'We won’t stay silent, women are speaking up and social media is on fire'
The case has sparked an outcry in the U.K., where #IBelieveHer and #BoycottCyprus trended on Twitter as news of the decision spread. And in Cyprus, the young woman’s case has electrified women’s rights activists long fighting for reforms to the way authorities handle rape cases, and has prompted pleas for intervention from the country’s current Attorney General.
The woman, who has not been publicly identified, is now facing up to a year in jail in Cyprus and a fine of $1,500. She already spent more than a month in prison before being granted bail at the end of August, and has not been allowed to leave the island. “This woman has been punished enough,” Nicoletta Charalambidou, a Cyprus-based lawyer on her legal defense team, told TIME ahead of the sentencing on Jan. 7. “It’s brought a whole range of consequences into her life.”
For those following the case in Cyprus closely, the verdict did not come as a surprise. “We knew it from July, when the accusation of rape came up, that the system would fail this woman,” says Zelia Gregoriou, associate professor at the University of Cyprus and founding member of the Network Against Violence Against Women, a group that demonstrated in solidarity with the woman at the courthouse earlier this week, wearing scarves around their faces with images of lips sewn shut. “Every rape claim is treated pre-emptively as a false rape claim, and that’s why we had to be there. It’s not the exception.” Gregoriou says female victims are often threatened by the police, and warned that they will be exposed and publicly humiliated.
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