“Unfortunately, violence against children is practiced in the Armenian society”

Victorian Ohanyan, UNICEF’s justice access project manager, welcoming the development of a draft law “On the prevention of domestic violence and the protection of victims of domestic violence”, notes that it answers many questions and offers mechanisms that certainly have a positive impact in the fight against domestic violence. But according to the expert, it is no less important to change the psychology of the people and puppet positive parenting so that the lack of parenting skills cannot be expressed through violence against a child, whether it is physical punishment or psychological pressure.

According to Ohanyan, some concerns that previously existed in the Law on Domestic Violence were solved from the point of view of the protection of children’s rights in the draft law submitted by the Ministry of Justice. Particularly, the child was not viewed as an independent subject and that the child was a secondary victim. But at present, in the draft law, that concern has been settled and the child, like a woman or a man, will be recognized as an autonomous victim.

According to him, only the adoption of the law is not capable of eradicating the phenomenon of domestic violence in our society because this problem is much deeper than it seems at first glance and there are many mechanisms that lead to this phenomenon. And although it has been designed by the government, it has set up mechanisms, as well as cooperation functions between different bodies, but it takes a lot of time to implement, introduce, and use all that.

“Only by adopting the law, it is difficult to achieve a positive result. I think it’s a primary task to raise the level of public awareness on this vicious phenomenon, and, first of all, from school education. It is essential that, for example, the issue of domestic violence during the study of literature be correctly interpreted by trained professionals so that children begin to formulate the viewpoint on what is permissible or inadmissible in family relationships”, – said our interlocutor.

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