Violence against women as a public health problem in Croatia: From practice to policy, from policy to practice

The learning objectives are (a) to describe the state-of-are in Croatia (b) assess local and national current activities and policy responses, (c) to discuss lessons learnt in implementation of public health measures and capacity building in community practice.
Beside the post-war problems in Croatia, the early 1990s marked the beganing of economic transition with significant social consequences. Particularly vulnerabile were women and children. A national survey conducted by NGO showed that every third women in Croatia had reported to be a victim of psysical aggression by her partner at least once. As a result of NGO efforts, the Parlament passed the National strategy of protection against family violence and the Law on Protection against violence in the family. A total of 27 short-term and long-term measures have been forseen, the realisation of which invoilves all competent public administration bodies, local and regional self-administration units and NGOs dealing with the aim of human rights promotion, particularly the protection of victims of family violence.

It was expected that this supporting legal framework should be a stimulous for building aaliances and partnerships in local communities, resource mobilisation and raising awareness among health care providers. Unfortunaly, study conducted in different local communities showed that  public health and  primary health care providers, professionals working in social welfare, police, justice, NGOs and media have had different attitudes, motivation, working capacities and competences in implementation of measures. They perceived their collaboration as ineffective, often blaming each other's. Therefore, the original model of multidisciplinary training programme was developed and model is described in this presentation. The most important lesson learnt is that professionals' empowerment, networking and personal relations are the key element in solving this complex  public health problem.