were family members. According to the statistics of
the Serbian ministry of the interior, 892 criminal re-
ports of sexual abuse of children were filed between
1998 and 2002. According to the data of the non-
governmental organization (NGO) Incest Trauma
Center in Serbia, the number of reported cases of
child sexual abuse has increased since 2000; cur-
rently, some 50 new cases are reported every week.
Data on sexual abuse of children in Slovenia,
Kosovo, Macedonia, and Montenegro were not
available.
After the war against Bosnia-Herzegovina
(1992–6), numerous NGOs for human rights and
related issues were established in the country and in
the region. These organizations work on raising
awareness regarding women’s issues, gender, and
sexual abuse of children in accordance with general
European standing on these matters. There are
public demands all over the region to improve the
existing documents by precisely defining sexual
abuse of children. There are also more and more
requests to develop legislative, executive, and judi-
cial powers in order to efficiently register, prosecute,
and veto these crimes. These issues are presented in
public debates and in the media, particularly in
women’s and feminist organizations, but so far no
general position on them has been reached. There
are no unified and developed procedures for regis-
tering sexual abuse of children in any of these coun-
tries, which is why the existing statistics are
inconsistent. In some countries there is an obvious
increase of the number of cases of sexual abuse of
children that is not visible in others. It is reasonable
to assume that the magnitude of sexual abuse of
children in all the countries concerned is similar.BibliographyPrimary Sources
CID, I begged them to kill me[in Bosnian], Sarajevo
1999.
Commission for Gathering Facts on War Crime, The sin
of silence. Risk of speech[in Bosnian], Sarajevo 1999.
F. Karåi¶, Studies of Sharì≠a law[in Bosnian], Sarajevo
1997.
M. Milosavljevi¶, Child sexual abuse[in Bosnian], Sara-
jevo 2002.
Z. Mr«evi¶, Incest between myth and reality[in Serbian],
Beograd 1997.Secondary Sources
M. Singer, Criminal-judicial responsibility and protection
of youth[in Croatian], Zagreb 1998.
V. Nikoli¶, Domestic violence in Serbia[in Serbian],
Beograd 2002.Déamna Duman736 sexual abuse: children
The Caucasus and TurkeyAll countries of the southern Caucasus region –
Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia – as well as
neighboring Turkey, have signed the United Nations
Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). This
stipulates that a child is any human being under 18
unless they have attained legal majority earlier. The
particular articles of the CRC that apply to child
sexual abuse and exploitation are numbers 19 and
34, 35, and 39. Only the two majority Islamic
countries – Turkey and Azerbaijan – have addition-
ally signed the Optional Protocol on the Rights of
the Child on the Sale of Children, Child Prosti-
tution and Child Pornography.
Age limits for sexual activity remain controver-
sial in the Caucasus. Girls in both majority Islamic
and Christian countries of the Caucasus region and
Turkey, living in rural areas especially, can marry
“voluntarily” as early as age 12 or 13. Younger
brides marry older adolescents or young adult men,
and almost certainly drop out of the education sys-
tem without completing minimum schooling.
Definitions of abuse, however, imply a lack of con-
sent for sexual contact between a child and an adult
or someone at least 5 years older. Some Western
European countries have set the legal age for con-
sent to sexual relations at 12 or 14. National legis-
lations in the Caucasus lack precise legal age
prescriptions on this issue, though an initiative in
the Georgian parliament in 2003 requests that this
limit now be set at 16.
Abuse within the family and the commercial sex-
ual exploitation of children, both boys and girls,
exist universally to some degree. However, a lack of
serious research in the Caucasus is actually con-
tributing to and covering the growing problems.
In Turkey there is cause for alarm because of the
lack of investigations into cases of abused children.
Cases are increasingly reported, but inadequate fol-
low-ups mean that the children continue to be
abused, or have even been known to be killed when
abuse was reported.
Rape has the clearest legislative consequences in
all countries concerned. In Georgia, the criminal
code specifies details of the act and the ages, as well
as length of imprisonment; for example, raping a
person younger than 14 is punishable by imprison-
ment from 10 to 20 years. In Azerbaijan, the crimi-
nal code mentions the rape of infants as well as of
juveniles, acts which engender imprisonment from
8 to 15 years.