National Mobile SOS Phone Established
The SOS Line for Youth (3 110 162) at the Union of Women Organizations of Macedonia - SOZM, transforms into SOS National Intervention Centre for Violence against Women and Girls (SOS - NIC).
The initiative for a mobile SOS line, according to Tanja Gjurovska, Coordinator of “Open Space” Youth Centre, originates in the real needs of the victims of domestic violence who are forced, when assaulted, to urgently leave the site and the only possibility to contact the SOS line is by mobile phone. SOS NIC, in addition to the SOS phone line, offers a number of other services to the victims of domestic violence, including a psycho-social counseling, urgent accommodation for the victioms for a period of 24 to 48 hours, as well as assistance to the victims in their contacts with the competent institutions and offices of the state. Elena Ivanovska, psychologist with the expert team on violence in the family at SOZM, presented the statistics on domestic violence, collected through processing of calls made to the SOS line. According to the data, the most common forms of violence are the psychological and psycho-physical violence, followed by purely physical and economic violence. The most common causes of violence are alcoholism, socio-economic dependence, poverty and patriarchal relations inside a family, which means that, in majority of cases, violence occurs as a result of the unequal distribution of power between men and women in the society. The SOS line, in addition to reports of violent assaults, received calls with demands for assistance in cases of drug-abuse in the family, sexual harassment, bad relations of younger members of the family with their peers and impossibility to socialize, as well as a big number of calls on the issue of human trafficking. SOS NIC and the mobile SOS line were established with support by T-mobile and Cosmofon telecommunications companies. |
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