The figures reported to the Human Rights Committee in the Cypriot Parliament are staggering: 400 women every year suffer serious physical and mental health consequences due to long-term abuse, while in the past five years we’ve had 22 femicides.
The Legal Service rightly argues that these are not crimes of passion or jealousy, as they are often portrayed, but gender-based crimes, with migrant women being particularly vulnerable.
As Anna Frangoudaki, a Sociology professor at the University of Athens, recently wrote in Lifo, “men use violence, men kill ‘the woman they love because they love her,’ men often deny responsibility for homicide, citing amnesia or mental disorder, men are exclusively the perpetrators of sexual abuse and rape […] It is revealing that women are killed by spouses or romantic partners within the family.”
As Frangoudaki comments, these crimes occur due to the long survival of sexism.
“Its influence remains strong in the consciousness of the entire population, an influence that significant changes have not even diminished, that men, because of their gender, have unconditional rights over everything, over others, over society, over women, over women’s bodies.”
M.P.
