ELAS creates new department for domestic violence

The Greek Police (ELAS) has created a new department for dealing with domestic violence and providing specialist training to officers around the country on how to prevent and manage crimes within the family.

Staff at the new department will have specific guidelines on how to file and build domestic violence cases, on how to handle victims and also on raising public awareness.

ELAS will also create a database recording all incidents of domestic violence, with details concerning the perpetrators and their victims.

The initiative foresees two central departments at police headquarters in Athens and Thessaloniki, in northern Greece, as well as at the main precincts of each of the country's regions. It will further include a manual that will be distributed to police departments all over the country with detailed information on domestic violence prevention and management.

According to data from the General Secretariat for Gender Equality for 2018, 81 percent of the 4,116 calls made to its hotline were to report domestic abuse: 70 percent of those, or 2,846 calls, were from women who were victims of violence in their homes, with the remaining 1,252 calls made by friends, relatives or neighbors of the victims.

Of the 2,846 women who called the 15900 hotline, 87 percent said they were being abused by their husbands, and 64 percent were mothers whose children were witnesses to the violence.