How Facebook became the new feminist battleground for #MeToo in the Western Balkans

“During my entrance exam for drama school, me and a dozen other shortlisted girls were made to sit in just our underwear. One by one we stood up while the professor circled around us, touching our bare bodies first with a wooden stick, and then with his hands. I felt alarm bells ringing, but I wanted to enrol on the course so badly. Soon, I found out that the professor in question was well-known for such behaviour. He inappropriately touched me many more times during my studies. Not only has he never been sanctioned, but he’s now vice dean at the same school.”

The post, written by a user in Bosnia and Hercegovina, is just one of thousands shared on the group Nisam Tražila (I Didn’t Ask For It). Created on Facebook, the page is an invitation to survivors of sexual assault to share their experiences, support each other, and raise awareness of the issue in the Western Balkans.

The group was founded in January 2021, but quickly exploded with thousands of posts and users. Now, the initiative has become so large that the four admins, all alumni of The Academy of Performing Arts in Sarajevo, are starting to challenge Bosnia and Hercegovina’s largest institutions in a bid to provide better protection and support for the victims of sexual harassment and abuse.

Tikvić and her co-founders set up their page in the middle of the night in “fits of rage” following the case of Milena Radulović’: a young Serbian actress who pressed rape charges against her famous acting teacher. “Our aim was to show that sexual assault is far more omnipresent than we want to admit,” she says. Just 48 hours later, more than 1000 notifications awaited them, with many people leaving testimonies to their own experiences of abuse.

When Bojana Kovačević created Ženska Posla with a few female friends in 2013, she only wanted to fight against the idea that “women weren’t as funny or as witty as men”. “‘Female Stuff’ is an almost degrading term in Balkans, with connotations that it’s just something shallow, stupid, unimportant, like gossip and intrigue,” she says.

Some pages are even creating a language of memes that is entirely their own. Montenegrin Facebook page Vala Ljeposava is named in honour of the female lead in the country’s legendary 80s sitcom Djekna Jos Nije Umrla, A Ka’ Ce Ne Znamo (Djekna Hasn’t Died Yet, And We Don’t Know When She Will). Ljeposava is an archetype of the wise, Montenegrin women, who carries the weight of an entire family on her shoulders. But with her unprecedented wit, she shows the patriarchal society in which she lives for what it really is — a miserable power grab. The group uses scenes and quotes from the show to create their own take on Montenegrin society and politics.

All of the admins agree that the problems they face in their respective countries are felt across the entire Western Balkans. The similarities have spurred them on to create regional campaigns: combining forces to bring attention to important issues.

One campaign focused on obstetric violence, or when women are subjected to neglect or abuse during childbirth. Hundreds of women told these admins about their experiences being verbally abused or threatened by hospital staff, denied pain relief without valid reason, or being subjected to medical procedures to which they did not consent.

“Obstetric violence became a hot topic after a news story where a pregnant woman went into pre-term labour after being severely injured at the hands of her abusive partner,” says Kovačević. “But instead of being able to access a safe space [in the hospital], she received another round of horrible treatment.”

The campaign received significant media attention, but also a reaction from authorities. In Montenegro, the country’s Ministry of Health has made the first steps towards addressing the issue by setting up a counselling service and calling on women to report obstetric violence.

For the Montenegrin admins at Vala Ljeposava, however, that isn’t enough. “We didn’t call it quits when they assigned a psychologist to the OB/GYN clinic, (although we appreciate they did what they could immediately), and we won’t call it quits until we achieve our lawful rights, which, unfortunately, still exist only on paper,” the told The Calvert Journal.

But although all countries in the Western Balkans face similar problems, only Croatia has so far been willing to take more concrete steps to clamp down on sexual harassment.

“Nisam Tražila has had their best results in Croatia,” says Tikvić, who is herself Croatian. She believes that the country’s EU membership may motivate officials to make it appear as if they are tackling harassment — even though for women living in the country, real life differs little from elsewhere in the region. “The University of Zagreb suspended two professors [after reports of sexual harassment and assault came to light]. In other countries, that hasn’t happened yet, even though there were numerous cases across different universities.”

She’s found that regionally, women from Montenegro are least likely to submit their own experiences: perhaps because the country is smaller, she says, or because women fear that their identities will be found out if they submit their experiences. “We didn’t have even a dozen testimonies come in from Montenegro, which might say that women are more afraid in these smaller, more conservative societies,” she speculates.

Any results are hard earned. Being a moderator of these pages is difficult: all of the work is voluntary, and often requires great effort and energy. “Reading numerous traumatic experiences can leave you shocked and in pain for days to come,” says Kovačević.

Some of their activism work takes a particular toll. In another coordinated campaign, page administrators took on the role of the police, unmasking public groups on messaging app Telegram that shared revenge porn: where men distributed explicit pictures of their former partners to the wider public without their permission. Some of these groups had more than 30,000 members. Some also shared images of child abuse. The youngest girls pictured were just 10 years old.

“The law doesn’t currently recognise revenge porn as an offense in itself, so we had to actively look for the pictures of underage girls in order to report these groups to the police,” says Kovačević.

There is also the pushback from predators and abusers themselves. “Someone tried to hack our page,” says Tikvić, “but luckily we were offered free help from professionals in sexual violence and NGOs.”

Some women who left descriptive accounts of their experiences on the page also saw their abusers recognise themselves in the post — leading to further threats and violence. In order to protect users, admins now immediately delete messages from their inbox and store their content off-site.