanism dedicated to systematically examining femicide and developing evidence-based approaches to prevention.
Furtuna Sheremeti
Furtuna Sheremeti is a criminologist and legal scholar specializing in state crime, state harms, transitional justice and international criminal law. She holds an MSc in Criminology and Criminal Justice from the University of Oxford and is completing her PhD at KU Leuven in Belgium. She teaches at the Faculty of Law at the University of Prishtina and serves as a legal consultant to Rexhep Selimi’s defense team before the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague.
DISCLAIMERThe views of the writer do not necessarily reflect the views of Kosovo 2.0.