Whenever violence manifests itself in its most drastic forms, and, unfortunately, reality shows us that this is often the case, as was the case with the latest murder of a woman in Sarajevo, the public enters a state of frenetic dismay that leads us to the question of why such cases happen and where we as a community have scheduled. The murders of women in this country are on a terrible rise, the issue of femicide brings this entire society to extremely serious confrontations that we must deal with without hesitation. Because as long as even one life is threatened, left completely unprotected or exposed to abuse, no one in this society can be safe.
In fact, the essential echo of such events refers, first of all, to repeated appeals in the public space, and media vulture that, based on black chronicles, tries to clickbait and attract an audience eager for bloody news. However, after the moment of initial astonishment passes, after everyone writes their comment online, we return again and again to those settings that made violence possible, and the issue of systematically dealing with the increasingly frequent unraveling of emotional or family dramas with murders, especially murders of women, is left exclusively judicial instances and their legal procedures. Thus we reach the point where there is essentially very little wider social questioning, dealing with and prevention of violence. Very little energy is invested in the key questions of why violence occurs, what are its causes, where mistakes were made, and how the situation can be brought to a point where it is possible to protect the life of a woman who has suffered years of violence.
In other words, reactions only come when the worst happens, when another life is extinguished, while any kind of timely action and preventing things from going too far is absent. What most cases of femicide in recent years have in common and alarming is the fact that after the murders of women we generally come to know that the violence did not happen as a result of the current situation, negligence or something similar, but as the culmination of years of abuse and exposure of women to patriarchal violence. To make matters more tragic, testimonies are usually presented to the public that the murdered person usually sought help and protection from the competent institutions on several occasions, which are constitutionally and legally obliged to protect every life of the citizens of this country, but that the help and protection failed, failed or they did not take into account the seriousness of the situation and the threat to life. We are used to authorities, police and other structures approaching the issue of domestic violence most often as something that concerns the private sphere. A large number of experiences of women who reported violence end up in drawers and registers, without serious and decisive action, and when a murder happens, we clearly see that the victim sought protection in every way and the possibility to ensure her life integrity and normal existence.
Easy passing over cases of violence, the deafness of the community and authorities, exposes the vulnerable person to the mercy of the abuser. Everywhere in front of a person seeking protection, walls and obstacles pop up and the space for establishing control over one's own existence is narrowing. We as a community must know that violence against women is not and cannot be an issue of the private sphere, that by agreeing to the marginalization of these cases as sporadic incidents, even though they are happening more and more often, we are actually refusing to accept responsibility and take the necessary steps so that everything that is made it possible to prevent a single woman from ever being more exposed and her life endangered. This is where we come to the question of the deep rootedness of gender inequality in this environment, in the position of a suffocating patriarchy that still dominantly tries to determine and limit the role of a woman, she is reduced to an object obliged to suffer, to adapt to violence and live with it. Until we become aware, until we establish an atmosphere in which equality and equality are guaranteed to every person, we will have cases in which a man perceives a woman as something that belongs to him without any dilemma and whose existence he can decide depending on his emotional disorder or disappointment. Simply, no matter what kind of internal conflict within a marriage or emotional union it was about, nothing and in no case can be a mitigating circumstance or an alibi for the most terrible outcome. And in order to reach a state in which it is possible to change this gloomy image of our society, it is necessary to work permanently and dedicatedly to educate new generations who will promote the position and freedom of women to decide and exist independently, without fear of endangering their lives, as an inalienable right which must be protected and enabled in all ways. We are all, as a community, responsible.
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