‘Shame, Guilt’: Can North Macedonia Crack Down on Online Harassment?

A friend of Qamili and a cousin had both shown her similar messages they had received months earlier, containing the same kind of vulgar content and the same spelling errors. They suspected the same person was harassing them, using a dialect of Albanian that pointed to their hometown, Kicevo in North Macedonia.

On January 4, 2022, Qamili posted screenshots of the messages on Facebook and Instagram, and in no time at all 16 women got in touch to say the same thing had happened to them. The phone numbers were different, but the spelling mistakes were not.

Qamili encouraged the others to go to the police, but they were reluctant - some were married, others engaged. Almost no one wanted to run the risk of being shamed for someone else's wrongdoing.

The next day, Qamili walked into the police station in Kicevo, armed with the screenshots, and reported that she was being harassed on social media.

"I reported the case on January 5, 2022, after realising that the same thing happened to many other girls," she told BIRN. One of them was Mona [not her real name], who also went to the police the same day, accompanied by her husband.

Mona had been harassed for months on WhatsApp, Viber and, later, Facebook by an account under the name of 'Agron'. He called her at work, using the same number that Qamili had been contacted from.

The case, however, has yet to be solved.

North Macedonia has since amended the Criminal Code to better address such cases and keep pace with the changing nature of such threats, but implementation will be key, argue experts, who say such harassment can have a lasting impact on its victims.

"Shame and guilt are often connected, and considering that such experiences often place guilt on the victim,...