When violent perpetrators father children, their aggression is often directed against the mothers of their children or their own children themselves. Then the state must offer protection. In Austria there is a good legal framework that is intended to protect women from male violence. When those affected by partner violence turn to an authority or institution for help, some of them experience the opposite: instead of protection, they experience further violence there. They become victims of institutional violence. This violence has many faces: financial disadvantage due to inadequate child support, forced visitation of the children with their violent fathers, and in some cases the trauma of having the child taken away, followed by placement in foster families or institutions or back to the perpetrator himself.
How can it be that the Istanbul Convention is disregarded by some Austrian institutions without this having any consequences? How can it happen that perpetrators are protected and their victims experience further violence at the hands of authorities? Using 16 real individual cases, FEM.A shows how this nightmare becomes a bitter reality for mothers in foster care proceedings. With the campaign #StopInstitutionalViolence, the association makes institutional violence visible. With this campaign, FEM.A demands from society and the state: Finally protect mothers and children from violence!
Speakers:
Andrea Czak, MA, executive chairwoman of the Association of Feminist Single Parents – FEM.A
Mag.a Maria Rösslhumer, violence protection expert, founder of StoP districts without partner violence and commissioned StoP coordinator for StoP in Austria
Dr. Ulrike Altendorfer-Kling, specialist in child and adolescent psychiatry, court-certified expert
Online press conference on the 16 days against violence against women
Mothers in foster care proceedings must be protected from violent fathers
Datum: November 22, 2024, 9:00 a.m
Art: Press conference
Ort: Zoom
URL: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84170408812?pwd=j85lvHgbpxyzQzAh6Qsp4UG0IfphZo.1
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