Members of The Advocates' Women’s Human Rights Program recently left Bulgaria and are currently in Kazakhstan and Croatia meeting with partners about domestic violence laws. Below is a report from Rose Park and Mary Ellingen, two of The Advocates' Staff Attorneys traveling with the group.

"We have just left Sofia, Bulgaria, having finished our first workshop on strategies to monitor the new domestic violence laws in Central and Eastern Europe.  We feel like it was a big success! Some highlights were: Women's Human Rights Program Director Cheryl Thomas' presentations on using human rights fact-finding to monitor laws and how to draft specific questions for interviewees, Rose Park’s presentation on principles of fact-finding, and one our Bulgarian partners Genoveva Tisheva's role play on the difficulties of achieving funding from the Bulgarian ministry. Everyone was also very interested in Cheryl’s presentation on court monitoring, and many attendees plan to try this strategy in the near future.

Rose Thelen, a long time Minnesota advocate, traveled with us to discuss quantitative monitoring of new laws.  She began her presentation with an introduction to the history of the domestic violence movement in Minnesota. She described working as an advocate with little resources and with the premise that victims are our sisters and not “Cases.”  Rose demonstrated how an advocate can begin to collect just a few statistics on what is happening to the victim, take them to a friendly police chief or mayor’s wife, and begin to advocate for changes in local policy or procedure, then eventually into changes of law. Her presentation culminated in an introduction to the DAIN database, which is very rich and complex.  Participants were especially interested in learning how an advocate with little resources can begin to make change and about the importance of keeping statistics on what happens to victims. Example statistics that are helpful include, is the perpetrator actually given sanctions? Does the victim have a place to go? Rose also taught participants the importance of forming alliances with friendly officials and making a step-by-step strategy for change. The video that she showed, called “Rachel’s story,” demonstrated the impact of many systems on the victim after she reports violence and how wearying that can be.

Stories from participants revealed how extremely urgent it is to continue monitoring the implementation of new domestic violence laws. We learned that a big issue in this part of the world is that women (victims) are being arrested at a disturbingly high rate. In some cases, it is because the legal definition of domestic violence includes psychological violence, which the batterer can turn against her, or in other cases, it is because of a seeming lack of interest in identifying and documenting self-defense wounds and injuries. In one case, a man was beating his wife as she was holding their infant child in her arms. He beat her around her face and chest, and to defend herself and the baby she was holding, she bit his finger. They were both arrested, and she received a fine double that levied on him.

After the conference, we strategized at the Bulgarian Gender Research Foundation offices with our partners about the next workshop and our monitoring missions. We learned so much from this conference and are excited to build on it for participants in the former Soviet Union. That workshop will take place in Istanbul in the spring.

We are now embarking on our next stage of our mission; Cheryl is on her way to Kazakhstan to consult and lay the groundwork for future missions, and we are on our way to Croatia to do interviews with a judge, police, gender equality ombudsperson, state attorney, shelter workers, social services, lawyers, and our host partner at Autonomous Women’s House in Zagreb.

Best to all,

Mary and Rose