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UK teenager’s conviction touches a nerve with angry Cypriot women
Women’s rights are now in the spotlight, with a new protest group using the ‘false rape’ case to raise awareness of abuse and injustice across the country



Famagusta district court is an unlikely springboard for a women’s movement to leap into the headlines. The tired, one-storey building in the small east-coast town of Paralimni is unused to seeing camera crews, much less a clutch of Fleet Street’s finest prowling its corridors.

But even they seemed insignificant next to the protesters who had shown up in support of the British teenager on trial for allegedly fabricating a claim of being gang raped last summer by 12 Israeli youths aged between 15 and 22, in the resort town of Ayia Napa.

Members of the newly created Network Against Violence Against Women (NAVAW), they had come in the pouring rain driven by a burning desire to see a purported injustice addressed.


The fate of the 19-year-old British student – found guilty that day of falsely accusing the Israelis of rape – had brought them to this place, placards and banners in hand. But it wasn’t all. The young woman’s ordeal, as gruelling and unfair as it appeared in their eyes, had galvanised a much deeper fury – one that runs deep in the fabric of a society more Levantine than European.

“It has given an explosion to the voice of women who have been very angry since the murders,” says Argentoula Ioannou, referring to the deaths of seven foreign women and girls at the hands of a serial killer who went undetected by the island’s authorities for years. Bodies of most of the victims were found last year in suitcases in the bottom of lakes on the Mediterranean island. “It is anger that we are turning into action now.”

An activist lawyer who has long been the force behind Cyprus’s single parents’ association, Ioannou helped set up the network in October.

On Tuesday, she will be among the protesters who will again descend on the court – this time with scores of fellow female demonstrators from Israel – for the sentencing of the Briton, who stands convicted of the crime of public mischief. The offence carries a maximum penalty of a year in prison and a fine of up to €1,700.

“It will be a big protest, a protest like no other,” she warns, calling the teenager’s alleged retraction of the rape claim a travesty of justice. “What has been happening in our country is very, very wrong.”

Few cases have touched such a nerve. On an island where women’s rights are rarely aired publicly, one woman’s fight for justice has stirred an underbelly of grievances so raw few can tell where they will lead.

“It has brought to the surface the problems of sexism and misogyny that we have across the private and public sectors,” says Susana Pavlou of the Mediterranean Institute of Gender Studies in Nicosia, the divided capital.

“Cyprus has one of the highest rates of tertiary-educated women in the world, which makes you think it’s a rather modern society at first. Then a case like this comes along and all these deeply held patriarchal attitudes, that might not be apparent at first glance, come to the fore.”

From last August, when the trial began, court proceedings had been clouded by what she describes as “gender stereotypes, classic rape myths and victim bashing”.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...-at-injustices