Faculty of Law University of Belgrade in the cooperation with the OSCE Mission to Serbia organized the Spring School/Pilot Master – Law and Gender. This Spring School was based on the project LAWGEM and served as a kind of the pilot practicing of the future master`s study program Law and Gender. It covered all courses contained in this master`s study program curriculum, and the reading materials consisted to a great extent of the books published within the LAWGEM project. The School was organized in a hybrid form – in person at the Faculty of Law University of Belgrade and online, with 69 participants (students of undergraduate, master and PhD level), both from Serbia and other countries around the world (Albania, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, China, Croatia, France, Germany, India, Iran, Italy, Montenegro, Russia and Vietnam). It is certain that participants of this School have gained valuable knowledge which will help them on their academic path and in their professional careers. On the other hand, the Spring School represented an excellent preparation of lectures and pedagogic experiences of the scholars from the University of Belgrade Faculty of Law for the future conducting the master’s study program Law and Gender.
In her first lecture “Gender and Victimization”, Assistant Professor Dr. Natalija Lukić explained violence in partner relationships which is the most common context of victimization of women. She provided figures presenting that the World Health Organization estimates that globally 30% of women who have been in a partner relationship experience physical or sexual violence, while 38% of all murders of women are committed by their current or former partners. In Europe, at least between 20 and 25% of women have experienced physical violence by a partner at least once during their lifetime, and more than 10% of them experienced sexual violence that involved the use of force; psychological violence, as a separate category, is discussed in several studies, and the rates range from 19 to 42%; altogether 45%. While in Serbia, according to the Victimological Society (2001) conducted on a sample of 700 women, research has showed that almost every second woman (46.1%) experienced some form of psychological violence, and that every third woman experienced a physical attack from a family member (30.6%). Professor Dr. Lukić then talked about femicide and trends in the rate of female victims of intimate partners in different countries and regions. Lastly, Professor Dr. Lukić explained different forms of intimate partner violence from physical violence, sexual violence, psychological violence and economic violence. She finished with the explanation of the instrumental violence and the different models therein such as the Duluth model, illustrated by a circle of power and control or model of cyclical violence where control of the partner is achieved through periodic violence through specific interpersonal dynamics that takes place through different phases. During her second lecture, titled “Gender and Crime”, Professor Dr. Lukić talked about the extent of female crime generally and in Europe, different sources of statistical data, advantages and disadvantages of statistical data in criminology, self-delinquency and victimization studies and presented gender and crime statistics. She explained in a detailed manner the change in the trends regarding female crimes giving different explanations such as: changing gender roles, economic marginalization of females and penal policy change. She also stressed which are factors of crime from the gender perspective, starting from the individual level, family level all the way to the societal level. Finally, in her third lecture “Gender and Penal Policy”, Professor Dr. Lukić presented prison population rates from the gender perspective as well as percentage of female inmates in the prison population in a ten year span from 2005 to 2015. Professor talked thoroughly about the relation of general prison population and female prison population. In addition, she mentioned the case of Serbia and relation with the changes introduced in the Serbian Criminal Code. She went on to talk about gender differencing in sentencing. She gives possible explanations such as: attitudes of judges that women should be protected; differences in female criminality; the presence of other factors like race-based discrimination that would have an indirect impact on the sentence. Professor Dr. Lukić also tackled the topic of criminal justice treatment of trans offenders stressing that they have difficulties in all stages of criminal proceedings. In the last part of her lecture she shared characteristics of a female prisoners in Serbia
Gender Competent Criminology 1: Gender and Victimization
Gender Competent Criminology 2: Gender, Crime and Penal Policy