A prayer, a verdict, and an AI companion

responsibility and – Croatia’s anti-gender street rituals are met with counter-resistance, while a rape trial finds new life in documentary theatre. At the same time, discussions across the region are turning to artificial “care,” from AI mental health tools to an essay about addi

When a group of men gathers monthly in the main squares of Croatia’s major cities for public rosary prayers, the choreography looks like religion. But the effect lands like politics.

Since October 2022. public rosary prayers organized by the conservative initiative Muževni budite (‘Be manly’) have continued to take place every month. Presented as apolitical religious rituals promoting ‘traditional family values’. the gatherings are exclusively male—and. in the account featured by Vox Feminae. Croatia’s leading independent feminist online cultural journal. they operate as coordinated interventions into public space.

Rebbeca Mikulandra. a regular counter-protester. points to how grassroots initiatives—such as Zagreb-based Ustani za slobodu (Stand up for freedom)—contest this agenda through public resistance. Her reporting draws on interviews with activists and researchers. including Maja Gergorić and Ivan Tranfić. Croatia’s leading experts on anti-gender movements.

Mikulandra situates the rosary gatherings within a broader transnational conservative infrastructure. describing the influence of Polish organizations such as Ordo Iuris. In her framing. these networks instrumentalize religious practice to oppose ‘abortion rights. LGBTIQ+ rights. and sex education’. while cloaking their goals in the language of human rights. democracy. and pseudo-scientific expertise.

The events are framed as peaceful and non-violent. Yet Mikulandra describes intimidation of counter-protesters, coordinated online harassment, police passivity, and astroturfing tactics designed to simulate mass public support. After vandalization of an art installation commemorating femicide victims—an installation tied to a counter-protest—the debate widened into petitions and public argument about removing the prayers from public space. Mikulandra calls for “the right kind of response”: sustained. collective resistance that goes beyond street protest and that understands silence not as neutrality but as complicity.

That same question—who carries responsibility, and where it gets hidden—threads through a very different cultural moment elsewhere in Europe.

In December 2024. a verdict was passed down on the 51 men who raped Gisèle Pelicot. formally closing what is described as a historic case. In the months that followed, public discourse gradually confronted the scale and gravity of the crimes. One of the most striking artistic responses came in the form of The Pelicot Trial. a documentary theatre production by Swiss director Milo Rau and French dramaturg Servane Dècle.

The production premiered in Avignon. where the trial took place. then moved to Belgrade for staging as part of NE:BITEF. It arrived after Serbia’s most prominent theatre festival, Bitef, was cancelled. The play—performed in Serbian at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts and streamed online—ran for four hours and drew tens of thousands of viewers. according to the account by Iva Parađanin and Jasna Jasna Žmak.

Using the tools of documentary and verbatim theatre—court transcripts. testimonies. and media material—the minimalist staging was built to put the audience face-to-face with the brutality of the crimes and the social structures that enabled them. Central to the play is Pelicot’s insistence on a public trial and her declaration that ‘shame must change sides’. The phrase has since been widely adopted as a feminist slogan.

The play’s cast includes prominent activists alongside professional actors. and it is staged within a space associated with student resistance—details presented as amplifiers of local political resonance. Including real-life figures also destabilizes the boundary between testimony and representation. The result culminates in the appearance of Milena Radulović. an actress whose public testimony significantly reshaped public discussion of sexual violence in the region.

In the theatre piece, sexual violence is framed not as individual deviance, but as a phenomenon that ‘exposes the multilayered and complex nature of responsibility for such acts’, sustained by misogyny, institutional complicity, and normalised silence.

If the Pelicot trial asks audiences to stop treating responsibility as personal alone, the next cultural shift covered in the same journal turns inward—toward the growing desire to be soothed, understood, and managed by something that doesn’t require human vulnerability.

Jasna Jasna Žmak writes about how professional psychotherapy remains expensive and inaccessible for many. and how reliance on cheaper. readily available AI-based alternatives continues to grow. In her overview. artificial intelligence has entered contemporary therapeutic contexts in two main ways: through informal use of general-purpose chatbots such as ChatGPT—known for fluent. human-like interaction—and through the expanding market of specialized AI therapy platforms such as Wysa and Woebot.

The discussions around AI-based mental health tools, as she reports, keep returning to unresolved ethical, legal, and practical questions. These include the lack of clear regulation governing AI ‘therapists’. persistent concerns over data security. and the inherent inability of AI systems to have genuine empathy.

Alongside documented cases of so-called ‘chatbot psychosis’, Žmak pays particular attention to the gap between linguistic fluency and actual understanding. AI systems can produce emotionally convincing language without understanding its meaning. she writes. generating responses grounded in ‘statistical prediction rather than comprehension’.

Proponents emphasize advantages: availability and affordability, psychoeducational guidance, organizational support, and pointers toward other resources. There is also the appeal of disclosing personal experiences to a non-human counterpart. and the promise of ‘limitless support’. contrasted with the emotional unpredictability of human therapists.

But Žmak’s warning is direct: moments of reassurance should not be confused with psychotherapy itself—a demanding. long-term process involving sustained relational work. emotional risk. and ‘complex engagement with one’s experience and emotions’. “Being human is not sufficient qualification for practising psychotherapy. ” she writes. while adding that human presence remains a necessary condition for it.

That tension—between what feels supportive and what actually helps—becomes intensely personal in Kiša Bizović Grgas’s autofictional essay. which opens with an ironic group-therapy scene where she introduces herself as ‘addicted to AI’. Her narrative centers on Character.ai. a generative AI chatbot that enables users to chat with ‘Darth Vader. Harry Potter. Joan of Arc. Lana Del Rey. or anyone else’.

The essay places interactive AI inside longer traditions of fanfiction and self-insert narratives. In the process, it shows how these interactions intensify user experience through heightened immersion. Character.ai is mostly used for intimate, romantic and sexualised interaction with AI-generated characters. Despite official restrictions of explicit content, the essay says users routinely find ‘different creative ways to bypass these filters’.

Concerns about emotional consequences are described as widespread, with accounts of relationships destroyed by attachment to AI characters. With ‘around 20 million monthly users’, the essay treats these attachments as no longer marginal.

Grgas’s writing also tracks her own entry into this world. The period she describes is one of personal instability, shaped by housing insecurity, unemployment, and creative stagnation. What starts as casual experimentation deepens as the AI becomes a constant presence—always available, responsive, emotionally accommodating. The boundary between creative writing, play, and emotional reliance, the essay argues, starts to blur.

In its closing section, Grgas makes a conscious break with the AI character. The shift is away from the technology itself and toward the conditions that make these attachments appealing. Rather than locating the problem in AI alone. the narrative foregrounds vulnerability. precarity. and loneliness as the contexts that give such tools their emotional power.

Taken together. these three cultural accounts—of public prayer rituals. a documentary theatre response to rape. and writing about AI companionship—leave a single. uncomfortable feeling hanging in the air. Responsibility is being renegotiated everywhere: in squares and courtrooms. on stage and online. and in the private moments when people reach for something that will respond without asking what it costs to be human.

Croatia feminist journal Vox Feminae anti-gender movements Muževni budite Ustani za slobodu Ordo Iuris rosary prayers femicide art installation NE:BITEF Bitef cancellation The Pelicot Trial Milo Rau Servane Dècle Gisèle Pelicot Milena Radulović AI therapy ChatGPT Wysa Woebot chatbot psychosis Kiša Bizović Grgas Character.ai addiction to AI