All for nothing
The victim of the latest femicide, which took place in the Athens suburb of Menidi on May 16, had not hesitated: She had reported her abusive partner to the police three times since 2013. The authorities had responded all three times; they had identified the assailant and arrested him. Following the last complaint, at the start of the month, it even appears that they also employed modern tools designed to protect vulnerable women and to offset efforts by abusers to exploit the leniencies of the legal system: The 40-year-old victim had installed the Panic Button app at the recommendation of the police, had received the code to activate it and had been offered psychological support and a spot at a shelter, far away from her tormentor. It is said that she turned down the shelter.
At the end of the day, the mechanism fell short: The woman was stabbed to death in the middle of the street. So what’s to blame? Why did yet another woman end up dead, even though help was offered, possibly with some oversights? We might have learned the answer without the death of another innocent person: Offering help is not enough, if the person who needs protection doesn’t know when, how and why they need it. The victim needs to be in a position to accept help without hesitation.
A woman who asks for help doesn’t necessarily do so after coming to a cool, rational decision, after having assessed all the different parameters of the risk. She may do so because she’s frightened, because in that moment of reaching out, she doesn’t know what else to do. She may even be oblivious, brainwashed or in denial; she may believe that the danger is fleeting, that the threat will fizzle out and the situation is not as dramatic as it may seem in that one instant.
The 40-year-old in Menidi was separated from her partner, but their communications appear not to have been severed in the 10-plus years since the first complaint she filed against her aggressor.
The state, therefore, has an obligation not just to offer help out of a sense of duty, like offering someone a piece of gum because that’s the polite thing to do. The state is obliged to be wiser and more vigilant than its citizens; to explain to the abused woman that you cannot set a bar on abuse, that a bruised eye can soon turn into a broken skull, a kick can become a stab and a slap a bullet. Panic Button and other such services don’t serve any purpose if the victim isn’t told the bitter truth from responsible lips: He will kill you; take any help you can get because he will kill you; if not today or tomorrow, then maybe 10 years from now.
The day after the Menidi murder, the perpetrator was due to stand trial for the last abuse complaint the victim had lodged against him. In theory, he could have been in custody; the truth is, he should have been in custody. Some will claim that even if he had been kept in custody, he would have been released at some point. That he’d have found another opportunity to kill her. They’re right. But the authorities had a duty to do whatever they could to restrict his access to her, knowing that what happened could happen: that a dangerous man would become even more dangerous when facing trial. The likelihood of him wanting revenge or to punish her for having the audacity to stand up to him would be heightened when his criminal behavior became public and started to have negative consequences for him.
Depriving the suspect of his freedom as a means of preventing further violence would indeed have been a temporary measure: But perhaps it would have been long enough for the victim to stay alive.
