Paris Demetriades
Over the past week, parents in Larnaca pleaded guilty to the horrific abuse of their five underage children. The case came to light when one of the children found the courage to speak to a teacher, describing the unimaginable conditions they and their siblings had endured for years. The two defendants admitted guilt to charges including the exploitation of minors through forced labor, causing severe psychological harm, and assault resulting in bodily injury. At the same time, the 48-year-old defendant, who is the stepfather of one of the underage girls, also pleaded guilty to the sexual abuse of a minor.
Meanwhile, figures released by Hope for Children on the occasion of this year’s Day for the Protection of Children against Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse paint an equally grim picture. In 2024 alone, 438 abused children were referred to the “House of the Child.” The majority, 74.4%, were girls, while 25.6% were boys. The average age was 12, with 14 being the most common. According to the same data, most of the children referred, 70.8%, were Cypriot nationals.
Also last week, a 23-year-old inmate at the Central Prisons took his own life. Information suggested he had been turned into a slave by more powerful prisoners, forced to wash clothes, clean cells, and carry out their sick whims under constant pressure—pressure he likely could no longer withstand.
Nor was the news negligible last Thursday that students at Vergina Lyceum in Larnaca, as shown in photos they posted on social media, uprooted a symbolic sign placed opposite their school reading “Gaza Children Street,” went on to commit further acts of vandalism inside the school grounds, performed Nazi salutes, and painted swastikas.
Yet none of these stories from recent days, nor others from the preceding period that were, in many cases, far more shocking and far more serious, seem to have scandalized the puritanical and prudish segment of our society to the extent that the infamous paintings by Gavriil did.
At the same time, none of the issues mentioned above were offered up for instrumentalization as rage bait by caricature-like yet dangerous figures in the country’s political life, such as Efthymios Diplaros.
For those unfamiliar with the term “rage bait,” it is worth noting that it is a neologism selected by the Oxford Dictionary as the word of the year for 2025. According to the internationally respected dictionary, it refers to content published with the aim of provoking intense emotional reactions and anger, thereby boosting engagement, views, and comments. Deliberately or not, it hardly matters, this is precisely what Mr. Diplaros did by reproducing Gavriil’s paintings. One hopes that, a few days later, after a flood of online hate speech and an attack on the painter’s home with firecrackers, the deputy leader of the supposedly more serious right-wing party feels at least a hint of remorse for the attention he undeniably succeeded in drawing.
Now, the core question of the affair, why certain works, which one may quite reasonably find at odds with one’s subjective aesthetic, have come to offend so much more than the dozens of genuinely serious scandals in our ecclesiastical and political life, is a deeply existential one. It is a question that all those who have been tearing their clothes in recent days over the work of an artist must answer, bearing in mind that the work in question was intended to be exhibited in a private, not a public, space.
It would also be interesting, in the meantime, to revisit the statements and positions of DISY and of the other deeply offended fellow citizens over Gavriil’s paintings back in early 2015, when the deadly terrorist attack on the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo took place. I suspect that freedom of expression was not up for negotiation then, nor was it placed under a microscope for allegedly offending religious beliefs.
*Read the Greek version here.
