Prepared by Elvana Gadeshi, Monitoring and Evaluation Expert, “Refleksione” Association, Albania

The Albanian Network against Gender-Based Violence and Trafficking implemented during November 2007 – March 2010 the project, titled: “Making it Real: Implementing the Law against Domestic Violence in Albania”.

5 districts in the country: Rrëshen, Shkodër, Berat, Pogradec and Vlorë were the target area of the project implementation.

Establishment and functioning of cross-sectoral referral system of domestic violence cases, making possible the practical break-down of the law in question.

Setting up of an electronic data system based on case management, which will make possible the effectiveness of the referral mechanism set up in a local level.

Five Council against Domestic Violence (CaDV)– a decision-making mechanism, made up of representatives from different state institutions and organizations are established

Five Technical Working Group (TWG) – an implementing mechanism of decisions made in CaDV are established.

What is the Electronic System for Data Collection of domestic violence cases management (DCS)?

DCS consists in three main sections:

Section of specific case data

Section of data on case management

Section of reporting

A data collection form/questionnaire was designed and used, which contains the sections that DCS itself contains

Involved project experts in each of five municipalities made possible collection of data through these forms, adapting in many cases the data according to forms of other institutions (for example in police stations/commissariats the data are collected based on their specific forms).

The expert who built the DCS reflected into the system all the cases collected according to the data contained in the relevant data collection forms.

The data in the system could be filled in by the project experts in cooperation with relevant trained persons in every municipality (domestic violence specialists).

The responsible person for the system maintenance and updating of the data will be the specialist nominated in the municipality organizational structure as “Specialist for Domestic Violence”.

The reports generated by the electronic system should be shared regularly with members of CaDV-s and TWG-s, and also with municipal council memebers.

When work starts to insert the data, the system homepage has the following view:

1. From the data already collected and registered in the DCS, 204 (two hundred and four) domestic violence cases resulted to have been treated multidisciplinarily for the period September 2008 – June 2009. This figure reflects the total of cases registered and treated for this period in all five municipalities where project implementation was focused.

2. In all five districts there is a list of actors to address the problem of domestic violence identified by the community as contact points, which are part of the cross-sectoral referral system. In three districts this system appears to function very well, in the meantime in Pogradec there is a need for improvement of its functioning, whereas in Rrëshen, the mechanism has not yet been made functional.

3. The most violated family member is a woman or a girl.

1. In improvement of work between actors

2. In the analysis of the phenomenon and identification of possible problems in order to address them and find a solution

3. In creating of another level of responsibility between specialists of data collection

1. To avoid all doubts on untrue data or wrong numbers, leading to increase of trust and improvement of the cooperation scale between actors and those who benefit from it.

2. To feed 75% of the indicators of the Albanian National Strategy Against Domestic Violence.