In September 2023, the Croatian government announced new amendments to the Penal Code, introducing femicide or 'aggravated murder of a female person’. The idea behind introducing femicide in the Penal Code is to prevent future murders of women and show that violence against women is unacceptable in Croatian society. The current ruling party, the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), has long supported EU policies and clashed with more conservative, far-right party members.
The demand for harsher penalties for perpetrators of domestic and sexual violence was accepted by the government in 2019 and put into practice in 2020. However, this new legal amendment will do little to change the socio-political climate in Croatia where violence against women and other marginalised groups thrives. The criminal justice system ultimately fails to give survivors what they truly need, such as state-provided financial support, societal condemnation of rape and abuse, and the radical transformation of the abuser’s behaviour.
In former Yugoslavia, women had opportunities for free education and mass employment in state-supported industries, but now, with the proliferation of low-paid and precarious part-time jobs, employment no longer guarantees financial independence. The fight to combat violence against women and femicide has been almost entirely relegated to the criminal legal arena, ignoring the socio-economic climate in which such violence thrives.
Carceral feminism, which relies on coercive state institutions like prisons, police, and the criminal punishment system, has been critiqued and popularised by feminists advocating for carceral solutions. The Feminist Autonomous Centre for Research (FAC) in Athens, Greece, advocates for abolitionist care and alternative conceptions of justice that are not based upon state control, punishment, and carceral logic.
Media narratives and opinion pieces on femicide in Croatia lack the desired results of general prevention for decades. Women’s organisations acknowledge that holistic prevention of gender-based violence, including early education programs, is needed, but most visible campaigns focus on sentencing and the judicial process. Evidence speaks against higher sentencing as the general prevention for crimes of gendered violence, as crimes of sexual and domestic violence are underreported and statistically underrepresented globally. Advocates from women’s organisations and the initiative #Spasime remain steadfast in their resolution that minimum sentences need to be increased to prevent judges from reducing sentences due to mitigating circumstances.
The Catholic Church in Croatia and the neoliberal agenda of privatisation and commodification have led to the re-emergence of traditional gender attitudes. Privatisation during the post-war period in Croatia has facilitated the systematic devaluation and defunding of health, education, and social welfare sectors. Social workers are particularly targeted when media-exposed cases of domestic abuse are not acknowledged, leading to the systematic devaluation of the system. Initiative #Spasime has been at the forefront of leading attacks against social workers, earning them a criminal charge.
Celebrity-led, middle-class initiatives like #Spasime illustrate political whiteness, which is produced by the interaction between supremacy and victimhood. This includes taking a black-and-white view of abuse, where people can be victims or perpetrators but not both. The state is seen as protective rather than repressive, and shaming and punishment are seen as efficient strategies for preventing future violence.
The focus of #Spasime on individuals rather than structural problems is also evident. They demand a public list of all families in which anyone has ever been convicted of violence and information on the whereabouts of their children, alongside the legal prohibition of children living with convicted abusers. However, these demands only fuel moral panic and performative cruelty rather than create a transformative approach to the harm the community has already suffered.
Carceral feminism of #Spasime adopts a neoliberal logic of individual responsibility, pathologizing the structural problem of patriarchal violence and displacing it onto deviant others who need to be denounced and imprisoned. The same scrutiny is rarely afforded to the police in Croatia, and the public does not question the legitimacy of state violence even when there is evidence of police misconduct and brutality.
In conclusion, Croatian liberal feminism refuses to critique those in power and shies away from calling out the repressive organs of the state because it ultimately does not wish to truly change the status quo. The fight against patriarchal violence is the fight against the capitalist state’s repressive organs, and a grassroots movement that understands the interconnectivity of struggles is needed. Feminist abolitionist thinking has already taken root in the region with the Feminist No Borders Summer School, which aims to create a world without borders, prisons, and carceral logic.