How Women’s Most Powerful Defense and Weapon is Solidarity

By Irena Ioannou — GAZE

Recently, a Greek sailing champion, Sofia Bekatorou, aged 43, went public and in a heart-breaking account revealed that at the age of 22 a powerful man in her field raped her. A lump settled in every woman’s throat in the country. They could easily empathize. The accused, the press found out, was a prominent member of the governing party, still in office after all those years and only gaining power within both the Hellenic Sailing Federation and the Olympic Committee.

An all-too-familiar concern took hold that after the dust settled, the Olympic gold medalist’s name would be dragged through the mud, or her story would be quickly forgotten with sympathies and a pat on the back. To put it kindly, Greece is not known for its gender equality. Both in public and private spaces women are ridiculed, silenced and dismissed with no real consequences. The #MeToo movement never made it to a country where little changes over time.

Life though exceeded any predictable story. The few (male) voices that wondered ironically why the athlete had suddenly remembered it, were drowned out by the overwhelming response that she hadn’t just remembered it because she had never forgotten it. To others who asked why the victim had not come forward right away, it was pointed out that this was an…