ONLINE RAPE
A major step forward in prosecuting crimes of sexual violence committed online!
The Zagreb police declared two cases of online sexual violence as rape and referred the cases to the State Attorney's Office under such charges, which, using the term online rape, accepted them in its indictment. By defining sexual violence as 'online rape', the Zagreb police have also opened a new path in the fight against sexual violence, which is increasingly being found on the internet.
Nikolina Grubišić Požar, head of the Department for Juvenile Delinquency and Crime Against Youth and Families of the Zagreb Police Department, mentioned the case of online rape at a recent multi-sectoral expert discussion on online violence that we organized as part of the SURF and SOUND project.
Grubišić Požar advises everyone who experiences online abuse to report it and not to bother asking whether it is a criminal offense and what kind. This will be assessed by the police, the state attorney's office and the court. All they have to do is honestly tell the police everything they have experienced, without shame, because this helps build a solid case, as well as to preserve evidence of the abuse. This evidence, as Anita Matijević from the Police Directorate said in the discussion on online violence, is the ID, user name, URL link to the perpetrator's profile, screenshots of the perpetrator's content and profile cover, and the time of the disputed communication.
Read the full article "ONLINE RAPE: Zagreb police uncover and define two cases of rape on the internet" on the portal Reci.hr.
The SURF and SOUND project, aimed at combating online violence against women, is co-financed by the European Union, the Office for Cooperation with NGOs of the Government of the Republic of Croatia, and the City of Zagreb. The BaBe association is the project leader in partnership with the Agency for Electronic Media.
