Hey girl, all of Kosovo is with you

Shouts and chants are heard from inside the houses. Shrill voices, loudspeakers and a multicoloured crowd flood Mother Teresa Boulevard to the cry of 'Traumë, jo lojë' (trauma is not a game, in English). And this same slogan has been echoed by most Kosovar cities.

It all began on Tuesday May 11, when three seventh graders (about 13-14 years old according to the Kosovar education system) from the Faik Konica school in Pristina sexually abused a first grader (about 6-7 years old) from the same school. They also recorded the incident on their mobile phones. For its part, the school simply 'scolded' the pupils and asked them not to distribute the video.

"Educate your children before allowing them to go out" can be heard everywhere in Skandaberg square, where the march ends. They shout, they chant. With loudspeakers, mobile phones and signs in Albanian and English. They get high when they see a camera. These young people want to go out and be seen. They want to be heard. "This is all part of the system. The director knowing about it and not doing anything. It's taken as normal," explained Ernera, a young Kosovar woman specialising in women's rights, as she told me what happened two days before the march. "The patriarchal system established in Kosovo maintains traditional gender norms and roles that are generally detrimental to women," explains Adelina Tërshani, director of the Kosovo Women Network.

This event and how it has spread is just the beginning of the fuse. Just as the 'Green Tide' took over Argentina or Spanish echoed 'yo si te creo' hashtag (I do believe you), 'trauma is not a game' has united Kosovo in the fight against sexual violence and changed perspectives. When the country's most important feminist association published at the end of last year that one of the problems of the movement was "social fear of feminism", five months later television, associations and civil society have united to highlight "problems in the education system and within the police ranks that discourage reporting sexual harassment".
 

The 'Faik Konica' case was the first domino that could begin to topple the patriarchal Kosovar system. Since then, a dozen other cases have come to light. Fatjona Krasniqi is a Kosovar blogger based in Germany, and she herself has admitted that she has received more than 2,000 messages on Instagram from girls who came to her telling her about the sexual abuse they had suffered.

The Kosovar women's network reports that 62 percent of women have experienced some form of sexual abuse in Kosovo. "Femicide, gender-based violence, lack of economic independence, gender discrimination in the labour market, low participation in decision-making so far, massive violations of inheritance rights are the main injustices faced by women and girls in Kosovo," laments the head of the feminist association.

Now, as of last week, the dominoes have started to fall in the form of harassment cases that have come to light. It is now known that in 2018 in Gjakova, a village in the east of the country, a teacher at Mazllum Kepuska primary school sexually harassed 27 female pupils. He has not yet been convicted. Sat në filtre nesër ku? (today it's school where?) shouts another poster in the centre of the capital. Liridona Sijarina is an activist with the Collective for Feminist Thought and Action, and during a discussion organised in the wake of all these events she said that "sexual harassment is widespread in Kosovo's schools and that the recent incident of sexual violence involving school children is far from being an isolated case."

'Edhe sa thirrje humbura?! Asnjë ma shumë!' (How many more missed calls are needed?

None more!) reads another sign held by a group of girls chanting the hymns coming out of the loudspeakers from the stairs of the Pristina Municipal Theatre. All together they point out the abuses, shout the names of the girls and repeat that "they are not alone". It is now clear to them that everything has to change, from the education system to the judicial system, including the police.

According to police data, in 2018 there were 58 new cases of alleged sexual abuse of children under the age of 16 in the country, although the prosecutor's office only initiated 25 of these cases. As for sexual harassment, while 43 cases were reported to the police, only eight cases were brought to court during 2018. But when Sherife Alickaj-Qerimi, a teacher in Fushe Kosove, a small town seven kilometres from Pristina, went to report sexual abuse of one of her pupils, the officers' response was, "Can I have your number? I would like to talk to you further.

"The officials who are supposed to provide protection against sexual harassment are not trained," the activist stressed during the debate. "They don't know what sexual harassment is and how to proceed in cases where someone reports sexual harassment." In 2020, 48 cases of sexual harassment were reported to the Kosovo police, but according to Sijarina, there is not a single case in which someone has been convicted, despite the fact that sexual harassment is listed as a crime in the Criminal Code.

Don't tell your daughter not to go out, tell your son to behave properly' shouts another poster. Like this dozens. Dozens of posters that blame the young people instead of criminalising them. No more she is asking for it'. The Faik Konica case has managed to change the discourse.

In the march, everyone shouts. And when it is generalised in masculine, it is because a large part of the demonstrators were young people. In masculine. Allies of the movement. Young people who, unlike their female counterparts, are not afraid of harassment, who can go out on the streets but who "are ashamed of the behaviour of these boys", as Albion told us in the centre of the demonstration. This Kosovar who, together with his friends, came to the march "because what has happened cannot continue to happen".

Now, everyone, everyone and everyone, is on the march. They see that it is wrong and they want to be seen to denounce it. The 'fear of feminism' that KWN denounced at the end of the year has changed. "Now there is more information about what feminism really stands for and we have men and women, girls and boys calling themselves feminists without fear of social prejudice. In some cases, this identification is done just to look cool, but at the point where we are as a society where people working for gender equality are afraid to call themselves feminists, we also need people who do this to look cool because then they can even start to fully believe in what feminism really stands for," explains Tërshani.

Hej qiki, ni Kosovo mbrapa e ki' (Hey girl, all of Kosovo is with you) assures one last pink sign. The girl holding it refuses to put it down. She stands there with her arms in the air. She wants to make it clear that her country has seen the mistake and will change.

The case in the Faik Konica school was not the first to be denounced but the one that has gained the most momentum. The one that has served as a launching pad. Thanks to how it was reported, Fatjona Krasniqi said that there were more than 2,000 messages in her Instagram inbox that told of abuse. Thanks to the outrage she provoked, Sherife Alickaj-Qerimi showed how the police are also part of the problem. Thanks to the shame felt by these young people, Liridona Sijarina has been able to shout on public television, this time being heard more than ever, that what happened in Faik Konica "is not an isolated event".

This is not an isolated event. Much remains to be changed. Much remains to be improved. The situation of women is still far from being equal to that of men. But young women are here to change it. Adelina Tërshani is clear, "to change this system and eradicate these injustices we need a lot of work, a lot of information, empowerment and continuous support for girls and women". And now, 'Hej qiki, ni Kosovo mbrapa e ki'.