- Sweeping Vietnam internet law comes into force
- Pope kicks off Christmas under shadow of war
- Catholics hold muted Christmas mass in Indonesia's Sharia stronghold
- Japan's top diplomat in China to address 'challenges'
- Thousands attend Christmas charity dinner in Buenos Aires
- Demand for Japanese content booms post 'Shogun'
- As India's Bollywood shifts, stars and snappers click
- Mystery drones won't interfere with Santa's work: US tracker
- Djokovic eyes more Slam glory as Swiatek returns under doping cloud
- Australia's in-form Head confirmed fit for Boxing Day Test
- Brazilian midfielder Oscar returns to Sao Paulo
- 'Wemby' and 'Ant-Man' to make NBA Christmas debuts
- US agency focused on foreign disinformation shuts down
- On Christmas Eve, Pope Francis launches holy Jubilee year
- 'Like a dream': AFP photographer's return to Syria
- Chiefs seek top seed in holiday test for playoff-bound NFL teams
- Panamanians protest 'public enemy' Trump's canal threat
- Cyclone death toll in Mayotte rises to 39
- Ecuador vice president says Noboa seeking her 'banishment'
- Leicester boss Van Nistelrooy aware of 'bigger picture' as Liverpool await
- Syria authorities say armed groups have agreed to disband
- Maresca expects Man City to be in title hunt as he downplays Chelsea's chancs
- Man Utd boss Amorim vows to stay on course despite Rashford row
- South Africa opt for all-pace attack against Pakistan
- Guardiola adamant Man City slump not all about Haaland
- Global stocks mostly higher in thin pre-Christmas trade
- Bethlehem marks sombre Christmas under shadow of war
- NASA probe makes closest ever pass by the Sun
- 11 killed in blast at Turkey explosives plant
- Indonesia considers parole for ex-terror chiefs: official
- Global stocks mostly rise in thin pre-Christmas trade
- Postecoglou says Spurs 'need to reinforce' in transfer window
- Le Pen says days of new French govt numbered
- Global stocks mostly rise after US tech rally
- Villa boss Emery set for 'very difficult' clash with Newcastle
- Investors swoop in to save German flying taxi startup
- How Finnish youth learn to spot disinformation
- South Korean opposition postpones decision to impeach acting president
- 12 killed in blast at Turkey explosives plant
- Panama leaders past and present reject Trump's threat of Canal takeover
- Hong Kong police issue fresh bounties for activists overseas
- Saving the mysterious African manatee at Cameroon hotspot
- India consider second spinner for Boxing Day Test
- London wall illuminates Covid's enduring pain at Christmas
- Poyet appointed manager at South Korea's Jeonbuk
- South Korea's opposition vows to impeach acting president
- The tsunami detection buoys safeguarding lives in Thailand
- Teen Konstas to open for Australia in Boxing Day India Test
- Asian stocks mostly up after US tech rally
- US panel could not reach consensus on US-Japan steel deal: Nippon
Greek women confront macho culture fuelling femicides
As a group of senior Greek coastguard officers sat down for a routine video call last June, the meeting opened with femicide jokes.
"I told my wife, you better behave or I'm getting a pilot's licence. She froze!" sniggered one officer in a video leaked this month by a local news portal after a Greek helicopter pilot murdered his wife last May.
"That's the way to teach them, my friend," replied another participant.
"Didn't all little girls want to marry pilots when they were young?" laughed a third officer.
The men were mocking the murder of 20-year-old Briton Caroline Crouch by her Greek husband, Babis Anagnostopoulos, as she slept.
For over a month, he tried to present it as a botched burglary before confessing to the crime that sparked outrage in Greece.
Crouch's killing was one of dozens of similar cases in Greece in recent years, including the gruesome rape and killing of American scientist Suzanne Eaton on the island of Crete in 2019.
On average, Greece records 11 femicides per year, deputy minister for gender equality, Maria Syrengela, told parliament in January.
She added that a special hotline for abuse complaints had received nearly 7,000 calls last year.
A belated #MeToo awakening in Greece has shed more light on abuse of women in the country.
But Greek activists say the conservative country has yet to fully dismantle traditional, patriarchal attitudes that lead to violence against women, while many have called for a separate crime charge for femicide.
- Women 'should not talk much' -
Macho culture has deep roots in Greece, say Eleftheria Koumandou and Eleonora Orfanidou, co-hosts of an award-winning daily show on Athens 9,84 city radio that regularly addresses social issues including misogyny and homophobia.
"A young girl (growing up) in Greece has centuries of tradition to deal with," Orfanidou told AFP.
"Greek education, the church and justice are conservative institutions built on the patriarchal model," she adds.
Koumandou says her mother, who gave up studying dentistry to avoid "offending" her marble mason husband, would say women "should not talk much".
"We were taught not to display too much intelligence," notes Orfanidou.
Greece first gave women the vote in 1952, and in 2020 elected its first woman head of state, former judge Katerina Sakellaropoulou.
But conservative Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis -- whose sister was Greece's first female Athens mayor and foreign minister -- has just two women ministers in his cabinet of 21.
Beatings of women were common in film a few decades ago -- frequently for comic relief -- while so-called honour killings over jealousy and adultery featured in popular song lyrics.
"In my school dance group, a folk song about a man who butchers his wife and then mourns her was among our favourites," recalls Orfanidou.
Many Greek films from the 1950s to the 1970s, considered the golden era of domestic cinema and routinely replayed on television, promote the bourgeois family model with the man at the head of the household, says Fotini Tsibiridou, a social anthropologist at the University of Macedonia.
- 'Caressed and slapped' -
In a 1966 hit comedy that sold over 420,000 tickets, the protagonist lines up his six sisters and slaps them for bickering.
"I want to be caressed and slapped by the man I love," says a song from the same era.
Contemporary Greek TV soaps and advertisements are still rife with "sexist references and stereotypes," Tsibiridou adds.
"For instance, you won't see a man buying or using house cleaning products in a Greek TV ad," she says.
In 2016, Greece's leading toy chain Jumbo sparked controversy with an advertisement featuring the line "hit like a man".
In another tongue-in-cheek advertisement from a cell phone chain in 2011, a man, unhappy with his wife's cooking, daydreams about returning her to her mother.
Critics also note Greek law penalises victims of domestic violence by giving lighter sentences to perpetrators who can prove they were in a state of agitation during the crime.
Proof of being in what the penal code calls "a fit of rage" can mean the difference between a life sentence and a reduced term.
This is the line of defence used by Crouch's husband Anagnostopoulos, whose lawyer this month told reporters that his client "was in a state of psychological arousal" when he committed the crime "in the heat of passion".
A few days after the coastguard video mocking Crouch's death leaked, the merchant marine ministry condemned the comments through an anonymous source. No official statement was issued.
M.Fischer--AMWN