Our View: Small shift being seen in approach to handling of sexual abuse cases

It was no surprise that last weekend’s revelations by the Greek Olympic medalist Sophia Bekatorou, who said she was raped by a high-ranking official of the Hellenic Sailing Federation in 1998, would lead to similar revelations in Cyprus. On Wednesday, sport shooter Andri Eleftheriou, a member of the Cyprus women’s national shooting team, filed a complaint with police saying she was sexually harassed twice by a man in a position of authority at two international sports events – the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne and the Olympics in Beijing two years later.

What is astonishing is that Eleftheriou first spoke of these experiences on a television show in 2018 and was ignored and the same thing happened when she repeated them last month. Cyprus society is not very sensitive to issues of sexual harassment or abuse as shown by the experience of a British teenager who accused a group of Israeli youths of raping her in 2019. Under persistent questioning by police she was forced to withdraw her complaint and she was subsequently charged with making false accusations, held in custody and put on trial. Her experience illustrated the rampant sexism of the Cyprus police and lack of training in dealing with sexual abuse victims.

Is it any wonder that sexual abuse cases were very rarely, if ever, reported to the police? The experience of the British teenager – a rape victim who ended up as the accused – simply proved to women that they were right not to report cases of sexual abuse to the police because they did not know how they would be treated.

In Eleftheriou’s case they could say that they never received a complaint from her. When she filed a complaint, on Wednesday, the police said they would investigate and take statements from officials in the shooting federation. The case would be taken over by specially-trained staff (they are a new addition to the force as they did not exist in 2019) it was announced.

It probably helped that the minister in charge of the police is a woman, and that she met Eleftheriou before she filed her complaint; Emily Yiolitis told Eleftheriou the state would stand by her all the way. This public support by the justice minister was very helpful and it could encourage other victims of sexual abuse to file complaints, knowing they would not encounter disinterested and unsympathetic policemen as had been the case in the past. This shift of approach had an impact as early as Thursday, even though it was a man making the revelations. The chairman of the shooting federation publicly said that the man who allegedly abused Eleftheriou was involved in several other cases about which nothing was done.

There will not be a rush of women making abuse allegations in public, but it is a positive development that those who decide to do so will no longer have to deal with unsympathetic, or hostile policemen.