Violence Against Women in the Yugoslav war as told by Women-Refugees

Abstract

In the first part of the paper the author discusses and interprets the results of research carried out in 1994, on the basis of interviews with 70 women refugees from Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, presently situated in Serbia and Montenegro. Also, the first part of the paper was written as a result of the interviews which the group of authors conducted with 54 women refugees from Krajina in the period between 1 January 1995 and 15 March 1996 in Serbia, about their own definition of violence in war, which means that their subjective definition was given priority over the objective definition. This research was aimed at the analysis of women's experience of violence in the war conflict in our close vicinity, whose largest number of victims, as ever, were children and women. We tried to help the women to articulate their own experiences, in such a manner to avoid them being hurt in the process, but rather to relieve their burdens of piled up fears and emotions. In the second part of the paper the author evaluates the present situation in this area, especially the process of social adaptation.