Authors: Janine Louloudi, Kostas Zafeiropoulos, Nikos Morfonios (MIIR)

Data Analysis – Visualizations:  Konstantina Maltepioti 

Illustration: Louiza Karageorgiou

“Mommy, he told me he’s going to cut my throat…”

“Mommy, Mommy, Mommy I’m dying!“. Salamina, Friday night, December 1, 2023. 74-year-old Evangelia hears her 43-year-old daughter, Georgia Poutou, on the other end of the phone line, pleading for help. She quickly realises that her daughter has once again been beaten up by her partner. From her home she calls the police to send a patrol car, but her plea falls on deaf ears. 

Finally, she herself rushes to her daughter’s house. When she arrives, she sees Georgia lying outside in the garden of the house, bleeding. The woman cannot walk, her ankle is broken and her knees are badly knocked out. The perpetrator is nowhere to be found. The battered woman, along with her mother and her 15-year-old son – a disabled child – set off for the island’s police station.

The policemen there won’t take a statement: ‘Go to the health centre, bring the doctors’ report and then come back to press charges’, they say. No mobilization takes place to arrest the violent offender, no concern for the victim. 

The next day the physically abused woman herself insists on going to the police, even though her mother discourages her, fearing the worst. “Mommy, he said he’s going to cut my throat”, Georgia replies, as her devastated mother tells MIIR. The same fear pushes Georgia to seek protection. It was not her first savage beating by her 71-year-old partner, who has reportedly been convicted of assaulting another woman in the past – not that this has any restraining effect. 

At the station she finds other police officers who finally take her statement, advising her not to stay in her house and placing the “panic button” app on her phone, so that she can call for help if she needs it. It wasn’t enough.  

Three days later, on the morning of December 5, Georgia falls dead. Her abuser sought her out at her mother’s house where she had taken refuge. He shot her twice with a shotgun through the glass of the front-door, fatally wounding her in the abdomen and chest. The assailant was arrested but it was too late. Georgia was the 12th femicide victim for 2023 in Greece.

Femicides without end in Greece and Europe 

There is no official record of femicide in Greece, and the government insists that there is no reason to make femicide an crime in its own right. This is despite the fact that the number of women murdered or subjected to violence by men remains extremely high in the country. The consolidation of violence against women both in Greece and in Europe is reflected in the cross-border data investigation conducted for a second year by the Mediterranean Institute of Investigative Journalism (MIIR) together with 14 other European journalism organisations in the context of the European Data Journalism Network (EDJNet). 

For the needs of the investigation and in order to address the pan-European lack of comparable data on violence against women, the participating teams sought and contributed as up-to-date data as possible through requests to the relevant authorities in each country for the period 2014-2023. Data were analysed based on two primary sources: the reports of the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE – provided data up to 2018) and EUROSTAT (data up to 2021). EIGE focuses on indicators measuring intimate partner violence, rape and femicide, while Eurostat focuses on intentional homicides, paying particular attention to the victim-offender relationship (partner or family member). It should be noted that EIGE considers this definition of intentional homicide by a partner or relative to be the closest to femicide. In our analysis we only included data that we were confident were consistent with EIGE standards.

By counting femicides based on data analysed to EIGE standards, we estimate at least 4221 victims in Europe between 2012-2022 (comparable data for Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, Ireland, Poland and Romania are not available and not all countries have data for every year). 

If anything, the above figure gives evidence of underreporting of femicide by police authorities. This is because Eurostat’s crime statistics show that in Europe, in a total of 27 countries, 14143 intentional homicides of women happened in the same decade (regardless of the perpetrator). Of these, based on available data we analysed (for 19 countries), at least 6806 are intentional homicides of women by current/former partners (4334) and family members (2472). One realises that if there is more diligence in data collection and proper recording of the victim-perpetrator relationship by the police, then the resulting number of femicides could prove to be truly staggering.

According to the most updated figures we received from the Hellenic Police, the number of female victims of intentional homicides by male partners in 2024 was already 5 until February 29th. 

Based on the most recently released femicide data for 2022 (EIGE standards), Greece saw a 4.3% increase compared to 2021, from 23 to 24 victims, confirming that at least 2 women per month died at the hands of a partner and/or someone in their domestic environment. Germany also showed a significant increase (22%). France and Italy had a decrease of 3.3% and 12.9% respectively compared to 2021, but still have a significantly high number of female victims of femicide (118 and 61 victims respectively in 2022). On the other hand, Slovakia and Cyprus – which remains the only EU country where femicide is recognised as a specific crime as of 2022 – saw a large decrease 50% and 60% respectively.  

In terms of the highest increases for the decade 2012 to 2022, data analysed by EIGE standards show that Greece had the highest increase in femicides in 2021 with an increase of 155.6% to 23 femicides compared to 9 in 2020 (note: in last year’s report the number of victims for 2020 was estimated as 8 by police). The second highest number is in Sweden, which saw a 120% increase in 2018 (22 femicides) compared to 2017 (10), followed by Slovakia, which saw a 66.7% increase in 2020, and Croatia with 28.6% compared to 2019.

Based on newly available data for 2021, the European average number for femicides by intimate partners (EIGE) per 100.000 women (based on the 10 countries that provided data) is 0.39, a figure that corresponds to almost 4 women per million. Based on Eurostat, the average number of intentional female homicides by an intimate partner in 2021 for the exact same countries as EIGE is 2.4 per 100.000 women, a number that is lower than the official data we collected from national authorities for these countries, which could be indicative of how femicides are not correctly reported to Eurostat.

Unofficial sources are better at monitoring

For the purposes of the investigation the participating teams also collected data from unofficial sources, such as local monitoring groups for the recording of femicides. Such organizations mostly monitor media coverage with the aim of countering the underreporting of violence against women. This choice was made in order to compare the official number of femicides with the unofficial one.

This method also allows us to gain insight into countries such as Belgium that does not have any recent data in the Eurostat or Eige databases. However non-official sources estimate 101 femicides took place from 2020 to 2023 (source: “Stop Feminicide Belgie”). Significantly higher numbers of femicides compared to official sources are estimated for recent years by non-official sources in Italy, France and Spain.

Violence of all forms against women in Greece is on the rise

Femicides are often the last and irreversible stage in a process of escalating violence from the perpetrators to the victim, as the recent case in Salamina has proved. For the data investigation we analysed other indicators relating to physical, psychological, economic and sexual violence in order to highlight the variation in the number of women victims of each form of violence in recent years across Europe.

In terms of physical and sexual violence, in Greece the pandemic period was characterized by a frightening increase (110.2%) in victims of physical violence in 2020 (3609 women) and 70.9% in 2021 (6166 women), while victims of sexual violence had increased in the same two-year period from 69 to 147. The evolution of the phenomenon is even more disheartening for 2022, where a 20.5% increase in physical violence was recorded with 7430 victims, and an explosion in sexual violence (268.7%) with 542 female victims. 

In contrast, Cyprus -in the year when it legally ratified femicide- saw a 9% decrease in physical violence incidents with 1752 victims in 2022 from 1925 in 2021, when it had seen a 78.9% increase in physical violence incidents compared to 2020 (1076 victims).

“Data-collection systems across the EU member States remain very heterogeneous, as they are grounded in national crime statistics or other administrative data sources on homicide (from the judiciary or health system) or from non-governmental organisations’ media analysis. Therefore, data is not comparable, making measurement across member states currently not possible”, explains Cristina Fabre Rosell who works as Gender-based Violence Team Leader at the European Institute for Gender Equality, adding that gender-based violent crimes remain under-reported. This makes tackling violence against women and developing policies that reinforce gender equality problematic. The Gender Equality Index for 2023 is indicative of this, as countries such as Greece, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania that are at the bottom of the list, do seem to have problems in addressing violence against women.

When it comes to economic violence against women in Europe (this is the suffocating financial control or financial bleeding that a man may exert towards his current or former partner), based on available data (2019-2022), four countries show decreases in victims: Serbia, Germany, Croatia and Slovakia. Greece had no data available at all before 2021, but in 2022, 1626 women victims of economic violence were recorded for the first time in our country.

Moreover, as revealed by the investigation, there is a remarkable Europe-wide increase in the appeal for help from victims of domestic violence or third parties to national support lines, such as the “SOS 15900 Line” in Greece. For 2022, the largest increases are found in Spain (21.51%), Greece (17.28%) and Ireland (19.66%). However, in 2023 in Greece, unlike other countries, a decrease (-21.62%) was observed (-21.62%), without knowing whether this is related to fewer incidents of violence or a tendency to avoid calling for help on the part of women. 

The area that most reveals the plight of women in Europe, and the one that causes the greatest political tension, is that of rape.  

In Greece, rapes increased by 34.1% in 2022 (from 226 to 303 women) and 79.4% in 2021. Police data for 2023 indicates towards a consolidation of the high number of victims (294 women).  

Spain recorded a significant increase in rapes in 2022 (140.7%), while the Czech Republic had a large increase in both years (25.9% in 2021, 11.1% in 2022). Slovakia (7.5%), Croatia (11.3%), Cyprus (5.6%), Ireland (3.2%) and Romania (2%) also recorded an increase in rapes in 2022. 

Apart from the extent of the phenomenon, we also analysed the evolution in the penal treatment of perpetrators of rape and sexual assault over time.

Rape as a field of confrontation

The issue of rape has significantly divided the European Union, as shown by the recent negotiations to reach an agreement across member states on the new EU Directive on combatting violence against women and domestic violence, initially proposed two years ago.

On February 6, a provisional agreement was finally reached between the European Parliament and Council on EU-wide rules to combat gender-based violence and protect its victims, especially women and victims of domestic violence. It includes minimum standard rules on the protection of women victims of violence, criminalisation of certain forms of gender-based violence, tougher rules on cyber violence, better access to justice, protection and prevention, as well as establishing enhanced reporting and evidence gathering by authorities.

However, the adoption of a controversial article on rape (Article 5), which would have made any sexual act without consent a criminal offence, was not achieved.

Patriarchy

“Firstly, it is a directive covering many criminal law aspects so negotiations took more time. Secondly working on women’s rights is always difficult because of patriarchal structures that are still guiding our societies unfortunately. The main obstacle was to get consent based rape legislation included which we did not manage to get in the end. There was a lot of resistance from several member states to this even though rape is the most widespread and serious form of gender based violence”, explains Swedish MEP Evin Incir (S&D), who is the European Parliament’s co-chief rapporteur on gender-based violence in the committee on civil liberties (LIBE).

In an interview with MIIR, MEP Incir added that “the concept of ‘rape’ is highly debated due to deep-rooted patriarchal norms in society. It’s challenging to reach an agreement that defines sex without consent as rape, as outlined in the Istanbul Convention. However, we’re optimistic that our recent negotiation success in including a provision on preventing rape based on lack of consent, will prompt a shift in societal attitudes across Europe. This, in turn, could generate the necessary pressure for national governments to update their legal definitions to align with international human rights standards, such as those set forth in the Istanbul Convention. Looking ahead, we anticipate the European Commission to propose new legislation specifically addressing rape, building upon this progress”.

The far right (also) threatens women

MEP Incir explains that the significance of the Directive “is further underscored by the looming threat of a right-wing surge in the EU, emphasizing the imperative for such protective measures. While it may not meet all our aspirations, this directive sets a foundational standard and serves as a starting point for progress, reinforcing the commitment to never regress on these critical advancements”.

This concern about the changing political and social environment in Europe in relation to the increase in violence against women is also expressed by Cristina Fabre Rosell, EIGE’s Gender-based Violence Team Leader, who told MIIR that “Two years after the Covid pandemic we don’t know if it’s still because of it, or because extreme forms of violence against women have increased due to different causes that are also related to the increase of the far right movements and the anti-gender narrative. We need to do more research on this, for me rape is a burning form of violence that demands our attentionFirst and foremost we must work towards better prevention”.

The missed opportunity in Greece

The Directive is expected to be formally adopted by the European Parliament and the Council and then,  in the near future, enter into force. Member states will then have three years to implement it. In Greece an attempt to regulate prevention and combatting domestic violence against women came with the recent bill of the Ministry of Justice, which was voted in parliament with rapid procedures, focusing on the tightening of penalties for domestic violence. 

Significant organisations and collectives (European Anti-Violence Network, Diotima Centre, Mov, etc.) denounced the fact that their comments in the consultation process before the bill was passed were not taken into account. Most importantly, they denounced the introduction of amendments to the draft law which did not take into account the urgent recommendations of the GREVIO Committee (the independent authority monitoring the implementation of the Council of Europe’s Istanbul Convention) to the Greek government, as reflected in the first evaluation report delivered to the Greek authorities last November.

Among GREVIO’s recommendations is the need for the Greek authorities to:

• Significantly strengthen the coordination of the response to the needs of women victims of all forms of violence.
• Support and further develop the network of specialised support services and adequately address the needs of all women victims of all forms of violence. 
• Expand the number and capacity of shelters for women victims of violence throughout the country – currently there are only 20 shelters for women victims of violence, with a total capacity of around 450 individual beds.
• Ensure that accommodation is available to women in emergency situations.
• Ensure that women victims of violence have adequate access to social services that meet their needs and facilitate their recovery from violence.
• Move forward with the establishment of rape crisis centres and/or sexual violence referral centres that provide immediate medical care, trauma support, forensic examinations and immediate, short- and long-term psychological support.

Dr Kiki Petroulaki, psychologist and chair of the Board of the European Ant-Violence Network, explains that apart from the significant gaps in the protection of victims of abuse, the bill does not clarify the concept of consent in the definition of Rape, and it does not state that any sexual act or behaviour must be the product of free will. Thus lewd acts may be tried as misdemeanors. 

There is also no provision in the new law for speeding up procedures and to prioritise trials for domestic violence incidents, although since November 2021, a circular issued by the Supreme Court prosecutor, Vasilis Pliotas, called on prosecutors to intervene imminently, to further the process of arresting the presumed perpetrators of such crimes and for the related criminal cases to be heard as a matter of priority in court, so as to avoid all delays in delivering justice. In fact, the circular explicitly mentioned the term “femicide” – the first time a senior prosecutor had made an argument for the legal adoption of the term in Greece – and also called for victims of domestic violence to be supported when reporting violent behaviour against them.

Impunity

For the needs of the data investigation we tried to estimate the proportion of male offenders who are prosecuted for violence against women and end up in prison. 

Based on our analysis, Greece has an extremely low and disproportionate conviction rate for domestic violence perpetrators compared to the number of prosecutions. In 2017 the conviction rate was 2.9%, in 2018 it was 2% and in 2019 it was 1.9%. In 2021 the rate increased to 3.2%. This means that just 3 in 100 men who are criminally prosecuted, are then convicted to imprisonment. The Greek authorities did not offer data for 2022.

It is worth noting that the absolute figures may not fully reflect the situation in the reference year and that there may be anomalies in the data. For example, the registration of an offender in 2020 does not mean that the offense was committed in 2020, and similarly the imprisonment of an offender in 2020 does not mean that he committed the offense in the same year. For this reason, these rates are a relative estimate of the relationship between prosecutions and imprisonment of perpetrators of crimes of violence against women, recorded in a given time period, and should be interpreted as an indicator of a trend.

“I don’t think that manifestations of violence against women should be misdemeanours. Criminalisation is a way of dealing with violence. But criminalisation without prevention doesn’t work. We can’t rely on tightening penalties without prevention measures. This can have the opposite effect, such as increasing hatred against women. This is not the way to change attitudes, we see it with femicide, where harsh penalties do not prevent men from killing women”, says EIGE’s Cristina Fabre Rosell,  adding that member states need to invest in cross-sectoral cooperation between competent authorities.

Secondary victimisation 

Τhe communication gap between the relevant agencies, according to Dr Petroulaki, leaves women completely unprotected and vulnerable to secondary victimisation in a lengthy criminal procedure, which, she points out, is not monitored over time in its entirety. “Even if a restraining order has been granted, who monitors its implementation and what happens if it is violated? No one and nothing”, she states. This in turn exacerbates the feeling of impunity among perpetrators, who repeat and escalate the pattern of violence and, as the data shows, even go as far as femicide. 

This is the same impunity that armed the hand of the murderer of 43-year-old Georgia last December in Salamina. 

One of the last photos posted by Georgia Poutou on Facebook 6 days before the murder

Authors: Janine Louloudi, Nikos Morfonios, Kostas Zafeiropoulos (MIIR)

Data Analysis – Visualizations:  Thanasis Troboukis (iMΕdDLab)

Illustration: Louiza Karageorgiou

“Every time it happens, you relive it. It’s terrible. I always think, ‘Oh that mother, that father, what they have to go through’.” For Katerina Koti, the mother of 31-year-old Dora Zacharia, who was murdered in Rhodes in September 2021 by her ex-boyfriend a few days after their breakup, each new femicide announcement is another small tragedy. Dora was the 11th victim that year, in a list that was destined to grow considerably…

In the middle of last summer, three women lost their lives in less than 48 hours in different corners of Greece at the hands of their partners. On July 31, 2022, a man stabbed his wife to death in Rethymno when she asked him for a divorce. The next day in Zakynthos, another man savagely beat his wife and then killed her with a knife. A few hours before her murder, the woman had gone to the local police station to file another complaint against him, after he had beaten her again. Just hours later, a 17-year-old girl in Peristeri would become the youngest female murder victim.

This kind of “epidemic” of murders of women by their current or former partners is the culmination of a trend that has long plagued Greece and seems to have intensified during the recent pandemic. And not just Greece: in Spain there were four murders of women in different cities in one day at the beginning of the year. Similar grim reports are arriving from other European countries, fuelling the debate on whether femicide should be recognised as a crime in its own right. So far only two European states, Cyprus and Malta, have ventured to take this step.

But what is happening in reality? Has there been an increase in the number of women murdered in recent years by male partners or family members? Is this development consistent with a wider increase in gender-based violence, particularly domestic violence, during the pandemic period? Has there really been an increase in femicide rates in Europe? And which countries are having the most difficulty in curbing violence against women?

The MIIR – EDJNet cross-border data investigation

The answers to these questions are not easy to find, as no official data has been published at a European Union level for the period after 2018. The European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE), which is in charge of conducting research and monitoring policies on violence against women, launched a survey in 2020, but the results are not expected to be published before 2024. This means that the EU will not have a full picture of what has been happening in a crucial area affecting half of its population for a period of around five years!

MIIR, together with a total of 18 European media outlets, including Deutsche Welle, El Confidencial, Civio, OBCT and others, within the framework of EDJNet, attempted to generate the most up to date map of violence against women in Europe today. By requesting statistical figures from the competent national authorities for the years 2010-2021, MIIR created a new database which contains important findings for the direction of gender-based violence in European countries. With the contribution of iMEdD Lab the data was analyzed, focusing on the years of the Covid-19 pandemic. 

The research was based on two primary data sources. The first of these are the EIGE indicators for recording intimate partner violence against women and femicide by male perpetrators, as included in the 2021 Gender Equality Report, which includes data up to 2018. EIGE defines “intimate partner violence” as any act of physical, sexual, psychological or economic violence that occurs between former or current spouses or partners, regardless of whether they live in the same house. The teams participating in the investigation sought and contributed as up-to-date data as possible, which was audited based on EIGE guidelines. 

Regarding “Femicide”, it is worth mentioning that EIGE adopts the statistical definition of “the killing of a woman by an intimate partner and the death of a woman as a result of a practice that is harmful to women”, and places crimes pertaining to these characteristics to “Indicator 9” which measures the deaths of female femicide victims aged 18 and older. In Greece there is no specific law for the criminal prosecution of the act of femicide, and so the phenomenon is monitored in the country through the collection of data regarding the female victims of intentional homicide, while the relationship with the perpetrator is generated in combination with the law for the handling of domestic violence.

As a second source and tool for informal “verification” of the results, Eurostat databases were used, providing data for the crimes of intentional homicides, rapes and sexual assaults, where the perpetrator is a partner or family member, up until 2020, as well as some details on the criminal sanctions against perpetrators. In the case of Greece, data was collected from the General Secretariat for Gender Equality, which in turn collected data from the Hellenic Police and the ministry of Justice. Along with Slovenia, Greece was one of the countries that contributed data in most categories. But the hidden picture behind these is quite dark. 

The data black hole on gender-based violence in the EU

Following the contribution of new data, on the basis of the first data source, the total number of femicides from 2010 to 2021 in the 20 countries providing data is estimated at 3232 – although no data is available for eight countries (Poland, Bulgaria, Denmark, Luxembourg, Belgium, Portugal, Ireland, Ireland, Romania). However, the above figure is a sign of serious indications of underreporting by the police authorities. This is because, at the same time, Eurostat data shows 6593 intentional homicides of women in Europe between 2011-2021, including 4208 by partners and 2385 by relatives (the figures for 20 countries: Austria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, the Netherlands, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden).

Both for our research and for policymaking, the lack of up-to-date data is a major limitation. The EDJNet teams collectively discovered significant gaps in the publishing of recent data by state actors. Adding to this is the lack of data with similar, and thus comparable characteristics. “No score is given to the EU in the domain of violence, due to a lack of comparable EU-wide data,” claims EIGE, which is looking for ways to overcome this obstacle. Despite these hurdles, the data now included in MIIR’s primary database yields important findings on the recent direction of gender-based violence in Europe and Greece. 

Explosion of femicides in Greece

For more reliable results, due to both incomplete data and different methods of recording femicides based on the EIGE index from country to country, a choice was made to compare not absolute numbers but rather the percentage change in femicides between years, for those countries with available data. In addition, the data was extrapolated to comparable rates per 100,000 population.

Greece had the highest increase in femicides in 2021 with an increase of 187.5%, from 8 incidents in 2020 to 23 in 2021. Sweden also took a “leap” with a 120% increase in femicides in 2018 compared to 2017, while Estonia and Slovenia saw a 100% increase in 2015 and 2020 respectively. Comparing the two-year pandemic with 2019 shows that Greece, Slovenia, Germany and Italy saw a significant increase in femicides.

For the purposes of the investigation the participating teams also collected data from unofficial sources, such as local monitoring groups for the recording of femicides. Such organizations mostly monitor media coverage with the aim of countering the underreporting of violence against women. This choice was made in order to compare the official number of femicides with the unofficial one.

‘We are not claiming that we are keeping an accurate count of femicides, but we are trying to demonstrate the necessity of open data. The issue of violence during the pandemic is very complex and not temporary. Based on the data we have from 2019 to 2022 we observe a persistence of the phenomenon,” says Athena Pegglidou, who founded the Greek section of the European Observatory on Femicide. For 2020 and 2021,the unofficial number of recorded femicides collected by the Observatory was higher in Greece than the official state number, by 2.4 times in 2020 and 1.4 times in 2021 respectively. In Serbia, the unofficial number of femicides collected by the NGO Autonomous Women’s Centre was almost 1.5 times higher than the official number. 

Examining Eurostat data on intentional homicides of women by men, partners or relatives, a similar increase of 156% in 2021 compared to 2020 is confirmed for Greece. The analysis further shows that Slovenia had a 100% increase in the first year of the pandemic in homicides of women by intimate partners and relatives compared to 2019. Croatia, Austria and Hungary followed with increases of 55.6%, 28.6% and 26.1% respectively.

Cristina Fabre Rosell works as Gender-based Violence Team Leader at the European Institute for Gender Equality, and explains that during the first lockdown of the pandemic there was a relative decrease in the number of femicide incidents, but the risk lingered: 

“Women were not at risk of femicide during the pandemic because they were stuck with the perpetrator, and therefore the perpetrator felt more confident. All the power and control was in his hands. She had nowhere to go, so she had no exit. So the intimate partner violence increased, but not the more severe form that is worse, femicide. What was more worrying for us were the measures that were to be established after the lockdown. How were we going to protect all these women that were running away from their perpetrators. And so our fear was that the severe form of intimate partner violence that is intimate femicide could increase after the release of the lockdown measures. This has happened in some member states. But we are still not able to see if this is a common pattern that happened across all EU member states, and to what extent we can say that it’s a result of these measures. We don’t have evidence. But we hope that with the collection of data on intimate partner femicide across the years, perhaps we will be able to build the evidence”.

As the figures from this data-driven investigation show, this was the case in 2021 in several countries, most notably Greece.

Increase in violence against women

The words of EIGE’s Gender-based Violence Team Leader are confirmed by the analysis of other EIGE indicators on physical, psychological, economic and sexual violence. The figures in the following graph show the variation in the number of victims of each type of violence in recent years.

In Greece, the pandemic period was marked by a frightening 110.2% increase in victims of physical violence in 2020 and 90.4% in 2021. Specifically, in 2020, 3609 victims of physical violence were recorded, while in 2021 the number reached 6873. Meanwhile, the number of victims of sexual violence increased from 69 to 141. 

In parallel, the widened use of the internet and the increase in online abuse, led to an 84.1% rise in victims of psychological violence in the country, reaching the number of 2906 victims in 2020, only to register another rise by 104.6% and reach 5350 victims in 2021. “I do think that we are now kind of conceptualizing psychological violence and people are more aware of what psychological violence is, and the huge impact that psychological violence has. I do think that this is probably the trend that we are seeing, more victims are aware of ‘this is unacceptable, this is an offense, this is violence’, EIGE’s Gender-based Violence Team Leader explains.  

According to EIGE, at least 44% of women in Europe have been subjected to psychological violence at some point by a partner. However, there do seem to be countries that have managed to slow its spread, such as Serbia and Germany, where the increase was limited to 3.4% and 1.5% respectively in the first year of the pandemic.

There are but a few reports about enforcing economic violence against women (this is the suffocating financial control or financial bleeding that a man may exert towards his current or former partner). Of the ten countries reporting it, six saw an increase and four a decrease from 2015 to 2018. Finland had the highest average increase at 33.4%, followed by the Czech Republic at 26.6%, Germany at 12.2%, Austria at 8.4%, Spain at 6.0% and Latvia at 4.6%. On the other hand, Belgium recorded an average decrease of -0.1%, Malta a decrease of -2.7%, Slovakia a decrease of -12.1% and Serbia a decrease of -18.1%.

In regard with the sexual violence indicator, Greece, Serbia and Slovenia showed significant increases in the years of the pandemic. In particular, sexual violence in Greece increased by 115.6% in 2020 and 104.3% in 2021. In Serbia it increased by 76.0% in 2021, after a decrease of -52.6% in 2020, while in Slovenia it increased by 64.3% in 2020 and 17.4% in 2021. Germany showed an increase of 8.0% in 2020, while Hungary also noted an increase of 20.8% in 2020, but posted a shift of -6.3% in 2021.

Based on Eurostat data, Hungary and Greece recorded the largest increases in reported rapes of women in 2020, with 41.2% and 36.5%, respectively, followed by Romania and Slovenia. Overall, Sweden leads the way with 135 victims of rape and 197 victims of sexual assault per 100,000 female population between 2015 and 2020 (note that in Sweden the definition of rape was widened in 2013, and again in 2018 and this could be affecting figures). Denmark, France and Finland follow with 54, 47 and 41 victims of rape per 100,000 female population, respectively. In terms of sexual assaults, France, Denmark, Germany and Finland have the highest rates.

The negligence of law enforcement authorities that costs lives

Konstantina Tsapa was murdered on April 5, 2021 with a knife by her estranged husband in the village of Makrinitsa, in Pelion near Volos. On that day, inside her parents’ house, the perpetrator also murdered her brother Giorgo Tsapas. Four days earlier the killer had again violently attacked the mother of his child and her parents in the same house. Similar violent incidents had been repeated several times by the same perpetrator, but despite appeals to the police, lawsuits and a request for an injunction, the perpetrator had not spent a single night in custody.

“In the quarrel in Makrinitsa before the murder, he had come to the house and beat all three of us – me, my wife and my late daughter. Then the police took him away, to the police station, kept him there for two-three hours. But they let him go, and they told me, ‘we cannot hold him anymore’,” a devastated Apostolos Chapas told MIIR. He had seen his two children murdered before his eyes.

“The police forces had a tolerant attitude towards the perpetrator,” says Anthoula Anasoglou, an advocate for the victims’ family. “He had also been charged with domestic violence in 2021. But he was never arrested. In fact, during the trial, a police witness admitted that the police had released him a few days earlier, saying ‘Okay, they are a couple, they will get back together’.”

Dora Zacharia was unaware in 2021 that her then partner and later murderer had previously been prosecuted for illegal violence and carrying a weapon after an incident in which he had threatened his former partner. The misdemeanor offense of unlawful violence had been dropped due to the expiry of the offense, while he had received a two-month prison sentence with a three-year suspension for the offense of unlawful carrying of weapons. Another former partner, a victim of physical violence, had also filed a complaint against him, but the injunction was not heard in time.

Dora Zacharia was the 11th victim of femicide for 2021. She was murdered in Rhodes by her former partner a few days after their separation.

“Dora paid for this delay with her life. We lost our child unjustly,” commented Katerina Koti, mother of the 31-year-old teacher who was murdered in 2021, to MIIR.

The available data collected in Greece for 2020 shows that of the 4436 perpetrators of domestic violence against women, 70.6% (3132) were prosecuted. Of these, 20.9% were convicted, but only 13.7% of those convicted went to prison. However, comparing the number of offenders with the number of men imprisoned, it is estimated that for every 100 offenders recorded in 2020 only 2 – a 2% percentage – were recorded as ending up in prison.

It is worth noting that the absolute figures may not fully reflect the situation in the reference year and that there may be anomalies in the data. For example, the registration of an offender in 2020 does not mean that the offense was committed in 2020, and similarly the imprisonment of an offender in 2020 does not mean that he committed the offense in the same year. For this reason, these rates are a relative estimate of the relationship between prosecutions and imprisonment of perpetrators of crimes of violence against women, recorded in a given time period, and should be interpreted as an indicator of a trend.

On average, annually, only 3% of men prosecuted for domestic violence in Greece and 5% in Slovenia ended up in prison. In contrast, in Spain, the average annual percentage of men prosecuted for domestic violence who ended up in prison was 30%, respectively.

Dora Zacharias’ mother is now a frequent participant in anti-femicide events, along with the mothers of other murdered women. Together they are urgently calling for changes in the way the state and society as a whole deal with violence against women and perpetrators of domestic violence.

In a historic decision on 22 February, after 6 years of delays due to constant opposition from various member states, the European Council decided that the EU should accede to the Istanbul Convention as a transnational entity. This follows the agreement of the European Parliament, which had previously called for violence against women to be included in the list of recognised crimes in the EU. In force since 2014 – and ratified in Greece since 2018 – the convention is the first legally binding international text that sets criteria for the prevention of gender-based violence in the EU, and could serve as a guide for follow-up initiatives by Brussels.

However, on 25 November, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, the European Commission had asked the European Parliament to adopt as soon as possible a proposed directive submitted last March to combat violence against women and domestic violence. Among other things, the directive aims to enshrine in EU legislation minimum standards for criminalising certain forms of violence against women; protecting victims and improving access to justice; supporting victims and ensuring coordination between relevant services; and work on prevention.

The directive also proposes that data collection should finally be made compulsory throughout the EU. The extent of violence against women is underreported and under-communicated, and, as noted, the data is not easily comparable between EU countries. In fact, the directive mentions that the last relevant pan-European survey was published in 2014.

The results of the cross-border data investigation carried out by MIIR and EDJNet add substance to the aforementioned. It took a total of 19 European teams of journalists and four months of searching for up-to-date data from the relevant national authorities of at least 22 countries, in order to show whether there was an increase in femicides and violence against women during the pandemic. Some teams succeeded in obtaining new and comparable data, others did not. 

It is clear in any case that without a common European system for the recording of violence against women and the strengthening of the victims protection system,  enforcement of the law and re-examining penalties for perpetrators, and systematically educating young people about gender identity and sexual relations, gender-based violence will continue to flourish. It is always a possibility of course that no one will find out about it, because incidents will simply not be recorded…