Redux
Every journey circles home
I write this today, not yesterday, because remembrance is easy on the day we are told to remember. What matters is the day after, when the ribbon comes off and the silence returns. That's when another woman disappears.
In Cyprus, many cases continue to haunt us. Women disappear or are killed under extreme violence that reflects deep-rooted misogyny. The details are shocking. Women vanished. Days later, bodies found buried. Hands tied behind their back, a black nylon bag covered the head, and a strap around her neck. Abductors and killers, later convicted, one has escaped from prison months after his life sentence and remains on Interpol’s wanted list. And we are ok with this.
Cyprus mothers, Ukrainian mothers, English sisters, daughters, girls, found murdered, bound with a cord and gagged. Pregnant women, mothers, and girls have been killed by partners, ex-partners, or strangers who could not tolerate a woman’s autonomy. Each number is a life lost, each story a reminder that femicide is not isolated. Even as the state passed legislation in 2022 recognising femicide as a distinct crime, patterns of control, overkill, and misogyny persist. From straps and cords to premeditated acts of extreme violence, these crimes reveal that much remains undone in protecting women from lethal gendered violence.
Her steps were ordinary. Finish work. Walk outside. Make a phone call. Then the ending. That ending is extreme. It is overkill. It is the manifestation of misogyny, a punishment for her autonomy. But in Cyprus, as in the rest of the world, it is a pattern.
The United Nations warns that femicide is rising. Its latest report breaks the crisis down with horrifying clarity. Femicide is universal. No country is immune, not even small and supposedly safe societies. Women and girls are most likely to be killed by those closest to them. Home is the most dangerous place. Recent cases in Cyprus confirm this brutal truth.
The true scale is far higher. Four in ten killings of women and girls cannot even be identified as gender-related because of broken reporting systems. Many women vanish into statistics that do not acknowledge who they were.
Some groups are especially at risk. Trans women face staggering levels of violence globally, and even these numbers underrepresent reality because so many victims are misidentified or never recorded. And there is also another battlefield. The online world, where threats escalate, partners monitor, abuse spreads, and women are hunted long before they are physically harmed.
We remembered victims yesterday. We forget them today. And tomorrow, another woman may walk out of work, make a call that does not go through, and disappear. And then misogyny enforced through overkill. It is the story that keeps being written. The day after the world day.