Marija Antić

Social identity approaches suggest that people favour ingroup members, yet ingroup favouritism does not necessarily translate into outgroup derogation. Using a sample of Croatian majority-group youth from a nationally and religiously homogeneous pre-COVID context, we examined whether personal values moderate the relationship between national identification and attitudes towards minorities. We conducted a latent profile analysis (LPA) on higher-order values among young Croatian Catholics who did not belong to minority groups (N = 994) and identified five value profiles that varied primarily in the prioritisation of openness to change versus conservation. Profiles differed in minority attitudes and national identification. Crucially, the association between national identification and minority attitudes varied across profiles: it was unrelated in the profile prioritising openness over conservation, whereas in the remaining profiles it tended to be negative and was most consistently negative in the profile prioritising conservation over openness. Taken together, the findings highlight the role of values in the relationship between group identification and attitudes towards outgroups, confirming their relevance for social cohesion and potential for the development of deradicalisation interventions.

This paper explores experiences of persons engaging in survival sex in Croatia. While research on commercial sex in Croatia is generally scarce, there is ‎an absence of qualitative inquires into the life stories and experiences of per sons selling se...

There are still relatively few studies on job satisfaction and the quality of work ‎among sex workers, partly due to the ideologies surrounding sex work. In this ‎paper we move away from dichotomous thinking and investigate the professional experiences of indoor independent sex workers in Croatia against the ‎background of criminalised context and gendered socio-economic realities. ‎We look into sex workers’ motivations, perceptions and experiences, their ‎control and safety strategies.‎ The study shows that despite many structural constraints on the sex workers’ agency, all participants exercise some degree of autonomy and control ‎over their working lives. The factors that seem to be the most relevant in terms ‎of their ability to set up their own conditions, which in turn influences their experiences, are their economic situation, motivation and self-perception. Negative experiences mostly stem from criminalisation and stigmatisation of sex ‎work, which affects women primarily, and creates more risks to their health ‎and safety. The results of the study call for integrative policy approaches, ‎which presuppose full decriminalisation of adult voluntary sex work.

While there is no European consensus on the most appropriate prostitution policies, in most European countries selling sex itself is not criminalised. Exceptions are most of the former communist/socialist countries of the Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia, including Croatia, where it is a misdemeanour/administrative offence against public order and peace, despite recommendations by human rights bodies to decriminalise sex workers. The legitimacy of protecting public order through criminalising selling sex has remained largely unchallenged and there is a lack of empirical studies examining the application of those provisions from a human rights perspective. This article addresses the gap and provides a human rights analysis of the case-law of the municipal misdemeanour courts in the two largest Croatian cities (Zagreb and Split), in the period from 2014 to 2019 concerning the offence of ‘falling into prostitution’. We show how laws criminalising sex workers are not only ineffective, but are also harmful for public order. Not only does the indeterminacy of the offence and its different interpretations fail to fully respect the principle of legality, police and judicial practice show discrepancies with the human rights standards, which impacts primarily women in vulnerable situations, thus raising the questions of gender (in)equality and intersectional discrimination.