“Leave, she’s my wife.” With those words, the 55-year-old police officer drove away the man who tried to separate them, as the perpetrator had grabbed his wife by the throat in the middle of the road, outside a school in Zakaki. A few minutes later, he pulled out his service pistol and, in front of the eyewitness, shot his wife four times.
Immediately afterwards, he turned the gun on himself and killed himself, choosing, as perpetrators of femicides so often do, the easy way out from the weight of the consequences. The result: one dead perpetrator. A woman fighting for her life in hospital. Four children left suspended in mid-air, without parents, their world turned upside down and a future filled with therapy and nightmares. And an entire society that keeps floating in denial — because how else can you explain the fact that, every other week, it claims to be shocked?
“Leave, she’s my wife.” Without meaning to, the man who killed himself compressed into a single sentence everything that is wrong with the f***ing mentality poisoning men across the board, without distinction of age, origin, colour, religion, financial status or education. Men who believe that a wife, daughter or sister is their property, and that they themselves are the self-appointed guardians of her honour, reputation and virginity. A “possession” that must obey them, respect them, look after them and not shame them in the eyes of society. And if she breaks those rules, carved in stone by the God of the Old Testament, the big, heavy-handed man has every right to put the woman in her place. To raise his hand — however much “fascist woke culture” may now forbid him — or even his weapon, in order to restore his “lost honour”. That is how men sort things out, isn’t it? “Tell him I’m your husband and that I won’t hurt you,” the perpetrator went on, addressing the terrified woman he was holding by the throat, as she gestured to the passer-by to help her. Cemeteries, you see, are full of women who believed their partners would not hurt them because they loved them, cared for them and protected them.
Do you really think the Greek Cypriot police officer is any different from the Syrian man who stabbed his wife and mother-in-law a few days ago and is still being sought? They carry the same backward, misogynistic rot in their heads. The difference is that, in the case of today’s attempted killing, the far-right sewer is not demanding the deportation of all middle-aged Greek Cypriot men with the mindset of a despot and the technique of a butcher. That narrative does not sell, you see. It does not translate into 10% in parliamentary elections. Imagine, just for a moment, that the perpetrator in Limassol had not been “one of ours”, a uniformed Cypriot, but a migrant. As we speak, Limassol would be burning to the ground. The local far right would be howling for the immediate deportation of all foreigners, social media would be dripping with pure racist poison, and the usual “concerned citizens” with hoods and clubs would be organising pogroms, supposedly to protect “our women” from the “barbarian invaders”, burning migrants’ homes and shops and beating up any dark-skinned person they found in front of them — including, of course, plenty of darker-skinned Cypriots, because they are hardly the sharpest tools in the shed. They have done it before, after all, with the tolerance — and encouragement — of the police.
But when the perpetrator is a Cypriot, an Orthodox Christian, perhaps a family man or, worse still, an armed representative of the law, the far right suddenly swallows its tongue. The crime is swiftly branded as a “family tragedy”, a “crime of passion” or a “bad moment”. The usual apologists of the local manosphere, those pitiful little incels who hate women more than they hate their own miserable lives, seize the chance to run riot in the comment sections of news websites. Count the vomit: “what did she do to him to push him to his limits?”, “she destroyed him psychologically”, “she was trying to take his money”, “we don’t know both sides”, “the perpetrator has his reasons too”. How sick and damaged must someone be for their first instinctive reaction to such an incident to be blaming the victim and whitewashing the perpetrator, invoking some supposed “other side” or offering their worthless opinion that nobody asked for and nobody cares about — except perhaps the police, who ought to pay these pathetic ‘tough’ men a visit, if only to watch them piss themselves.
In Cyprus, from 2014 to 2025, 43 women were brutally murdered in a population of less than one million. We are talking about women murdered in their own homes, in the streets, often before the terrified eyes of their children. SPAVO, the Association for the Prevention and Handling of Violence in the Family, is called upon every year to handle consistently more than 3,000 calls — desperate pleas for help and reports of beatings and psychological terror. Last year alone, the national helpline 1440 recorded 5,728 calls, while in the three-year period from 2023 to 2025, police recorded 2,783 offences of violence against women. In most cases, the state machinery still treats violence as a strictly private, domestic matter, sending patrol cars that usually arrive to collect a body, not to prevent the evil from happening.
Where, then, is the real root of this evil? Certainly not in some defective DNA, but in children’s bedrooms, schoolyards and family dining tables. We are raising generations of boys who learn from the cradle that a woman’s “no” is simply a disguised “yes” requiring a little more persistence or violence — and that obsessive behaviour is baptised “romance” or “real manhood”. Young men are brought up on the theory that rejection is a mortal insult to their imaginary honour and they equate masculinity with blind domination. Our education system, which should be teaching consent, absolute respect for personal boundaries and emotional intelligence from kindergarten onwards, remains tragically stuck in mothball-scented, outdated stereotypes — thanks to the medieval Church, the far right and a timid government that have significantly restricted or downgraded sex education in schools. At the same time, pop culture, modern trap music and countless online “gurus” of toxic masculinity are freely training an entire generation to see women, at best, as trophies of validation and, at worst, as disposable, subordinate objects.
And for as long as we insist on sweeping reality under the carpet of convenient generalisation — “all femicides are homicides” is the misogynists’ “All Lives Matter” — and the desperate effort to preserve an outdated, oppressive status quo by branding any discussion of gender-based violence as “woke”, that reality will keep getting exceptionally dangerous.
