Tsiaras Law: How much women's blood can a piece of legislation hold?

In the case of Vasiliki, too, the most recent woman murdered by her husband and the father of her children, there was a history of abusive behavior. Before the 45 stab wounds, there were voices, complaints, expressed fear, testimonies from people who knew and stayed silent. There were children growing up amid the violence. There was a system that knows, yet insists not merely on failing to protect, but on leaving women like Vasiliki exposed to violence and the threat of death, along with their children.

But why, in Vasiliki's case, did feminist groups as well as the page "No to Mandatory Joint Custody" underline the responsibility of the Tsiaras Law, highlighting the slogan "The Tsiaras Law kills women"? What does a law that stipulates that after the end of a marriage custody responsibility goes simultaneously to both parents have to do with a femicide?

Let's hear what a friend of Vasiliki said: "He had threatened her that he would arrange things so that she wouldn't see her children. She stayed because she feared for her life and for her children's lives."

Those of us who follow the judicial odyssey of victims of the Tsiaras Law stand in grief before the survivors. Women who have suffered physical and psychological abuse, women who hesitated to leave their abuser for the very same reasons Vasiliki cited when speaking to her friend.

The self-proclaimed "active fathers" -- that is, the joint custody lobby -- threaten their victims using the Tsiaras Law as a vehicle, a law which grants the privilege and permission to abusers of mothers and children to retain custody until it is proven in court that they are unfit and dangerous parents.

Since the law came into effect, abusers have grown bolder, while women like Vasiliki have retreated and not proceeded with divorce, enduring violence out of fear of losing their children. Others who found the courage to leave are threatened with convictions because they refuse to hand over their children to abusive fathers, resulting in their arrest through in-flagrante-delicto procedures. A mother has recounted to tvxs an incident in which police broke into her home and took her child at night to hand them over to the father and the child's rapist, according to the child's own testimony.

To sustain this criminal law and to dismantle our well-founded arguments, a narrative was needed. This narrative was summed up in the provocative statement made at the time by Yannis Loverdos, who claimed that someone who abuses his wife does not necessarily mean he is also a bad father. In other words, a father who beats the mother of the child he supposedly loves black and blue can still be a good father. This seemingly "innocent" distinction was reproduced by compliant media outlets that kept repeating the notion that an abuser can be a good father, until it unfortunately became entrenched in part of society.

After Vasiliki's murder, the same journalists who defended the Tsiaras Law tried to shift the focus from the perpetrator to the victim. Articles and TV programs scrutinized the time she was returning home, her personal relationships, her life choices. Others rushed to emphasize that the children "had a very good relationship with their father."

What exactly does this information offer the public? Nothing. It is a pure attempt to whitewash the murderer.

Systematic gender-based violence is turned into an individual outburst against the "unfaithful" woman, and femicide into a family tragedy stripped of any political and social context.

Yet that context does exist, and behind it there are names and addresses.

For years now, women's rights organizations, psychologists, social workers, and legal experts have been warning that mandatory joint custody, as institutionalized by the Tsiaras Law, treats parenthood as a neutral mathematical formula of equality, ignoring the power dynamics and violence that often exist within the family.

International organizations dealing with gender-based violence continually point out that abuse does not necessarily stop after separation. It often continues through the courts, through custody, and through mandatory contact. For many women, shared parenting becomes a mechanism of ongoing control by the ex-partner.

And yet, in Greece the discussion has for years been dominated by "fathers' rights," often without a corresponding emphasis on protecting women and children from violence. Those who expressed concerns were portrayed as ideologically biased or hostile to fatherhood.

Today, however, the questions remain relentless.

How many women must be murdered before we recognize that domestic violence is not a "dispute between ex-spouses"? How many children must witness the murder of their mother before it is understood that violence against a woman is also violence against children?

The lawmakers were not the ones holding the knife that killed Vasiliki. But they are responsible for the institutional environment in which women are not merely unprotected but held at gunpoint, under constant threat and hostage-taking -- and many of them, like Vasiliki, are gone from us forever.

As long as the government does not withdraw the Tsiaras Law, it gives the impression that it is cynically watching to see just how much women's blood a piece of legislation can hold.