The project was initiated to provide data on the prevalence of violence against women and to contribute to formulating and improving national policies and regulations in this field. The specific objective was to conduct a survey and enhance documentation and statistics, as specified in the National Strategy for Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Family Violence from 2009.
The survey was conducted on a sample of 2500 women aged 18 to 75 years from Central Serbia. Representative data on prevalence and main characteristics of family violence against women was collected, and then presented in a Study. Results show that the actual prevalence rate of family violence against women is 37.5% – more than one third of women experienced some form of family violence over the last year. Furthermore, there is a big gap between reported rates of violence and rate of reporting violence. Regarding perpetrators, in most cases those are husbands and intimate partners.
These findings need to be interpreted in the overall social context. It is necessary to further improve institutional and legal mechanisms for combating family violence against women, increase human and financial resources at all levels, develop a monitoring system, and improve gender equality in the society, especially socio-economic. In other words, combating family violence against women has to be recognized as integrative part of different policies and measures to provide simultaneous influence on many different factors that create conditions and reproduce family violence against women.