A few weeks ago, in the village of Sllupçan, a minor girl was sexually abused and blackmailed by 17 men, including a relative and a religious figure from the village. A crime that, in any slightly dysfunctional society, would have caused deep public shock, immediate institutional reaction and a collective anger that would not subside until justice was served. In our society, this crime was treated as such cases are usually treated: as an isolated incident, as unpleasant news that could be forgotten within a week. It was not seen as a collective failure of the family, the community, the institutions and the norms that preach public morality, but turn a blind eye when something so serious happens.
The moral alarm that should have deafened our ears because a child was raped, made very little noise. There were attempts at relativization. Attempts were made to minimize it. Attention was shifted. We even managed to talk about the 2001 war, to prove that the men of this village are not rapists, but brave, as if yesterday’s heroism were an alibi for today’s crime. Selective memory was used as a moral shield, as a mechanism to stifle public anger and to silence any subsequent process. Unfortunately, it worked.
This is the most brutal reflection of the false morality preached within the Albanian community in Macedonia. A morality that is produced and reproduced as a mechanism of power, not as a system of values. It does not serve to guide in something ethical, but to regulate behavior through fear, to install shame as a means of discipline and to keep under control those who deviate from the limits of “acceptability”. This morality operates through collective pressure, gossip, stigmatization and the threat of social exclusion. It does not need to be fair or coherent; it is enough to be functional for the preservation of the existing order. Within this order, morality is not distributed equally. It is imposed on some bodies more than others. Women and girls become the main terrain of its implementation: they are exposed, defenseless and targeted. Many cases, before this one with the girl from Slupcani, should have been a bellwether that justice does not end with institutional punishment, but must create a space where women and girls can denounce without fear, without shame and without being exposed to a public trial. Nothing can recover the emotional and physical damage that this girl and other victims of sexual violence will carry throughout their lives. This case does not stand alone; it speaks of an order that systematically protects the perpetrators and teaches the victims to be silent.
This order is also clearly revealed through simple mathematics: the village has about 2,000 men, which means that about 1% of the men in the village have committed an extreme coordinated crime against a child. This is not an insignificant minority. Here we do not have 17 random men, but a cousin, a religious figure preaching morality, and 15 other men who participated in this crime. When so many men feel safe doing this to a child, in a small village where everyone knows each other and where nothing really remains a secret, the problem is structural. As long as the majority continues to hide behind the phrase “not all men,” the false morality remains there to protect the abusers.
This order is also clearly revealed through simple mathematics: the village has about 2,000 men, which means that about 1% of the men in the village have committed an extreme coordinated crime against a child. This is not an insignificant minority. Here we do not have 17 random men, but a cousin, a religious figure preaching morality, and 15 other men who participated in this crime. When so many men feel safe doing this to a child, in a small village where everyone knows each other and where nothing really remains a secret, the problem is structural. As long as the majority continues to hide behind the phrase “not all men,” the false morality remains there to protect the abusers.
