Socio-Legal Aspects of Sexual and Gender-Based Violence Survivors’ Victimization in Kosovo1

Abstract

In Kosovo, violence against women is both a ground for and a result of socialized norms of victimization. Men socialize violent and toxic behavior toward women from a young age, and when they commit sexual and gender-based violence, victimizing norms are reinforced by the state structure during judicial processes, casting survivors back into the circle of maltreatment. Lack of conceptual understanding, violence relativization, and victim-blaming are components of structural violence perpetrated by the police, prosecutors, and judges when addressing sexual and gender-based offenses. Available research suggests that the majority of femicides are preceded by domestic abuse or intimate partner violence; thus, when gender-discriminatory norms are socialized both among people and institutions, and when socio-legal impunity is the norm, survivors of sexual and gender-based violence are exposed to an in-time developing spiral of violence. This spiral is determined by the constructivist relation of interdependence between agents – here individual people, the sum of whom constitutes society – and the state’s structure – here the politico-legal institutions of the police, prosecution, and judiciary. Agents and structure, on the one hand, continuously reinforce the socialization of various types of violence against women within society, and on the other hand, they are only the ones who can interrupt the spiral. I argue that Kosovo’s current state of affairs favors reinforcement over interruption.