Benefiting also from the substantial contribution of local NGOs supported by some foreign ones, Georgia has drafted and adopted a law on Elimination of Domestic Violence, Protection of and Support to Its Victims in 2006. In December 2008, the Presidential Decree established the advisory and coordination body on DV entitled the State Inter-agency Council on Domestic Violence (the Council) to support and strengthen the implementation of the Law on DV. However, there is lack of budgetary sources for implementation of the law and there is also quite a lot of resistance at state and regional authority level.
Georgia has traditionally been a conservative society with deeply rooted religious and patriarchal traditions. With these traditions also exists a strong discrimination against women and widespread acceptance of gender based violence (GBV) in different forms.
There have been a number of studies that address domestic violence against women in Georgia. The studies have examined the scope of domestic violence as well as attitudes and knowledge about the problem. In 2005, the Caucasus Women’s Research and Consulting Network (CWN) published a study on domestic violence1 according to which 22.2% of respondent women reported that their husbands had physically abused them at least once. Approximately 5% of respondents described frequent abuse and 25.5% reported sexual assaults by their husbands. The study suggested significant barriers to women seeking protection and services. 13.1% reported that they had considered calling the police to protect themselves from physical domestic violence, but only 1.8% of all women interviewed actually approached the police. Societal attitudes may account, in part, for the discrepancy between those needing and those accessing services. Over 90% of the women surveyed considered that the "woman should be more modest and try not to provoke violence." Over 60% of women responded that "no matter what, whatever happens in the family should stay within [the] family."
