Photo: Ulrike Mai/PixabayA UN Women survey conducted in Albania shows that one third of women feel unsafe in their own homes because they suffer domestic violence. About 53 percent of the respondents said that at some point in their lives they experienced partner violence
For Albania, the year 2021 was similar to 2013 in Serbia, when a record number of women were killed in family-partner violence. In Albania in 2021, as many as 30 percent of the victims of all murders were women who were killed by partners, spouses or relatives. 11 of them were killed, which is 13 percent more than in 2020. The total number of murders in Albania in the last 10 years has been decreasing, but fluctuates from 40 to 60 per year.
At the end of last year, the Albanian Ministry of the Interior published data showing that the vast majority of femicides were committed after the perpetrators violated a restraining order against the victim. According to the Euractiv portal, this indicates another problem - a serious lack of police officers who would adequately protect the woman from the abuser who is forbidden to approach her.
On average, in Albania in 2021, one woman was killed in partner-family violence every three weeks. The most frequently used weapon is a firearm, and there is no information on whether it was in legal possession or not. In addition, Albanian women who report physical and sexual attacks, persecution and other forms of violence number in the thousands, and the police manage to process only between 10 and 12 percent of those reports.
The Albanian authorities did not announce exactly how many cases were reported in 2021 (except that they are counted in thousands), but they did disclose the fact that in 2020, an average of 12 cases of domestic violence were reported every day, which, by simple multiplication, is at least 4800 cases. According to data from Euractiv, the police responded to only 13 percent of reports, and there is no data on the number of convicted abusers.
In addition to the alarmingly high rate of femicide, a UN Women survey conducted in Albania shows that one third of women feel unsafe in their own homes because they suffer domestic violence. About 53 percent of the respondents said that at some point in their lives they experienced partner violence, while 80 percent of Albanian women claimed that the risk of gender-based violence increased drastically during the pandemic.
To make matters worse, as in the rest of the world, in Albania the vast majority of cases of domestic violence remain unreported, because women are afraid of reprisals from the abuser and do not trust the institutions (which is a completely justified distrust, since the violation of the restraining order dominates the majority of cases of femicide). .
Why Albanian institutions react slowly and with difficulty when it comes to prosecuting femicide can be deciphered from the statements of political officials on a different topic - the reckoning of criminal clans. Namely, the rate of femicide in Albania in 2021 is equal to the rate of murders in mafia clashes of criminal clans - 30 percent. Let's put aside the horror that the number of women killed is equal to the number killed in criminal confrontations. The problem is that the institutions are much more committed to dealing with organized crime.
"Fighting organized crime, detecting, documenting and bringing perpetrators of criminal murders to justice in Albania remains an important priority for the police," said the head of the Criminal Police Department, Tonin Vokaj, at the beginning of this year.
Although an equal number of women suffer in the partner-family context, no one has yet addressed that problem as an "important priority". The exception is the thousands of Albanian women who took to the streets of Tirana in September 2021 for a protest called "Justice for Sabrina".
The protest took place after Elton Metai killed his ex-wife Sabrina Bengai (23) right after he was released from prison where he had been for domestic violence. Elton killed Sabrina with an automatic rifle, so after the murder he tried to escape. Police found him after a three-hour search.
The murder of a twenty-three-year-old woman could have been prevented, civil society activists claimed at the protest. A year before he was going to kill her, Metaj held Sabrina and her family hostage. It took five hours for special police forces to persuade him to let them go and surrender. From then until July 2021, he was in prison, from which he was released to defend himself due to "mental health problems". The institutions did not take into account the fact that Metaj sent threats and warnings to Sabrina from prison that he would kill her as soon as he was released.
Metaj had a restraining order against Sabrina, one of about 3000 issued annually by the Albanian judiciary. However, he violated it, like most perpetrators of femicide in Albania.
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