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Notes
This included both Serbian and Croatian feminists.
My example is not unique. As Blagojević noted, it was quite common that women who went through difficulties in their private life joined women's groups, and that their activism had a therapeutic effect (Blagojević, 1998: 22).
As one battered woman said: ‘The war is nothing new for me, I have been living in war for years’ (Nikolić-Ristanović, 1996: 204).
Of course at that time, I was not aware of this impact on myself. On the contrary, I felt powerless and wished to do something for so many of those suffering around me.
This is in accordance with research on women's motivation for joining women's groups in Serbia during the war, which shows that during the 1990s three main motives for joining women's groups were: the need to understand and change social reality, their own victimization/negative experience and the wish to oppose the war and alleviate its consequences, that is, to help others (Blagojević, 1998: 21).
At that time, the Women's Studies Centre was an NGO, and, although working under extremely difficult conditions, offered a unique alternative to mainstream and ideological studies.
The Group for women's rights (Grupa za zenska prava) is the predecessor of the Victimology Society of Serbia (www.vds.org.rs).
The most effective common actions of women's groups were those related to issues such as abortion, laws on rape, pornography and prostitution, which most easily united Western feminists as well (Bouchier, 1983: 106; Rowbotham, 1992: 74–76). Obviously, these actions were most effective in terms of preventing negative change or advocating for positive legal changes, since these are issues around which women's groups found a high level of agreement and interest for advocacy. This is not unusual since, as Fireman and Gamson (1979: 28) stressed, mobilization is more likely when collective action is more urgent, and ‘collective action is most urgent when there is no reason to believe that collective goods will be preserved without collective action’. This is exactly the kind of urgency that most easily united women in collective action when their rights were threatened by announced changes of laws in Serbia. The most recent example occurred in July 2009, when fifty-six organizations signalled their support for amendments to proposed legal changes relating to domestic violence.
For more details on how precious was support sent to Serbia at that time, see Nikolić-Ristanović (2003).
Feminist panels, meetings and other events that feminists from Western countries participated in have been organized in Belgrade on a regular basis since 1975 until 1992 when the war and international isolation of Serbia prevented them from continuing.
VDS is a membership NGO that joins together female and male members, experts and activists to work for the benefit of victims of crime. It was established in 1997, and its main aim is to advocate for the rights of victims of crime, war and human rights violations in a gender sensitive way.
Vesna Nikolić-Ristanović, Slobodanka Konstantinović-Vilić, Nevena Petrušić, Ivana Stevanović and Brankica Grupković.
The New Model of Laws on Domestic Violence presents harmonized changes of five relevant laws: the Criminal Code, the Criminal Procedure Code, family law, civil procedure law and the law on weapons and munitions.
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Acknowledgements
This paper was presented as part of Feminist Review's Conference celebrating thirty years of the journal. The ‘Feminist Theory & Activism in Global Perspective’ conference was held at SOAS, The University of London, on September 26, 2009.
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Nikolić-Ristanović, V. feminist research and activism on violence against women: linking the local and the global. Fem Rev 98 (Suppl 1), e21–e35 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2011.30
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2011.30