Progressive movements strengthen and keep continuity, among other ways, by sharing knowledge and timely documenting of organizations’ work. A publication titled “Policy and resilience of a women’s NGO active in the field of sexual violence: Experience of Incest Trauma Center, Belgrade, Serbia” contributes exactly to that, and even though it is based on the working experience of a single specific organization, it still holds sets of universal information and mechanisms applicable to akin organizations, as well as a sort of workbook. On this occasion, we share the PDF version of the publication with you, along with a conversation with a co-author of the publication, doctor Ljiljana Bogavac.
1. Almost three decades of devoted work is impossible to be reduced to specificities that have marked them but let us at least to try ask this question – what were the turning points or otherwise moments significant to your organizational and political development?
As a co-founder of the Incest Trauma Centre – Belgrade, I am proud of our work and results, primarily of the reliability that we have provided to children and adults who have survived sexual violence. As key impacts, I recognize our decision to, already during our establishing, become a part of the anti-war movement which insists on facing the past, starting with the responsibilities of individuals from our country, to always thunderously advocate for the human rights of LGBT+ people, and to keep our integrity and autonomy regardless of the price. That is still the case today.
2. Even though the work of Incest Trauma Center is tightly focused on the issue of sexual violence, your organization is, as evidenced in the publication, deeply dived into the wider context, and it vastly cares about the anti-war politic, LGBTQ+ rights, strengthening the resistance to the right-wing. And such a holistic approach to work keeps getting rarer among NGOs, sometimes because of movement discontinuities, sometimes because of significant bureaucratic burdens that narrow down activism, sometimes for some third reasons. How do you manage to keep this multi-aspect approach, which, eventually, is also necessary for a more comprehensive understanding of sexual violence?
After almost 30 years, I am confident that for us at Incest Trauma Centre this exact system of values is our basic identity. Yes, we are experts in the field of sexual violence. But we work in a social context and we are experts and activists in one identity. There is no gender equality while there is no public and loud speaking about sexual violence against children and women. Our determination is an active and publicly visible response to nationalism, right-wing options, church in the part in which it brutally stomps over the human rights of women and children and hides sexual abuse of children committed by church employees. We have decided about exposing people who are the members of the organization and exposing the organization – because we live these values.
3. In Incest Trauma Center’s work what also seems highlighted is the practice of collaborating with institutions, either through training with the institutions’ employees or through your initiatives that you lift to the highest available institutional levels. And you manage to do it even though you have, more than once, experienced, as you have described, “a backlash to common sense” by the government and its services. With all these obstacles, how do you manage to find channels for institutional collaboration, and put delicate and progressive subjects out on their tables?
There is a lot of thinking, analysis, behind us. About every step, every action that we have made or that we will make. Our decisions are based on what children and adults who have survived sexual violence communicate to us as their needs. If our clients have done everything to survive sexual violence and are bravely facing long-term effects of sexual trauma – who are we to calculate against institutions? We have not been founded because of the organization or ourselves but because of children and women who have survived sexual violence as one life experience. Our self-organizing is an instrument for the goal of protecting the interests of children and women. We tended to make this instrument wise in approach, and imbued with high expertise in its essence, which we have built with a lot of investment. Hence, it is necessary to timely know the field in which you are and continuously learn about the system that we are addressing. We deeply believe in our investment in learning and that the knowledge will literally help us in everything.
4. You have a set of policies and procedures in which you have transferred your values and principles, and one of them is the Policy of self-care as supporters active in the field of sexual violence. Over the past years, policies and practices of self-care are more present in the feminist movement but they often escape their own political nature and frequently appear in forms that are not (quite) adequate, with the danger of being counterproductive. How do you see a sensible organizational policy of self-care, with a particular reflection regarding supporters active in the field of sexual violence?
Caring about ourselves as human rights defenders is a political issue, a political stance at the level of an organization, and, equally, at the individual level. The social position of women’s human rights defenders who are active in the field of sexual violence is one of the priority fields of work within the European Network against Sexual Violence of which we are a member and co-founding organization. In creating an organizational policy, we consider that it is necessary to encompass the value system of women defenders, social changes that they have made as to the result of their work, risks that they are exposed in their work and the sources of personal strengths and vulnerabilities (including personal pre-history), survived experiences of violence, specifically because they are the defenders in the field of sexual violence, then changes that they self-identify at the personal level, in their lives, as the result of working on this subject and which ways of self-care and self-protection they communicate that they have used. Particularly, by continuous learning of all the members about the subject of organizational development, the prognosis of achieving adequate self-care. Besides the recommendations that we have given, more about this can be learned from our last-year publication “Social position, experiences and strengths of women human rights defenders active in the field of sexual violence” which we have published in English with the support of Reconstruction Women’s Fund. It follows the personal experiences of 12 defenders who have devoted 295 years of work overall to the issue of sexual violence, they have personally won 28 awards for their achievements, and additionally, 20 awards were received by their organizations.
5. In the publication, you reflect upon the “non-fair game” between women’s organizations, spreading rumors, rivalry, etc. Although in the publication this refers to your organizational experience, it is applicable to a wider level – the movement is fragmented, in a rivalry (sometimes “voluntarily”, sometimes in a rivalry imposed by donors), contaminated by personal conflicts… What was, according to your opinion, the “wrong turn” at the level of the movement? What measures are needed in order for women’s organizations to (re)build authentic alliances?
For us, the answer is simple, and it implies that everything starts with people. A personal system of values and whether you live it – that is what it is about. Each of us in organizations and in general in the feminist movement, has a choice literally every day of her life to entice anything negative. We are personally responsible. The personal culture is transmitted from movement members to their organizations, to young members and those just joining the movement. Each day we choose whether we will act fair. It is all about us.
Read and download the publication “Policy and resilience of a women’s NGO active in the field of sexual violence: Experience of Incest Trauma Center, Belgrade, Serbia” by Dušica Popadić and Dr. Ljiljana Bogavac HERE.
Interview and translation by Galina Maksimović
