THE WAY THINGS ARE

By Colette NiReamonn Ioannidou

There’s controversy in the UK about women on a night out whose drinks were ‘spiked’ or who were injected with drugs. This growing ‘club culture’ of men treating women as nothing more than objects to be taken without consent or complaint is not always acted on by police or managers of some clubs.

The self-defence instructions issued by the Metropolitan police, several women said, after Sarah Everard was brutally murdered by an off-duty officer who handcuffed her, kidnapped her then brutally raped and murdered her, levered responsibility onto what women should do. Why not teach boys, they asked, early on in school, how to behave towards the opposite sex?

Similarities between Ireland and Cyprus exist where Church and state cooperate over what constitutes morality. Here priests can marry, and divorce was available long before Irish governance agreed to it. In Ireland, laws made women subject to what men, especially unmarried clergy, thought was correct when it came to their bodies.

Over decades, Irish governments kowtowed to the weight of Roman Catholicism’s hold on the people; Cyprus, on occasion, retains that mutual alliance. Both teach religious instruction in schools even though more than 20 years into this century, different cultures and creeds share common space and educational facilities with indigenous citizens. Religious instruction should now be optional and separate from the daily curriculum.

It’s good to give young children a moral base, but as lessons become more demanding, some subjects could be optional when older students need to concentrate on preparing for working lives in a very competitive world. A Cypriot friend, a closet atheist, can’t express her irritation to her ultra-Orthodox family. ‘There are teachers and teachers.’ she said, ‘the good ones teach with care and understanding; the bad see only one dimension, their own. The good teacher lets them form their own opinion. The not-so-good says do as I think and say.’

She gets livid when her daughter comes home and tells her some of the things her religious teacher tells the class. ‘I can’t see that kind of narrow-mindedness as having anything to do with Christ’s teachings, more like a misogynistic interpretation of it.’ Opting out is allowed for children of other denominations, but at what age should that instruction halt? And what if non-religious parents would prefer to have that time as an optional period spent learning something they feel would further their child’s education or give more study time?

Irish children were, in a word, brainwashed by Roman Catholicism, told we would be the only ones to enter heaven. Other religions didn’t stand a chance of getting through the Pearlies. Some teach in a similar fashion here, my friend says. We believed all of that, had it rote-drummed into our heads most of our young lives.

Is there a God? I don’t know. When my mother died, I was in London. On arriving home and still a believer, I was very distressed, wanted a sign she was at peace after hellish suffering with cancer. On impulse, I took a portrait from the wall that had hung there for decades and opened the back. I found a picture of Christ who, secretly, had been looking out on our living space from behind the Renaissance lady. It said, ‘Sacred heart of Jesus, I trust in Thee’. I showed it to my sister who smiled sadly, ‘those were the last words your mother spoke before she died.’ I kept that picture and, in spite of not believing in organised religion anymore, I still respect Christ.

House president Annita Demetriou said about young people ‘…we should all listen to them more so that we decide together which is the best path to follow.’ Methods of education need to be reassessed for this technological age. Young boys with easy access to porn should be taught respect for girls, and girls to know they are equal not inferior. Restructured curricula needs creating for an endangered world with increased science and environment lessons centred on making the most of the precious time and talents of our youth, preparing them to deal with the hazardous time ahead because the Earth is running out of time… their time to come.