Kyriaki Griva was murdered on the threshold of an Athens police station. She had gone to the police to alert them to the fact her ex-boyfriend, who she had previously filed several complaints about, was once again lurking outside her house. She feared for her life. She didn’t file another formal report on that night of April 1st, but asked the officers there if they could escort her home. The officers told her to call the emergency 100 number, which she did. The dispatcher told her “the police car is not a taxi.” When Griva stepped outside the station, the ex-boyfriend was there waiting, and stabbed her to death.
Griva’s murder, and the lack of protection from the authorities, who she had repeatedly asked for help, reignited an all-too-familiar sense of outrage around Greece. Gender-based violence is common, and protections are minimal.
A recent survey on gender-based violence in Greece (the first of its kind) conducted by the National Center for Social Research found almost half of all women aged 18-74 in Greece have experienced intimate partner violence. Greece does not keep an official count, but tallies kept by the Greek team of the European Observatory of Femicide found 15 women killed in 2023, and 25 the year before.
For years activists, lawyers, social workers, and women of all stripes have called for more to be done to prevent femicide, defined as the killing of a woman or girl on account of her gender. The outrage reached a fever pitch in 2020 when, with the entire nation in Covid lockdown, calls to domestic violence counseling centers increased by over 200% and the media reported over a dozen femicides. Suggestions aimed at reducing gender-based violence have ranged from improved education for young boys to better training for police officers, and from providing more shelters and or protections for women fleeing gender-based violence to including the term ‘femicide’ in the penal code.
“Femicide is the final level of gender-based violence, which is the power a man tries to exert over a woman,” explained Despina Tsepelaki, a lawyer at the Omonia Counseling Center for Violence against Women, which operates under the auspices of the General Secretariat for Family Policy and Gender Equality.
She has advocated for the inclusion of femicide as a specific crime in the penal code, among other measures: “The law should consider the gender, the motive, the relationship of control the perpetrator tries to exert over the victim, and the stereotypical patriarchy,” she explained.
Though a revised penal code was ratified in February, it includes few of the changes advocates have been calling for: femicide was not named, rape is still not defined in terms of the concept of consent, and qualifications that the perpetrator was in a “boiling mental” state or that the violence was committed as a “crime of passion” are still mitigating factors in sentencing.
Some measures have, however, been taken in recent years. In 2018, Greece ratified the landmark Istanbul Convention on preventing and combating violence against women, and set about including those standards in Greek legislation. The Greek police have instituted 73 Domestic Violence Response Services and 63 Domestic Violence Response Offices within police stations. There are 27 counseling centers in the country, most of which opened after 2012.
“After the pandemic and the coverage of those femicides, there is a better understanding of what femicide is and of its sexist nature,” said Maria Stratigaki, Professor Emeritus of Social Policy at Panteion University. “The police respond a bit more, whereas before they did not at all.” But she insists that the gender-based violence response education and services should be expanded to every municipality, as the current installations in a few police stations are woefully insufficient.
In May, the Ministry of Citizen Protection expanded the purview of an application with a panic button that can be used to immediately call the police in situations of violence. It had been rolled out in certain cities and provinces the year prior. “Between March and November 2023, more than 800 women installed the app on their mobile phones and the panic button has been activated 143 times. None of these incidents had a tragic outcome” states the Ministry of Citizen Protection website.
Reporting and following the bureaucratic processes to file for protection from abuse orders is cumbersome and more difficult with the passing of a law that can force women to share custody of children with their abusers. And like the murder of Griva, there are many instances where women took all the steps to notify police and authorities, but were brushed off.
On November 11, a woman was murdered by her former partner in the western city of Agrinio. She had a previous restraining order against him, and a court case involving domestic violence charges against him was meant to take place four days later. Hers was the 12th femicide in Greece this year. One day later, a woman from Patras died in the ICU, succumbing to injuries inflicted by her partner days prior, marking the 13th femicide this year.
“Whatever measures you take, it does not mean you have a bodyguard with you at all times, or that there are real consequences for the perpetrator,” said Tsepelaki. “There needs to be holistic protection for women.”
November 25 is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. There will be awareness raising events in municipalities across the country and demonstrations in major cities. But real holistic approaches to combating not just gender-based violence but the patriarchy that props it up, are distant still.
