MOBILIZING FOR POLICY CHANGE Edited by Andrea Krizsán WOMEN'S MOVEMENTS IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN DOMESTIC VIOLENCE POLICY STRUGGLES CENTER FOR POLICY STUDIES CENTRAL EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY Nádor utca 9. H–1051 Budapest, Hungary [email protected], http://cps.ceu.edu Published in 2015 by the Center for Policy Studies, Central European University © CEU CPS, 2015 ISBN 978-963-89822-9-2 The views in this publication are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Central European University. This text may be downloaded only for personal research purposes. Additional reproduction for other purposes, whether in hard copies or electronically, requires the consent of the author(s), editor(s). If cited or quoted, reference should be made to the full name of the author(s), editor(s), the title, the year and the publisher. The research leading to this publication was supported by the Central European University in 2012-2013. Cover design: Origami Europe Advertising Cover photos: © FILIA Center, www.centrulfilia.ro Design & layout: Borbala Varga MOBILIZING FOR POLICY CHANGE: WOMEN’S MOVEMENTS IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN DOMESTIC VIOLENCE POLICY STRUGGLES Edited by Andrea Krizsan CONTENTS Acknowledgements v List of Contributors vii Women’s Movements Challenging Gender-based Violence in Countries of Central and Eastern Europe 1 Andrea Krizsan and Raluca Popa “The Spirit of the Law”: Mobilizing and/or Professionalizing the Women’s Movement in Post-socialist Bulgaria 45 Mariya P Ivancheva Croatian Women’s Movement and Domestic Violence Policy Change: Generational Approach 85 Sanja Kajinic The Efforts of Women’s Movements in Poland to Change Domestic Violence State Policies Between 2001-2012 123 Dominika Gruziel A Decade-long Struggle for Change: Women’s Mobilization and Domestic Violence Legal and Policy Reform in Romania 185 Raluca Popa Conclusions: Coming Back to the Model of Critical Institutionalization 223 Andrea Krizsan iii iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This volume was initiated and developed alongside a research project that Raluca Popa and I have been working on in the last few years. As such, the volume would not have been possible without the input coming from our common work and the common framework we developed for analyzing domestic violence policy change and its gender equality contents in five contries of Central and Eastern Europe. I am immensely grateful to Raluca for this on-going cooperation and for her thoughts that contributed not only to the co-authored piece but also to the conclusions and the overall volume as such. I am grateful to the many collaborators this volume has engaged throughout the years. I especially thank Alex Flemming for her organizational and editorial work, and to Kata Amon for her editorial support. I am very grateful to Lilla Jakobs for the enormous effort she put into language- and copyediting the final version of the manuscript. Borbala Varga was wholeheartedly involved in the project all along, from organizing its workshops, through commissioning the cover image to typesetting and preparing the electronic publication. My special thanks go to her. I wish to thank Austin Choi Fitzpatrick, Dorit Geva, Elissa Helms and Viola Zentai for commenting on different versions of the introductory and the concluding chapters. Their comments were very constructive and encouraging. The CEU Center for Policy Studies community also deserves our thanks. Being such an excellent intellectual environment, as well as a place where we could run our workshops and monthly meetings contributed v greatly to our collective enterprise. Special thanks go to the entire team of the book: Dominika Gruziel, Mariya Ivancheva, Sanja Kajinic and Raluca Popa for being such a wonderful team. I learnt a lot from our common discussions. Together you showed what excellent PhD students and young post-docs the Central European University can bring together, a resource and a potential that should be intellectually exploited much more frequently for the benefit of the CEU community and beyond! Thanks are due to the CEU Research Support Scheme that has offered funding for writing three out of four country studies in the volume. Andrea Krizsan April 2015 vi LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Dominika Gruziel holds a PhD degree in Comparative Gender Studies (Central European University). Her research interests include the history of women’s movements, modern history, religious studies, and gender studies. Mariya Ivancheva holds a PhD in Sociology & Social Anthropology from the Central European University. Her dissertation explored the higher education reform in Bolivarian Venezuela. Mariya is currently a post-doc researcher at University College Dublin working on new inequalities in the neoliberal university. Mariya has researched and published on topics such as the history and legacy of socialism, the institutionalization of revolutions and social movements, as well as on issues of gender, welfare, and care. She is a member of the editorial board of LeftEast. Sanja Kajinic has a PhD from the Central European University. In 2007/2008 she was an Early Stage Training Marie Curie fellow at the Women’s Studies Centre, University of Lodz, Poland. From 2012 to 2014, she taught Bosnian Croatian Serbian to graduate students at the Source Languages Teaching Group at the CEU. Her research interests focus on feminist approaches to visual culture, social movement theory, and analysis of intersections of culture and politics. Dr Kajinić wrote a chapter on Croatian women activists’ perceptions of self-change through civic engagement in Women Activists – Spelling Out the Theory (Center for Women’s Studies, 2001); edited the MediaNet Handbook (ZaMirNET, 2005) that gathered the work of young activist journalists from the post-Yugoslav region; and published several articles on post-Yugoslav queer arts festivals (in particular, vii the Queer Sarajevo Festival, and the Queer Zagreb Festival). During the 2014-2015 academic year, she works as MIREES academic tutor and lecturer of Bosnian Croatian Serbian at the University of Bologna. Andrea Krizsan is Research Fellow at the Center for Policy Studies of the Central European University, Budapest since 2001 and teaches at the Department of Public Policy of the same university. She worked in different comparative European research projects on gender equality including Quality of Gender+ Equality Policies in Europe (QUING) and Multiple Meanings of Gender Equality (MAGEEQ). Her research engages with understanding progressive policy change in different equality policy fields including gender equality, gender based violence, ethnic discrimination and intersectionality. Most recently she works on analysing domestic violence policy reforms in five Central and Eastern European countries. Her publications include articles in Social Politics, European Journal of Women Studies, Violence against Women, European Integration Online Papers and Policy Studies. She edited a volume on ethnic monitoring and data collection (2001) and co- edited one with J. Squires and H. Skjeie on Institutionalizing Intersectionality and the Changing Nature of European Equality Regimes at Palgrave MacMillan (2012). Andrea has a PhD in Political Science from the Central European University. Raluca Maria Popa works for the Gender Equality Unit of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, France, on issues related to women’s access to justice and ending violence against women. She is PhD Candidate in comparative gender studies at the Central European University, Budapest with a thesis preliminarily entitled State Feminism within State Socialism. Rethinking Communist Women’s Activism in Romania, 1946-1989. She has published articles in Violence against Women, Social Politics, Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies, Roma Women’s Journal/ Nevi Sara Kali, as well as chapters in several edited volumes. She works with Andrea Krizsan on a book project analyzing the factors that influence domestic violence policy reforms in five countries in Central and Eastern Europe, over a period of fifteen years. viii WOMEN’S MOVEMENTS CHALLENGING GENDER-BASED VIOLENCE IN COUNTRIES OF CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE Andrea Krizsan and Raluca Popa 1. Introduction Domestic violence, one of the most prevalent forms of gender-based violence, is a policy field where spectacular progress took place worldwide in the last decades. Importantly the issue was put on the policy agenda across different regions and countries almost invariably by women’s movements (Htun and Weldon 2012). Awareness of domestic violence as a policy issue which needs state intervention has also showed spectacular progress in the last decade or so in most countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Yet, considerable variety emerges in the achieved policy outputs and the extent to which these outputs are gender equality sensitive and serve the interests of women victims/survivors (Krizsan and Popa 2014). This volume asks how this variation can be connected to women’s movements in the region. Is women’s rights advocacy and autonomous women’s organizing an equally important component of progress in countries of this region? The literature on women’s movements in the region has widely discussed their weakness and dependency on foreign donors, in the context of transition to democracy. Weak capacity to mobilize as well as to generate policy change, vulnerability to the influence of foreign donor agendas, as 1 ANDREA KRIZSAN AND RALUCA POPA well as the wide refusal of the feminist label because of its association with