The ongoing trial before the Cantonal Court in Mostar for the murder of Aldina Jahić must be followed with full respect for the defendant’s presumption of innocence, but also without concealing what the Prosecution is seeking to prove.

By Zilka Spahić Šiljak

Anis Kalajdžić has been charged with the aggravated murder of Aldina Jahić, the unauthorized possession of a weapon, and endangering public safety. The defendant pleaded not guilty, while witnesses were allegedly asked to lie in his favor. Testimonies presented during the trial indicate that Aldina had documented threats and collected evidence with the intention of reporting them. The Prosecution claims that, on the day of the murder, she attempted to escape, seek help, and call the police before she was found in a hospitality establishment and killed.

These facts are particularly important because they dismantle one of the questions most frequently directed at victims: “Why didn’t she leave?”

Aldina, like many other victims of femicide, tried to leave. The problem was not that she did not know how to leave. The problem was a man who did not accept a woman’s right to leave.

According to information confirmed by the Ministry of the Interior of the Herzegovina-Neretva Canton to Detektor after the murder, at the time of his arrest the defendant was already awaiting trial for endangering public safety following a report filed by another woman, and no restraining measures had been imposed on him. This raises questions that go beyond individual criminal responsibility: How do institutions assess risk? How do they connect previous reports? How seriously do they treat threats and stalking? Why is protection so often activated only when it is already too late?

This is precisely why it is wrong to reduce femicide to unhappy love, jealousy, or a relationship dispute.

These are not neutral words. They conceal a relationship of power. A dispute involves two parties; in persecution, one person deprives another of safety. Love respects freedom; control abolishes it. Jealousy is an emotion; murder is a decision and a criminal offence.

Internalized Misogyny as an Accomplice to Femicide

When, following a femicide and abundant evidence of a criminal offence, a woman writes on social media:

“I do not support violence, especially murder, but… She thought she could take advantage of him while acting like a single woman. So, the man simply killed her and was done with her,”

we must ask ourselves why women seek to find justifications for the murder of another woman.

Sometimes a single sentence, such as the one above, reveals more about a society than dozens of reports, strategies, and conferences. The comment, written by a woman beneath a news article about Aldina’s murder, ends with words that should provoke collective horror and outrage in every healthy society:

“The man simply killed her and was done with her.”

This comment was not written by a man openly boasting about his hatred of women. It was written by a woman. That is precisely why it deserves attention.

Not because its author should be subjected to public lynching, insults, or threats. Such a response would merely reproduce the same pattern of violence. It is important to analyze the comment because it demonstrates how patriarchy survives: not only through men’s use of force, but also through values that women may adopt, defend, and transmit as though they represented a natural moral order.

This is what we call internalized misogyny: a process through which women, growing up in a society that systematically judges them more harshly than men, begin to accept its prejudices as their own beliefs.

They learn that a woman is responsible for a man’s anger; that her behavior “provokes” violence; that gifts create a debt toward a man; that being in a romantic relationship means losing one’s freedom; and that a woman who rejects a man must be selfish, immoral, or ungrateful.

Patriarchy is most successful when its commands no longer need to be spoken only by a man, because a woman repeats them on his behalf. This is why the social media comment begins with an apparent disclaimer:

“I do not support violence, especially murder, but…”

Everything that follows that “but” invalidates what came before it:

“I do not justify murder, but she used him.”

“Violence is not the answer, but she should have known what kind of man he was.”

“No one had the right to kill her, but why didn’t she report him earlier?”

“I feel sorry for the woman, but she also provoked him; she was no saint either.”

That “but” is not an innocent linguistic habit. It is a bridge across which responsibility is transferred from the perpetrator to the murdered woman.

At the very moment when attention should be focused on the person who threatened, stalked, controlled, obtained a weapon, and took a life, the public begins investigating the woman’s character: What did she accept? With whom did she travel? Where did she live? Why did she stay? Why did she leave? Why did she not report him sooner? Did she perhaps “give him false hope”?

In this way, after her death, the murdered woman becomes the accused.

A Gift Is Not a Property Deed

In the comment cited above, a car, a journey, and a paid apartment are presented as evidence that the woman owed the man something. It is as though material gifts constituted a contract through which he purchased her availability, obedience, sexual fidelity, and the right to decide whether she could be a “single woman.”

This is one of the most dangerous patterns of patriarchal thinking: the idea that a man’s investment gives him a right to a woman—her body, her time, and her movement.

No gift, service, emotion, or previous promise abolishes a person’s right to change their mind, end a relationship, refuse contact, or continue living their own life.

Even if all the allegations contained in the social media comment were true—and the commentator presents them without evidence—they would have no relevance whatsoever to a man’s supposed right to take a woman’s life.

Possible disappointment, jealousy, a sense of having been exploited, or a wounded ego are not mitigating circumstances for murder. They are emotions that adults must manage without violence.

What the comment reveals is the belief that a man who has given something also has the right to take something in return. When a woman attempts to leave such a relationship, he does not experience it as her decision, but as the theft of his property.

This is where the logic of femicide begins:

“If she will not be mine, she will be no one’s.”

Why Do Women Defend Abusers?

Internalized misogyny does not mean that women are naturally more cruel toward other women. It means that women, like men, are raised within the same patriarchal society.

From an early age, they hear that a “good woman” does not provoke a man, does not speak too loudly, does not leave a man, does not change partners, does not exercise her sexual freedom, and must be grateful for the attention she receives.

They learn that a woman’s value is measured by whether a man has chosen her and whether she has managed to keep him.

At the same time, male possessiveness is romanticized: if he is jealous, it means he loves her; if he is persistent, it means he cares; if he controls her, it means he is protecting her.

In such a system, some women attempt to prove their own moral worth by distancing themselves from other women:

“I would never behave like that.”

“That could never happen to me.”

“I respect my husband.”

“She must have done something to make him angry.”

By condemning the victim, the commentator creates an illusion of safety. If she believes that the woman was killed because she behaved wrongly, she can convince herself that she will remain safe as long as she is “good,” obedient, and careful.

It is far more frightening to acknowledge the truth: a woman may do everything “right” and still be subjected to violence because the perpetrator chooses to control and punish her violently.

Victim-blaming therefore often functions as a psychological defense mechanism. At the same time, however, it becomes politically and socially dangerous.

Every sentence that seeks an excuse for an abuser sends a message to other women that, when they report violence, their morality will be examined first.

It tells them that their messages, clothing, sexual life, and financial relationships will be analyzed before the threats made by the man they fear.

Because of such reactions, many women remain silent. They remain silent not only because they fear the abuser, but also because they fear that their families, the police, their employers, their neighbors, and the wider public will not believe them.

From a Social Media Comment to a Culture That Enables Femicide

The author of the comment did not pull the trigger. Responsibility for the criminal offence lies with the person whose guilt is established through lawful judicial proceedings.

It is important to state this clearly because the concept of internalized misogyny must not be used to transfer responsibility for male violence back onto women.

Nevertheless, public discourse is not insignificant.

There is no simple, automatic cause-and-effect relationship between a misogynistic comment and femicide, but there is a cultural continuum.

At one end of that continuum are “jokes” about beating women, checking their phones, insulting divorced and sexually active women, ridiculing reports of violence, and claiming that a woman “made her own choice.”

At the other end are stalking, threats, physical violence, and murder.

Femicide does not arise out of nothing. It grows within a culture that associates masculinity with domination and women’s freedom with disobedience.

It grows where saying NO is treated as the beginning of a negotiation, where ending a relationship is regarded as a man’s humiliation, and where rejecting a man becomes a reason for revenge.

It also grows in environments where those around the perpetrator describe him as “a good man who snapped,” while the murdered woman is investigated to determine what kind of girlfriend she was.

When someone writes that a man “simply killed her and was done with her,” that person is not merely commenting on one crime.

She is affirming the idea that a woman’s life can become the object of a man’s decision.

In that sentence, murder is not described as the taking of a human life, but as the resolution of a problem.

The woman is the problem. Murder is the conclusion.

That is the very essence of dehumanization.

The Law Is Important, but It Is Not Enough

Through amendments to its Criminal Code adopted in 2025, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina introduced the separate criminal offence of the aggravated murder of a woman.

Article 166a provides that anyone who commits the gender-based murder of a woman shall be punished by imprisonment for a term of at least ten years or by long-term imprisonment.

The law requires that, when determining whether the offence is gender-based, consideration must be given to previous abuse, relationships of intimacy, subordination or dependency, sexual violence, and other circumstances demonstrating that the crime constitutes gender-based violence.

The same amendments also introduced the criminal offence of stalking.

This represents a major legal advancement. The law has finally recognized what feminist organizations have been saying for decades: some women are not killed accidentally or simply because they happened to be in the wrong place.

They are killed within a context of control, inequality, possessiveness, and gender-based violence.

But the law will not protect women on its own.

It will not help if the police treat threats as a private dispute.

It will not help if prosecutors fail to connect earlier reports and patterns of behavior.

It will not help if restraining orders are not imposed quickly and monitored seriously.

It will not help if a woman’s family tells her to remain silent so that she does not bring shame upon the household.

And it will not help if society continues, even after a murder, to search for reasons why the victim allegedly deserved to be punished.

Society often shows empathy only toward the “ideal victim”: a quiet, modest, faithful, completely helpless, and morally irreproachable woman.

If she defended herself, argued, returned to the abuser, accepted gifts, had another partner, or did not immediately report the violence, the amount of compassion that the public is prepared to offer begins to diminish.

The question “Why didn’t she report him?” is especially hypocritical when it comes from a society that asks a woman who does report violence what she did to provoke the man.

Reporting violence is not a simple administrative act. It is often the period of greatest danger because the abuser feels that he is losing control.

At that moment, a woman does not need advice offered from the safety of someone else’s home. She needs trust, legal protection, a risk assessment, safe accommodation, and institutions that will act before a threat becomes a death notice.

What We Must Learn from This Trial

The trial for the murder of Aldina Jahić must not become merely another media spectacle in which the public waits for new and disturbing details.

Its purpose does not lie in collective voyeurism, but in accountability.

The court must establish individual criminal responsibility on the basis of evidence. Institutions must examine whether there were failures in prevention and protection. The media must report without sensationalism and without romanticizing violence.

The education system must teach young people about consent, emotional literacy, equal relationships, and accepting the end of a relationship.

Social media platforms must respond more seriously to the open justification of violence.

And every one of us must stop participating in the ritual trial of a dead woman.

The real question is not why she was not careful, grateful, or obedient enough.

The real questions are:

Why did a man believe he had the right to decide whether she would live?

Why are threats and stalking so frequently normalized?

Did the institutions have enough information to assess the danger?

Why does society continue to defend abusers by referring to money, gifts, and wounded masculinity?

And why do even some women believe that a woman’s freedom can be punished by death?

No “But” After a Murder

Internalized misogyny is not a personal deficiency belonging to individual women. It is the result of long-term social conditioning.

It cannot therefore be eliminated by insulting the commentator, but through education, public opposition, feminist solidarity, and the consistent identification of patterns that sustain violence.

Women are not natural allies of patriarchy. However, the mere fact that they are women does not automatically make them feminists.

Solidarity must be learned.

So must disobedience toward a system that demands that a woman understand the abuser more than she understands the victim.

The comment with which this article began is not merely an “ugly comment from the internet.” It is a small textbook of the culture of femicide.

It contains all of its key elements: distrust of the victim, the material ownership of a woman, the punishment of female freedom, sympathy for the man, and, finally, the presentation of murder as an understandable solution.

This is why the sentence “I do not support murder, but…” must be answered without any continuation and without negotiation:

There is no BUT.