Digital sexual violence in Serbia

“Helpless,” “scared,” “angry,” “my world has collapsed.”

This is how some girls in Serbia described their feeling when they became victims of digital sexual violence.

With technological advances, this type of violence takes on new forms every year. Victims report being subjected to sexist comments, sexual harassment, revenge pornography, blackmail into sending explicit photos or videos, and secret recording and photography.

“The peculiarity of digital sexual violence is that it can spread quickly, reach a large number of people and not disappear,” Vesna Ilić, psychologist, tells BBC Serbian.

According to a 2020 Mogu da neću survey, more than half of girls aged 14 to 19 were exposed to sexually suggestive comments, 9% had private photos or videos they shared posted publicly, and 8 % were sexually blackmailed. (I can say no) project.

“Every year new forms of sexual violence appear on the Internet that we could not even imagine,” says Melita Ranđelović, an educator.

Schools have an obligation to respond when students are exposed to any form of violence, but teachers say they know the least about digital sexual violence and victims rarely choose school as the first port of call to report it, write Tanja Ignjatović and Marina Ileš in their study paper. “I fear that many cases never reach the teachers. When they do happen, children and parents rarely turn to the school because they don’t trust it to solve the problem,” says teacher Marina Vidojević.

The echo remains

Most students first turn to their classmates, then to their parents and only then to the school staff, emphasizes Vesna Ilić, who works at a high school in Paraćin.

She says she encounters several cases of digital sexual violence every year and has worked three times with girls who were victims of revenge pornography.

“One student dropped out of school because she couldn’t withstand peer pressure.

“The echo of such events remains, it spreads quickly and the person is labeled within the entire community, which is difficult to bear,” Ilić told the BBC.

Victims who face ridicule and humiliation find it difficult to recover and take a long time to regain their self-confidence, she explains. Revenge pornography is the sharing of explicit sexual content without the consent of everyone in the videos or photos. International organizations that help victims are reporting more and more cases of revenge porn, and in Serbia several Telegram groups with tens of thousands of members were discovered sharing photos of women and even children.

Data on registered cases of revenge pornography among schoolchildren is not publicly available.

However, a 2020 survey cited by Ignjatović and Ileš shows that teachers are aware of situations in which boys have shared videos of girls without their consent, used photos to create pornographic content, or blackmailed them into sending sex videos.

In the event of violence, it is the school’s job to work with both the victim and the perpetrator, explains Vesna Ilić.

“Equals do not feel the weight of the harm they cause by engaging in sharing such videos. Empathy decreases, children grow up in an environment where selfishness is not criticized or corrected, and it is easy to cause pain to someone else while hiding behind anonymity. There’s also a lot of immaturity as children deal with things they don’t fully understand,” she adds.

“Teachers are part of society”

Marina Vidojević works at a primary school in Belgrade and believes that certain forms of violence have become part of everyday life.

“People no longer pay attention when girls, in particular, receive sexist, offensive or violent comments on social media,” she says. Although she teaches children from fifth to eighth grade, she says she has twice faced more serious forms of abuse when explicit videos and photos were shared.

“Such content spreads quickly and finds its way like water, so parents, children and teachers quickly find out what happened.

“It’s hard to find a balance. “You don’t want to sweep the event under the rug, but you also have to talk about it in a way that doesn’t jeopardize the children’s privacy,” she says.

Despite protocols in place, teachers don’t always know how to behave, she believes.

Teachers have at their disposal a protocol to protect children from violence and neglect, which covers all forms of violence, explains Tanja Ignjatović, head of the Autonomous Women’s Center. This NGO conducted a research on online gender-based violence among high school students in 2020.

The Protocol also applies to violence experienced by children both inside and outside of school, and describes different forms of violence and procedures that must be followed for each form. “As we worked with teachers, we found that most were familiar with the protocol, but there were also some who had not even read it.

“They are not entirely clear about when and how to react,” says Ignjatović.

Vesna Ilić believes that the reaction of colleagues depends on individual sensitivity.

“From my experience with teacher training, I know that some are hesitant to use the methods available to them for fear of not receiving institutional support and becoming a target by parents, students or lawyers. “Teachers are part of the same cultural milieu as we cannot expect them to be moral experts,” she says.

Frequent change of responsibility

Research by the Autonomous Women’s Center has shown that teachers generally have no prejudices when it comes to gender-based digital violence.

However, stereotypes exist, as almost a third of high school teachers agree with the statement: “If a girl sends revealing photos to her boyfriend, it is her fault if they appear on the Internet.”

Similar reactions, i.e. blaming the victim, can also be heard among high school students. “When we conducted training with teachers, we found that they failed to clearly identify responsibilities. They said things like ‘Yes, but she…’, ‘She sent the photo…’, ‘If she hadn’t taken a photo like that…’ “That wouldn’t have happened,” says Tanja Ignjatović.

According to Ignjatović, undue responsibility can have an impact on disciplinary procedures and possibly lead to inadequate punishment of the perpetrator. “And those who shared the violence will feel even worse because they did not receive the appropriate response and protection,” she adds.

Marina Vidojević puts the responsibility on adults – teachers and parents.

“Children are not psychologically equipped to know what they need, nor are they trained to understand the consequences of certain online behaviors.

“Sex is a taboo subject and no one talks to children about it, just as they don’t talk about sexual violence. We have protocols and laws that prescribe punishments, but we see that they are ineffective and no one focuses on prevention,” she warns.

Sex education

Introducing sex education in schools could be a preventative measure, but the idea faces resistance from more conservative parts of society.

Melita Ranđelović was one of the participants in a program run by the Incest Trauma Center, which prepared educational materials on sexual violence for children from preschool age to the end of high school in 2016.

However, the program was never officially implemented in schools due to concerns that “the content was not age-appropriate.”

“We believed it was the right thing to do, but everything fell through. It’s obviously not the right time for this and I don’t know when it will be. At the moment everything depends on personal initiative and individual enthusiasm, which is unacceptable,” says Ranđelović.

She believes that children need to be taught responsible behavior when publishing and using content on the Internet. “What consequences might my posts have, whether in fun or revenge? These are questions that children need to understand. “It’s time to get serious because this is not a joke,” she explains.

Children’s interest in sexual content “starts at a much younger age than is generally assumed” and “they find information in the wrong places,” says Ignjatović.

“When we propose the introduction of certain educational programs, we always come up against a wall of conservative views that say, ‘Don’t sexualize children.’ But if they don’t talk about it, children risk becoming sexualized and insecure,” warns Ignjatović.

(BBC Serbia, October 16, 2024)

https://www.bbc.com/serbian/lat/srbija-69184311

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