Gender and Sexuality Report

Gender-Based Violence Against Women and LGBTQ+ groups D 3.7 July 2023

Abstract

Gender-Based Violence (GBV) has been the cause of growing concern in Europe and beyond in recent years. The European Union (EU) introduced the Daphne project in order to prevent GBV against females, such as sexual exploitation and human trafficking in 1997 (Montoya, 2009). With that project, the EU sought to establish a comprehensive approach to deal with violence against women and children in European society. The Council of Europe’s Convention in Istanbul (2011) on preventing GBV against women and girls was the first legally binding regional instrument to address different forms of violence, such as psychological violence, stalking, and sexual harassment (Bradbury-Jones et al., 2019). Moreover, the EU has also pushed for LGBTQ+ rights for its candidate countries as its enlargement policy (Muehlenhoff, 2019, p.203). In this report, we select EU members, namely Poland, Hungary and Italy and EU Candidate countries including Bosnia and Kosovo in order to express the weakness of EU institutions to prevent GBV whereas they have tried to establish a “feminist” and “queer friendly” policies (Ammaturo, 2015; Latcheva, 2017; Korkut & Ziya-Eslen, 2011). In this case, we analyse why the EU has failed to protect women and LGBTQ+ people from GBV within and beyond its borders (Godzisz, 2019; Mazey, 1998).