Vassiliki femicide - a result of the law for forced joint custody

From the statement by New Democracy MP Giannis Loverdos during the parliamentary debate on the Tsiaras law, that an abuser doesn't mean he's a bad father, to the entrenchment of the notion that the abuser is a good father, only five years separate us — from the implementation of the mandatory joint custody law and a line drawn in the blood of murdered women.

Yesterday morning we woke up to learn that Vasiliki was no longer with us. Her abusive, controlling husband slaughtered her at the knee, with the children watching the slaughter, just as they had watched the beatings with the belt, just as the neighbors listened to the screams, just as the police monitored the offenses reported ex officio by the neighbors and yet couldn't find the house. Just as we watch the state snatch the children away and dump them at the hospital, after the femicide of their mother, instead of them being in the arms of people who love them.

Just as we watch the articles by journalists, their news sites, the packs of "active dads" in the comments of the news, sketching out from the very first minute the regime we find ourselves in five years later. "The young girls had a very good relationship with their father, who savagely murdered their mother in their home," "Exclusive – Kalamata: 'The young woman was having an affair – He was watching her,'" and of course whitewashing the femicide perpetrator by spreading everywhere the narrative of the killer's...self-defense.

While we know, we knew beforehand, what a friend of hers publicly reported: "He had threatened her that he would arrange things so that she would never see her children again. She stayed because she feared for her life and for her children's lives."

We know, we knew beforehand,
The Tsiaras Law Kills Women.

The abuser and the femicide perpetrator are a good father for the world being prepared by the far right, both in government and outside it, within New Democracy and elsewhere. A good father is one who disciplines and trains the state's future citizens to understand that his wife and children belong to him; a good father is one who contributes to the normalization of gender-based and domestic violence, and who has every right to punish "for the sake of honor," if need be. This is a good man and a good father.

On the battlefield we live in, within and beyond our borders, the Tsiaras law and its supporters are preparing tomorrow's masters and murderers. Tomorrow's slave and mistress. And children with bowed heads. The belt with which the femicide perpetrator beat Vasiliki will fall with force -if it isn't falling already- on children's bodies.

We have no intention of returning to a regime of violence and terror that millions of women across the planet fought to escape – in every corner we shout that we will live free, both us and our children.

We will win this fight against the war they declared on our bodies. The Tsiaras law will be overturned.

With feminist organizing and resistance.
We will live.
We will protect the children.
Vasiliki, we will vindicate you.

# The Tsiaras Law Kills Women
# no to mandatory joint custody