Case of Women Rights Center

Women Rights Center in Armenia initiated drafting of Law on Domestic Violence in 2005 and advocated and lobbied it since 2007. In September 2009 the law was submitted to the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs of RA for further circulation and on November 12th, 2010 it has been presented to the Government of RA for consideration.
The strategy used to force law was to work with the women parliamentarians and push the law with their help. The first challenge the organization faced was that women parliamentarians were sure that domestic violence is not an issue in Armenia. As many male officials and authorities they were sure that domestic violence is western issue that foreign governments and agencies trying to integrate in our society to weaken strong Armenian family values and traditions.
Domestic violence topic is very sensitive topic for Armenians. Over centuries Armenian Families were considered as one of the strongest family units with very little number of divorces. The other challenge with domestic violence topic was that general public under the domestic violence only understood severe physical violence. The population did not identify psychological, economic and sexual violence in the family as domestic violence. Sexual violence in the family even nowadays is a taboo topic. There is zero record on reporting sexual abuse in the family in my city which is the second biggest city in Armenia.
I agree with M. Avner that building of advocacy capacity is very important before initiating advocacy. Without strengthening the knowledge base, having strong facts and numbers in hand, building coalition with other interested organizations to make lobbing stronger, understanding the opposition it is impossible to be quick and effective. Another issue with this campaign was that the population was not supporting the issue either. As professionals in this field we could identify easily domestic violence and the issue was obvious for us but for general public that was not able to identify psychological and economical violence was difficult to accept that the phenomena of domestic violence is existing in Armenia. As a non-profit we cannot lobby an issue which is not coming from grassroots and is not the voice of the target group that we are representing. Such campaigns will stretch longer, will request much more resources and there is no guarantee that it will have any success.
This case is showing that sometimes before starting the lobbying there may be a need to do public awareness raising activities also that can initiate debates and dialogues on the issue that will help both general public and authorities to look at the issue from different angles.