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

Data Analysis – Visualisations:  Thanasis Troboukis (iMΕdDLab)

Illustration: Louiza Karageorgiou

Visualisations: Corina Petridi

On January 22nd, the first femicide for 2023 took place in Nikaia. A 50-year-old man killed his 54-year-old wife by strangulation, after first beating her up. He then called the police to tell them what had happened, uttering the aforementioned phrase on the phone. According to witness accounts and what became known after the murder, the perpetrator had been arrested by the police following domestic violence in the past, in 2017 and 2019. However his subsequent treatment by the justice system is not known. Could this crime have been avoided?

This question comes up again and again after the news of yet another femicide. Is there anything more the authorities could have done to protect the woman before she lost her life?

Apostolos Tsapas strongly voices his disappointment for the failure of law enforcement to protect his own children. 28-year-old Konstantina Tsapa, along with her 29-year-old brother Giorgos Tsapas were murdered on 5 April 2021 by her estranged husband in the village of Makrinitsa in Pelion. The double murder dominated the news at the time. It was during the third wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, a period in which a number of restrictions were still in place. Four days before the murders, the estranged husband had violently attacked the mother of his child and her parents in the same house.

Apostolos Tsapas describes his devastation to MIIR: “During the fight 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, and detained him for two or three hours. But they let him go, saying to me, ‘We can’t hold him any longer’. They kept calling my daughter and asking her, ‘What should we do with him? We can’t keep him any longer’. And so he was released. We filed a complaint, but they didn’t arrest him. As for the blame… The harm has been done, my children are not coming back.” He adds that his daughter had filed an injunction against the perpetrator, but it was not heard in time.

“The injunction was scheduled to be heard the day after the murder. And of course he killed her in the meantime, so there was no time for them to be heard”, laments Anthoula Anasoglou, a lawyer for the victims’ family. “He had been accused of domestic violence in 2021, but was never arrested in the context of self-incrimination. The police forces had a tolerant attitude towards the perpetrator. In fact, in the courtroom at the trial, a police witness admitted having told the man’s wife, on his release, ‘It’s okay, he loves you, he won’t hurt you’. And ‘It’s okay, they’re a couple, they’ll get back together’. The police witness said this in court and it caused a lot of tension”.

In small places where everyone knows each other, as in the case of Makrinitsa, police officers often go beyond their duties in domestic violence cases, explains the lawyer of the Tsapas family: “The police officers play the role of psychologists and try to reassure the woman, without understanding the seriousness of the situation. And for Konstantina it was just an inevitable spiral towards the void, like a thriller where you already know the ending. Photos in the days leading up to the killing showed her having been abused, she had a black eye. He had been cursing her, locking her up, there was endless violence. This had been going on for two years. He had beaten the brother and the parents before. For two years there was a systematic cover-up. It all pointed to a tragedy, and that’s what happened…”

The causes of a predictable crime

As shown in the cross-border investigation the Mediterranean Institute of Investigative Journalism (MIIR) coordinated in the context of the European Data Journalism Network (EDJNet) along with 18 media partners in order to gather updated data on the extent of gender-based violence in Europe, in Greece the pandemic period was characterised by a frightening increase of 110,2% in victims of physical violence in 2020 and 90,4% in 2021, after 3,609 victims of physical violence were recorded in 2020, reaching 6,873 in 2021. Incidents of psychological violence in Greece increased from 2,906 to 5,350 during the period in question, and those of sexual violence increased from 69 to 141. Similar acts of physical, sexual, economic and psychological violence were experienced by thousands of women across Europe.

In Greece, the rise in domestic violence and femicide led the supreme court prosecutor Vassilis Pliotas to issue an encircular in November 2021. It 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. 

Despite the Pliotas initiative, in practice the issues of both police protection and the administration of justice are not moving as fast as they should.

In domestic violence, most crimes – apart from rape and homicide – are misdemeanours, explains Kiki Petroulaki, which means that short suspended sentences are given. “This should be about the police arresting the perpetrator and the authorities punishing him immediately. Not the police arresting the perpetrator, the prosecutor letting him go and within two hours the perpetrator being able to return back home. The system has a big responsibility when it sees that there are older complaints against a perpetrator, and it does not take any action. Domestic and sexual violence is never an isolated incident, it repeats itself, with the same victims and different ones. This is an issue that has been discussed across Europe in recent years – the recurring pattern as a risk factor. It is also present in the Istanbul Convention, which aims to prevent violence against women and domestic violence. Having a previous record is an aggravating circumstance and should ring bells for the police and the public prosecutor’s office and make them respond more quickly. Putting someone in jail for a misdemeanour is almost impossible, even if they have four convictions in a row. But even if they were put in jail, I don’t think it would solve the problem of domestic violence.”

According to this experienced psychologist, who has been called upon to advise many female victims of domestic violence in Greece, it is clear what is needed: strict measures that will immediately remove from the perpetrator the ability to control the life of his victim, combined with systematic monitoring of the safety of victims and their children.

The Istanbul Convention includes many such provisions for the protection of domestic-violence survivors and children who are directly abused and/or exposed to their mother being abused. Unfortunately, our country chooses not to apply them, or even violates them in law. Examples include Articles 26, 31 and 45 of the convention, which aim to protect children, and Articles 48, 51, 52, 53 and 56, which focus on risk management to prevent recurrent victimisation. 

“The effective implementation of these and other provisions of the convention requires, for every reported case of domestic violence, an honest, immediate, coordinated, cross-sectoral response by police, justice and support services, both specialised and general. The European Anti-Violence Network is attempting to design this, alongside the authorities and using an exchange of good practices between Greece and Iceland within the framework of the “ACF project GR_IS_UnitedForDVSurvivors”, explains Kiki Petroulaki. She adds: “At the end of 2023 we will see whether the protection of women and children and the reduction of femicides is indeed a political priority – or whether the only thing that interests our country is not to ‘sound’ like we are violating European and international legislation and the human rights of survivors of domestic violence and their children.”

Among the data analysed as part of the MIIR-EDJNet investigation was the number of prosecutions, convictions and imprisonments of domestic violence perpetrators. This enables a relative estimate of the relationship between prosecutions and imprisonment for male perpetrators of domestic violence against women. From the available data collected in Greece for 2020 it is estimated that, relative to the number of perpetrators of domestic violence against women (4,436), the prosecution rate was 70.6% (3,132). Convictions account for 20.9% of these prosecutions, while imprisonment was a penalty in an estimated 13.7% of these convictions. However, comparing the number of offenders with the number of men imprisoned, it is estimated that for every 100 offenders recorded in 2020, only two were imprisoned. So overall, just 2% of perpetrators who used violence against female partners were imprisoned. 

It is worth noting that there are likely to be discrepancies in the data and that these percentages are entirely indicative. Indeed they may be overestimated, as the prosecutions brought in 2020 also relate to cases reported in 2019 or even 2018. However, they are a relative estimate of the relationship between prosecutions and imprisonment of male perpetrators of crimes of violence against women over a given period of time and they indicate a trend. Similarly, it is interesting to note the percentage of cases where prosecutions ceased due to a process of pre-trial agreement (21.7% and 33.4% of cases in 2020 and 2021 respectively), as well as the percentage of cases in which restraining orders were issued (from 0.6% to 1.6% of cases in 2016-2020).

On average, therefore, only 3% of men charged with domestic violence in Greece and 5% in Slovenia ended up in prison annually in the period 2016-2021. In contrast, in Spain the equivalent annual average figure for men prosecuted for domestic violence and ending up in jail was 30%.

Sentences and recognition of femicide

The Greek government recently moved to toughen up the penalties for perpetrators of domestic-violence crimes. But is this the solution?

“Tightening up sentences not only is not a panacea, but it seems ineffective. This does not mean that the punishment should not be proportional to the gravity of the act. But, in itself, a strict sentence is not enough to deter the perpetrator or to reaffirm citizens’ trust in institutions and the administration of justice”, says Chara Chioni-Chotouman, a lawyer at the Diotima Centre for Gender Rights and Equality. She also stresses that the failure to properly implement the law risks renders “the response to crime meaningless”, and adds that the frequency of violence against women shows that Greece needs to reassess its attitude to such crime, by recognising femicide. However, she points out that the most immediate need is to “update the protection tools by, for example, tightening rules for those who violate decisions which are intended to protect the victim and prevent crimes of violence“.

In an article last October, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis made it clear that he had no intention of legally recognising femicide in Greece, but promised to do everything possible to restrict the phenomenon. Among other things, he referred to the establishment of 18 police “Domestic Violence Offices”, charged with managing incidents and providing information to victims. However, cases of understaffing have been reported in those offices, as well as behaviour by officials that discouraged women from reporting.

“There are ongoing trainings for police officers to better manage incidents of gender and domestic violence,” argues the deputy minister for Demography, Family Policy and Gender Equality, Maria Syrengela, adding that the legislative framework can only partly contribute to the prevention and deterrence of violence against women. However, when it comes to the legalisation of femicide, she says that “it is not a question of what to call these crimes against women but more importantly to focus on prevention and to put an end to the attitudes that allow abusive behaviours”. 

The picture is very different in Cyprus where femicide was recognised in July 2022 as an offence in its own right, following a proposal by the then speaker of the Cypriot parliament, Annita Demetriou.

Speaking to MIIR, Ms Demetriou, who is the first woman to occupy her position in Cyprus, said the term “femicide” does not negate the term homicide, but rather has a complementary and reinforcing effect: “In order to have an effective response we must first of all call a spade a spade. This is precisely why we insist on the importance of the term femicide, because it encodes, signifies and names the most extreme form of gender violence – and any modern self-respecting society must admit that victims of domestic and sexual violence, victims of misogyny, victims of intimate partner violence, victims of ‘honour’ crimes or crimes over religious beliefs – these victims are women, not men. Therefore, the establishment of femicide as a specific offence – as opposed to the common-law crime of homicide – emphasises the intensity, origin and cause of the crime. There is therefore a need for legal separation. At the same time, another valuable aspect is added to the toolbox for eradicating the phenomenon: the possibility of an official record of femicide.”

As the MIIR data investigation has demonstrated, there is a significant pan-European data gap in terms of the actual number of femicides in the first place, but also of female victims of physical, sexual, psychological and economic violence. There is also significant uncertainty over the number of perpetrators of these crimes. In Greece and across Europe, experts and women’s groups who advocate the recognition of femicide as an offence, stress that this may be the only way to tackle underreporting of crimes that kill and harm thousands of women every year.

The data resulting from this project, as well as the findings on the institutional gaps in prevention and support for victims and on the administration of justice, show that the undeclared war against women in Europe will not stop until citizens and politicians face up to the problem. There is a need to invest financially and qualitatively in strengthening the system of protection for women and vulnerable groups. Laws need to be implemented, and young people need to be better educated on gender equality and gender relations. This would at least be a small tribute to the women who have lost their lives to crimes that could have been prevented. 

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…