December 2019

THE FIFTH SOCRATES CAFE IN SARAJEVO: VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN


The fifth Socrates Cafe was held at the Chamber Theater 55 in Sarajevo on December 5th, 2019. The theme was ''Violence against Women''. Cafe facilitator, Melika Šahinović, program coordinator of the TPO Foundation, together with participants read some paragraphs from the Baseline study "Peer and Gender Based Violence in Primary Schools in B&H" from 2017. "I realized that the child is lonely, no one talks to her, she is just spending time on the internet, and at the end of the conversation one day, she told me, "I'm going to kill myself," was one of the paragraphs which were read.

Participants inquired if and how we respond if we notice that someone is lonely and sad, whether we have developed empathy, and why did we allow our society to become a society of violence. With reactions on violence, they said, you get comments that today everything is violence, and they believe that the threshold that relativizes violence should not exist, and that there are rank and responsibility. Violence must not be suppressed. We need to do the best we can. If it is someone's highest priority to say, "I'm here. You are not alone." even that is enough.