Raped women hesitate to apply for pensions

Women victims of sexual violence during the last war are reluctant to plead for retirement. Disdulgence, as they have expressed, has to do with fears that they will be identified, even though the preservation of privacy is legally envisioned

Every woman raped by Serbian forces faced not only trauma but also other health problems after the war. They never received health or pension assistance as a category of war.

Now that the government has shared the means to start verifying these victims and separate pensions for them, some of these women in their confessions for “Zerin” have said pensions are nothing to them.

There's nothing to us about those pensions. Our crime is the worst. Our lives are ruined. The State had to do everything. To answer for the crime that has been committed against us. Because there's a woman who even named the criminal, if I didn't know the language, someone knew, knew someone, and never was wanted by criminals”, she says on condition of anonymity.

She says that if criminals were convicted, women would feel better and would not feel ashamed of crime. She does not believe she will ever receive pensions. He even says that even if they get nothing, they don't need it.

“I don't know what the Government (for verification) wants from these women when the whole world knows what they've experienced”, she says. She and her postwar husband have never received a salary, and social assistance has been stopped.