"I Will Protect My Children"

In this interview with the journalism team The Manifold, we hear a woman recount more than fifteen years in a relationship marked by domestic violence, and eight years of legal struggle. Her story shares many common features with other cases that have ended in the criminal prosecution of the mother for trying to protect her children. It begins with verbal, psychological, and physical violence within the relationship, and, later, allegations of child sexual abuse. It continues with institutional violence: experts who don't follow protocol, police arbitrariness, and prosecutors acting vindictively. One more shared pattern is the father's organizing into groups with other men accused of abusing their own children. This story also reveals, moreover, a troubling pattern of institutional bias in favor of the accused parent, and the shortcomings of the child protection system, which we will examine against the Protocol for the Investigation, Diagnosis, and Management of Child Abuse-Neglect (hereafter, the Protocol).

The story in brief

The woman met her partner in 2007; they married in 2009 and had two children, a daughter in 2010 and later a son. Early in the marriage, she describes, he subjected her to verbal and psychological abuse, while disappearing for long stretches of time and leaving her to care for the children alone. In November 2016 he beat her badly inside their home, in front of the children.[1] After the beating, they separated through an uncontested divorce, because the mother didn't want to subject the children to a painful legal battle.

The father's controlling and violent behavior worsened after the separation. He systematically slandered the mother and her maternal-line relatives to the children, while his stance grew increasingly hostile. In September 2018, the children themselves (then 8 and 5.5 years old) disclosed that the father and grandmother — his mother — were touching them inappropriately.

An eight-year ordeal with the institutions followed. The Juvenile Prosecutor's Office repeatedly refused to support or guide the mother, while the first evaluation was delayed six months. Then came the contradictory expert assessment — which she describes as "99.9% a eulogy to the father" — the archiving of her criminal complaint, a new custody application from the father exactly when the mandatory joint-custody law was passed, and finally, criminal prosecution against her as "moral instigator," within the broader case against the psychologist of the Hellenic Police.

"when I finally asked for help, they gave me some things to read and I learned about the cycle of violence, and I immediately said, 'that's me.'"

Patterns in the relationship

The cycle of violence

The woman describes a cycle of violence: tension, departure, return with remorse — "you're right, I won't do it again" — and repetition. Each time, things got worse. The stages of the cycle of violence are documented in the international scientific literature.[2] What's notable here is that she recognized the pattern through the literature, after she sought help: "they gave me some things to read and I learned about the cycle of violence, and I immediately said, that's me."

Gaslighting the mother

Beyond the physical and verbal abuse, his behavior toward her included the systematic distortion of reality.[3] After a car accident caused because he ran a STOP sign and failed to maintain a safe following distance, both he and his parents blamed her as the one at fault — they told her that she had "crashed" the car. After he beat her in November 2016, he gradually began claiming to her, to the children, and to third parties the exact opposite — that she had hit him. "Why are you telling these lies," she would ask him, never receiving an explanation. This reversal of perpetrator and victim is part of a broader pattern: every negative event in the relationship — his being fired, the accident, even his own abusive behavior — was reframed so that responsibility always fell on her.

Control through food and challenging the children's medical care

Before the beating, his controlling behavior was already showing up around the children's bodies and health: refusing vaccinations, questioning medications, imposing dietary views against the pediatrician's guidance. Controlling a partner's or their children's access to medical care is a recognized form of coercive control.[4] After the separation, this behavior worsened, escalating into the psychological terrorizing of the children around food and death.

The intergenerational transmission of violence

The children's father disclosed to his wife that he had grown up in a home marked by domestic violence: his father used to beat his mother. Later, her mother-in-law confided that she recognized in her son's behavior what she herself had lived through in her own marriage. The intergenerational transmission of domestic violence — the fact that a child's exposure to violence between their parents significantly increases the likelihood of reproducing similar behavior, or tolerating it, in adulthood — is among the most well-documented findings in the relevant literature.[5] At a later stage, the children disclosed that the paternal grandmother — not only the father — was also touching them inappropriately.

Radicalization and conspiracy theory as a mechanism of control

Over the course of their life together, and after the separation, he began exhibiting intense ideological fixations: at first, an interest in aliens, the divine, extreme dietary theories. Then politics: shifting from far-left to far-right rhetoric during the rise of the neonazi criminal organization Golden Dawn.[6] He left Hitler's book, Mein Kampf, in the house where the children could see it, and played Ilias Kasidiaris's podcasts loudly (a leading Golden Dawn figure). When she objected, he reversed the roles, calling her a "fascist" — a clear example of the mechanism known as DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender): denial, attack, and reversal of victim-offender roles.[7]

After the separation, and following the passage of the mandatory joint-custody law, the father organized into "fathers' rights" groups: groups of accused men who, as the journalist conducting the interview describes, emerged in response to the law, appear in an organized fashion at other accused fathers' trials, and act intimidatingly inside and outside courtrooms. This trajectory — from individual fixations to collective organizing around the identity of the "wronged man" — is examined further below, in the analysis of the pattern of organized harassment in the courts.

"mommy, I'm going to get fat and die."

Patterns in child abuse

Psychological terrorizing through food obsessions

His personal obsession with food extended to the children in a way the mother describes as terrorizing. He called the children "idiots, fat, pigs" for eating oil, dairy, and meat. He showed them slaughterhouse videos unsuitable for their age, took them to butcher shops where he showed them slaughtered animals and told them, "that's what death looks like." He even weaponized their grandfather's cancer diagnosis to convince the children they would lose their loved ones if they ate certain foods. Her son, five years old at the time, would tell her, crying, "mommy, I'm going to get fat and die." The children stopped eating and developed eating disorders. The mother was forced to find a dietitian to help them recover.

"Leave your mom, who doesn't treat you well and doesn't take care of you well, and come stay here with me, with your grandmother who loves you very much and will raise you."

When the abuser turns the child against the parent protecting them

The mother describes two incidents, which took place while the children were staying with their father, that left her deeply insecure about the quality of care he was able to provide them. In June 2018, her daughter returned from the beach severely sunburned over her entire body. The father hadn't applied sunscreen, claiming sunscreens are carcinogenic. Shortly after, her daughter came back with her front teeth broken, after a scooter fall on the floor of a shopping mall where wheeled devices were explicitly prohibited. The father didn't take her to a doctor himself, nor did he even inform the mother — she only learned what had happened when the child failed to return on time. That same night, her younger son came back with both knees scraped from a similar accident, with no one having tended to him.

Despite his own negligence in these and other incidents, the father never took responsibility. Instead, he turned systematically against the mother and her relatives, accusing them in front of the children of neglect and poor care — at the very moment when he himself was ignoring basic safety instructions and medical advice. He even told the children outright, "Leave your mom, who doesn't treat you well and doesn't take care of you well, and come stay here with me, with your grandmother who loves you very much and will raise you." It's a reversal that recurs often in such cases: the very parent who will later accuse the mother of "parental alienation" is, in fact, the one turning the children against her.[8]

"all I wanted was to hear, 'mommy, we're okay.'"

When the abuser doesn't allow the child to communicate with the parent protecting them

Whenever the children were at their father's house, he wouldn't allow any contact with their mother — he didn't want to speak with her himself, nor did he want the children to. In August 2018, she bought her daughter a simple mobile phone so they could stay in touch while the child was staying at her father's house. The father and grandmother would take it from the child and delete the saved contacts, leaving her daughter with no way to call her mother.[9] In one incident that November, the grandmother took the phone from her granddaughter and kept it away from her while the child repeatedly asked to speak to her mother — something that, as the daughter said afterward, caused her great distress ("she was mocking me"). When the mother called the grandmother to ask why she wouldn't give the child the phone, she cursed at her in response. The same dynamic played out over text messages too: when the mother tried to reach the father directly to find out what was going on, she received a threatening message from a relative of his telling her not to call his mother again.

"grandma and daddy touch us."

The disclosure

In September 2018, her son, 5.5 years old, spontaneously told her in the kitchen that "grandma and daddy touch us," accompanying his words with a gesture toward the genital area. Her daughter, then 8, confirmed her brother's words and physically re-enacted for her mother what she described happening to her. According to the mother, both children had reacted physically — kicking — against the person touching them, without having spoken to each other about it beforehand.

Somatization of trauma

In the months and years that followed, her daughter developed tremors in her upper limbs, insomnia — the mother describes her as a child who had slept through the night on her own since three months old — stress-related alopecia, and fainting-type episodes, despite tests at the Children's Hospital showing no pathological findings. She was eventually prescribed an SSRI alongside weekly psychotherapy. The somatization of psychological trauma in children, particularly through repeated institutional questioning of their testimony, is documented in the relevant literature.

Beyond the allegations of molestation, the children had also, as witnesses, experienced domestic violence against their mother inside the home. The Protocol notes that even when children are not themselves the victims, "the fact that they are witnesses to violence between parents/caregivers usually has negative consequences for their emotional development."[10]

"you women file complaints and then withdraw them."

Patterns of police arbitrariness

According to the Protocol, the role of the police is to "collect all the evidence necessary to establish whether a criminal offense has occurred." In this particular story, although the police were involved at every stage — in the 2016 assault complaint, in the Sunday handovers, and in court proceedings — they acted contrary to the obligations of their institutional role. Instead of offering protection, they showed distrust toward the victim, discouraged her from filing a complaint, and failed to record what they were obligated to.

Gender discrimination: the police's distrust of women

When she reported the first physical assault in 2016, the officer on duty told her, verbatim: "you women file complaints and then withdraw them," suggesting she "go outside and think about it" before making an official statement. The same behavior is documented across many similar accounts: this isn't an isolated unfortunate moment from one officer, but entrenched institutional distrust toward women reporting domestic violence. The same officer invoked the fact that the offense is prosecuted ex officio as an argument to dissuade her from making a statement — a complete inversion of the law's actual logic.

The domestic violence law further provides that police authorities are obligated to inform the victim of the relevant support services, "so that the necessary support and assistance can be provided immediately."[11] In this case, no such notification ever took place.

"the mother won't hand over the children."

Police afraid to record the children's wishes

At a later stage, the children were consistently refusing to go with their father for scheduled visits. He would call the police on the spot, but the officers either failed to record the children's refusal — or, worse, recorded that "the mother won't hand over the children." One officer explained the reason openly: officers were afraid of being sued by the father themselves if they recorded the children's wishes. This selective or distorted record-keeping is a common practice in similar accounts, and stands in complete contradiction to the role the Protocol assigns to police officers: to collect evidence and record it so that it can be determined whether an offense has occurred.[12]

Inaction in the face of criminal acts

The journalist was illegally photographed by the woman's ex-husband outside a Mixed Jury Court courtroom, in a different case, and asked an officer present on the scene for immediate assistance. The officer moved slowly and reluctantly, without result — in the journalist's words, "he pretended to go after him, I was running faster."

"Mommy, he told me I was lying."

Patterns of institutional failure

Examiners with interrogative conduct

Before the formal expert evaluation, the children went to the center the mother had requested for the assessment. The treatment was unacceptable. Her daughter, examined first, came out crying: "Mommy, he told me I was lying." The child couldn't calm down — it took roughly half an hour, with the grandmother's help too, before the mother managed to settle her. Her son was examined for a very short time and came out without crying, but later said at home: "That lady is mean. That lady is with daddy." The court-appointed examiner in a later phase of the case displayed the same conduct. He directly challenged the children and made them feel bad — her daughter left in tears again.

The official protocol for investigating child abuse cases is clear about the role an examiner should play toward a child: they are not an "interrogator" or a "police officer."[13] Challenging a child's credibility to their face — telling them they're lying — and behavior that makes a child feel "judged" by an adult siding with the accused parent, is exactly what the protocol warns against, because it can terrify the child and undermine the very credibility of their testimony.

"The examiner even proceeded to directly confront the daughter with the accused father inside the same room."

Examiners with documented bias

The private expert assessment ordered by the civil court — roughly 100 pages long — is described by the mother as "99.9% a eulogy to the father." At one point, the examiner records that the child "was cooperating" during the alleged touching, then the next moment corrects the wording, without ever explaining the contradiction. The examiner even proceeded to directly confront the daughter with the accused father inside the same room. This was repeated again during the supervised visits of 2021–22, in the same examiner's office, where the father went so far as to carry the case file and ask his daughter to "read" how the courts had vindicated him. This is a practice the protocol for handling such incidents in Greece explicitly rules out.[14] Particularly when a child fears the accused, the Protocol recommends a closed-circuit interview to avoid direct exposure.

Multiple depositions, no recording

To date, the children have spoken to at least five different agencies or professionals, over a span of seven years, and a new round of depositions is expected to begin. Despite the mother's repeated requests for video or at least audio recording, none of these depositions has been recorded to date, even though the Protocol provides for a specific procedure for recording the interview[15] and explicitly recognizes avoiding re-victimization as a child's right. In fact, it clarifies that not even the court's need for information justifies repeatedly exposing a child to new examinations.[16]

Unequal access to the Children's House

Although the family officially resides in Piraeus, mere minutes from the Athens and Piraeus Children's House, and although she knows of a case involving a child from Thessaloniki who was referred there, her own children have repeatedly been excluded from this process, following the father's petitions, with no explanation ever given. Instead, examinations take place in a private, non-standardized setting.

"At least he didn't find that I had coached them — that I told my children to say these things — small mercy. The question is: since I didn't tell them, where did it come from? Did they see it in their sleep? Did they imagine it? What's going on?"

Archiving: when a case closes before it even reaches court

The prosecutor's office archived the mother's criminal complaint over the children's abuse, and her appeal was rejected by the Appellate Prosecutor with almost identical reasoning to the original archiving decision — despite the technical report supporting the children's credibility, and despite the contradictory expert assessment, which found that the children had not been coached by their mother. The case never even reached court.

Judicial timeline against the mother

The same prosecutor handling the case of the Hellenic Police psychologist suspended the decision on whether the mother should be referred for trial as a "moral instigator," waiting for the outcome of a separate complaint the father had filed against her, for false testimony. When she was acquitted, that same prosecutor immediately filed an appeal against the acquittal. This sequence — waiting for a ruling favorable to the father, and immediately challenging the mother's vindication the moment it came — suggests something more than simple procedural delay. It's worth emphasizing again the contradiction here: the mother is being prosecuted as moral instigator in the alleged attempt to "brainwash" the children, supposedly carried out by the ΕΛ.ΑΣ psychologist — even though the original expert assessment, the very one on the basis of which the prosecutor archived the criminal side of the case, found that the children had not been coached, and that the mother had not manipulated them into testifying to what they described.

"That man and this group of men accosted me at that courthouse, and, as I later discovered, so did your ex-husband — because I was trying to find out who he was — your ex-husband, it turns out, is the one who photographed me illegally."

Organized harassment in the courts

The journalist conducting the interview, Mariniki Alevizopoulou, who was covering an unrelated trial — one in which the defendant was convicted at first instance to 13 years for abusing his own child — later realized she had been illegally photographed by the ex-husband of the woman in this story, who was present there together with a wider group of accused fathers. Despite an immediate request for assistance, the police did not take meaningful action. The mother, independently, describes a similar mob outside her own courthouse, with threats made against her witnesses. The organizing of fathers accused of abusing their own children into "fathers' rights" groups that act intimidatingly inside and outside courtrooms constitutes a pattern that recurs across many similar accounts.

A systematic prosecution of mothers?

The most serious finding of this testimony is the pattern that independent journalistic investigation by The Manifold has already documented across many, otherwise unrelated cases: a father is accused by his own child of sexual abuse, responds by invoking "parental alienation," and turns against the psychologist who documented the allegation — or against multiple professionals — while simultaneously organizing, either before or immediately after the accusation, into a group with other accused fathers, sharing lawyers and legal strategy.[17] One of these groups, publicly known as the "16+ fathers," has filed repeated complaints with the Supreme Court prosecutor's office against psychologists who have documented abuse allegations, appears collectively at trials of its members, and has secured extensive coverage on television programs that reproduce its version of events without pushback. This is an organized, recurring scheme applied systematically across multiple cases, targeting mothers and children who have reported abuse.

"I don't see a single father in that position. This has a dimension too, for me — a kind of gender-based violence, let's call it that."

The mother herself as defendant — gender discrimination in Justice

The mother is being criminally prosecuted as moral instigator, under Article 312 of the Penal Code, for trying to protect her children. "How is it that a person — mother, father, it doesn't matter — who is trying to protect their children, and has no way to do so other than through the courts, [...] should suddenly be demonized?" she asks. She also points out something worth noting: that she sees mothers "taking all this blame, all this mud," but no father in the same position.

Epilogue

This testimony is not an isolated case. It's the same story repeating, with small variations, across dozens of cases: a mother, herself a victim of domestic violence, turns to the relevant authorities — police, prosecutorial, judicial — to protect her children. The authorities fail to apply what the state itself has established as protocol — specific, written obligations. We see police discouraging complaints instead of recording them, examiners doubting and interrogating children instead of listening to them, prosecutors archiving one case after another despite the existence of evidence, or, worse still, acting vindictively.

At the same time, an organized practice is emerging: accused fathers banding together into groups, sharing lawyers and legal strategy, appearing collectively at the trials of other group members as a show of force, and turning systematically against the professionals who document the allegations against them.

The harshest finding, however, remains the punishment — both of the mother trying to protect her children, and of the children who found the courage to report their abuse. On one hand, the mother is criminally prosecuted, doubted, called on to prove that the fault for trying to protect her children doesn't lie with her. On the other, the children are forced into contact and sessions [with the accused parent], or, worse still, end up in the custody of the very parent they themselves have accused of abusing them, separated from the parent who protects them.

More testimonies will follow, because the more these voices are heard, the harder they become to ignore.

The independent journalism team The Manifold is producing a vidcast series on how the relevant authorities respond to those reporting domestic violence and/or child sexual abuse, with the support of the Open Society Institute – Sofia and co-funding from the European Union, as part of the Media Resilience project.