Two more women were added the day before yesterday to Greece’s long list of femicides.
In a single day, one woman was murdered and another succumbed to injuries from abuse she suffered a week earlier.
Both cases share a common feature with almost all femicides: the perpetrator. A partner or spouse, former or current.
Men who were born and raised by women, yet never managed to see women as human beings with autonomous existence. They never managed to value them, respect them, or truly love them.
And perhaps this isn’t entirely coincidental. In many cases, following a murder, a sister, a mother, a lawyer… will try to assign blame to the victim.
Because she wanted to end the relationship, because she was outgoing, because she sought her independence – things that are respected in a man but not in a woman.
In the last four years, 80 women have been murdered in Greece. In their homes, at their workplaces, in front of their children, in the middle of the street… even outside a police station.
No court order keeping the perpetrator away from the victim is enough to protect her, nor is the panic button that victims can press in emergencies guaranteed to help since the harm takes mere moments to occur.
This isn’t a policing issue but a social one. As long as women are treated as the weaker sex that must submit, and men are raised as lords of the world with inflated egos, the list of femicides will grow longer.
And that’s not all. Women will continue to be abused even if they don’t report it. Women will fall victim to rape. Not just by strangers, but by their husbands, as revealed in the Pelicot case in France.
A case that may be extreme, may be sick – but it’s real. Starring seemingly good family men, above suspicion, in an advanced country where women theoretically enjoy equal rights with men and breathe the same air of freedom.
Often, men in the Western world wonder “what more do women want, haven’t they gained everything now?”
That’s what the showcase displays. According to European Institute for Gender Equality data, 50 women are murdered every week in the EU by current or former partners. In Britain, for instance, a woman is murdered every three days.
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