Interior Minister Davor Bozinovic accepted the award by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Mediterranean in Rome on Thursday on behalf of Croatian police for their model for combating domestic violence, violence against women and other vulnerable groups.

In a special address at the conference which brought together ministers of home affairs of Mediterranean countries, Bozinovic said he was pleased that the Croatian model for combating violence received recognition outside the national borders.

Domestic violence is a complex, ubiquitous negative social phenomenon, which has no understandable or easily measurable causes, is not specific to a particular social class or level of education and affects both sexes. Thus an integrated and coordinated approach of the social, political and professional public is crucial in combating and preventing it and stopping inter-generational transmission, said Bozinovic.

He added that at the beginning of the lockdown due to the pandemic, two primary hotspots had been identified — an increase in physical violence behind closed doors and an increase in predatory sexual behaviour aimed at the most vulnerable groups, children and minors, via digital platforms.

Bozinovic said Croatian police had conducted a campaign “Behind the Door”, launched at the beginning of the pandemic to raise public awareness of various forms of violence against children and to encourage people to report suspicious behaviour to police.

The value of the campaign was immediately recognized at the European level, Europol presented it as an example of good practice, and eventually it was also launched in Slovakia. For the youngest, the police developed, in cooperation with the education system, a new model for informing children about different safety topics as part of online classes: Virtual police officers.

Bozinovic also stressed the importance of the online application Red Button, which makes it possible to report possible child abuse online and to report illegal internet content.

He said the number of reports via the application was growing and that most of them referred to sexual and other harassment via the internet, domestic violence and child sexual abuse.

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Mediterranean has 28 member states, and its basic mission is to strengthen political, economic, social and cultural cooperation between member states with the aim of finding joint solutions to the challenges faced by the Mediterranean.