ZAGREB, March 9, 2019 – As part of the European project, Building more effective protection: transforming the system for combating violence against women, the ombudsman’s office for gender equality on Friday released a media ethics code with guidelines on raising awareness when reporting about violence against women and femicide, and the document was accepted by 12 local and national media outlets on the occasion of International Women’s Day.
As part of the 500,000 euro project, the ombudsman’s office and Women’s Room – Centre for Sexual Rights, conducted a survey on the way media outlets report about violence against women in Croatia and the media code was formulated based on the findings of that research.
“We wanted to see how media outlets reported about and how they perceived domestic violence and violence against women and how they reported about femicide and women who are killed by someone close to them,” Ombudswoman Višnja Ljubičić said.
The survey of media outlets covered articles on web portals and in daily newspapers in the period between 2012 and 2016. The results showed that the media often disclosed the identity of the victims, speculated on the perpetrators’ motives and downplayed violence, describing it as “excessive” love by the perpetrator for their victim or that fun went too far, suggesting that the victim is somehow responsible, which is a violation of the code of ethics of journalism.
The basic guidelines recommend clear condemnation of violence in the media. The code recommends that the perpetrator be put in correlation to the perpetrator of an offence or criminal act, and that the victim should in no way be considered to be co-responsible nor should their private life be brought into question, particularly in cases of sexual violence.
The code also recommends that the victim’s identity should not be disclosed because this just additionally stigmatises them.
Ljubičić underscored that one of the guidelines recommends that reports on violence against women should be put in the context of gender-based violence. “According to data from the Interior Ministry, of the total number of domestic violence offences in 2018, in 78% of the cases, men were the perpetrators and in 22% they were women,” she said.
The same data indicates that last year in 3,198 criminal offences with elements of violence committed by someone close to the victim, 76% of the victims were women and 24% men and that of the 2,100 perpetrators of criminal offences among close persons, 91% were men and 9% women.
Ljubičić underscored that this is gender-based violence in fact because of the disproportion of women victims.
The national police director Nikola Milina said that in over 70% of femicide, perpetrators do not try to disguise the crime, and most frequent motives are jealousy, dysfunctional family relations and mental diseases of perpetrators.
More news about the status of women in Croatia can be found in the Politics section.
