The Association “Women for Contemporary Society”, together with the Gender Equality Platform, will monitor sexism and violence against women in elections. The preliminary results will be presented in the middle of February.
In a news conference at IPN, Olga Nicolenko, expert involved in the conduct of the study, said it is for the first time that the subject of violence against women in the election campaign will be examined in the Republic of Moldova as a separate problem. The fact that this issue hasn’t been investigated until now does not mean that this phenomenon hadn’t existed in the past. Situations when female candidates were threatened and the threats involved the family and children were reported earlier too. There was a case when a female candidate had a knife stabbed in the door of her home because she refused to withdraw from the campaign. Recently, a candidate had her domestic animals poisoned.
According to Olga Nicolenko, the women are more disadvantaged than the men. Having additional responsibilities in the family, related to the looking after children and housekeeping, the women have less time for career and slimmer chances of obtaining a well-paid job. “All these situations make the women be afraid to become involved in an election campaign and this phenomenon is present at international level as well,” stated the expert.
Olga Bîtcă, president of the Gender Equality Platform, made reference to an international study that covered 123 female MPs from 45 member states of the Council of Europe. This showed that 85% of these women were subject to a particular form of violence during the election campaign or while holding office.
Veronica Lupu, director of the project “Equal Chances for Women in Elections”, as part of which a study will be carried out, said it is an important initiative as part of which the women are encouraged to take part in elections. On the other hand, when they become involved in election campaigns, the women face stigmatization, blaming and intimidation.
The identification and collection of sexist messages from the press and social networking sites are one of the components of the study. Also, questionnaires filled by those who will identify aggressive or sexist messages against women in the election campaign will be published on the website of the Gender Equality Platform. Finally, the phenomenon of violence against women in elections will be mapped so as to see how spread it is. The people will be informed how to identify and where to report cases of verbal violence, physical or sexist aggression against women in the election campaign.
