DUSHANBE, July 9, 2009, Asia-Plus -- A roundtable meeting, formally titled “Crisis Centers: Realities and Prospects,” is being held in Dushanbe today.

Organized by the Committee for Family and Women’s Affairs with support fro, the Gender Program of the Tajik Branch of Open Society Institute/Assistance Foundation (OSI/AF-Tajikistan), the meeting is part of the project, Support and Development of Crisis Centers.

According to the OSI/AF-Tajikistan, the main objective of the project is in collecting and analyzing information about crisis centers operating in Tajikistan.  To this date, they have collected information about 35 public associations supporting violence victims.

Today’s meeting participants include representatives of crisis centers, information and resource centers, local NGOs, Committee for Family and Women’s Affairs, international organization working in this sphere and media.

The meeting is dedicated to analyze the situation and determine further steps on support and development of crisis centers in order to promote making their activities more efficient in partnership with public associations and government institutions.

The OSI/AF-Tajikistan said that similar meeting would be held in Khujand on July 14 in partnership with the Crisis Center “Gulrukhsor”

Since 1996, "Gulrukhsor" has been offering women in Tajikistan''s northern region free medical consultations and social and psychological rehabilitation.

Over the past five years, 17,678 people, with more than 77.2 percent of them being women, have applied to crisis centers in Tajikistan.  The number of suicides both among women and men is increasing in the country that makes work of the crisis centers even more topical and significant.