When it comes to cowards it’s hard to beat wife beaters and men who abuse women to satisfy their rage against people who can’t fight back – and it’s getting worse for women in Greece.

They’re being harassed, stalked, raped, assaulted, beaten, and killed – an d no amount of government educational programs, would-be deterrents, or penalties is going to stop it because that’s just the nature of these beasts.

If people who kill don’t think about going to jail it’s not on the minds of men smacking around their wives or partners or girlfriends – they must feel such empowerment beating up punching bags.

When these incidents happen you have to wonder: where’s the fathers and brothers to step in and mete out justice – because women in Greece aren’t going to find it in the courts, nor from police too busy protecting the rich and powerful, like the 17 Kazakh oligarchs who were said to have burned a forest on the island of Hydra and were let go.

Early in 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, former Olympic champion Sofia Bekatorou said she “did the right thing” when she went public alleging she was raped by a senior member of the Greek sailing federation when she was 23.

That essentially began the #MeToo movement in Greece, which has since floundered because he wasn’t even prosecuted – there’s a statute of limitations on rape but not on ignorance – and what she said didn’t slow the onslaught against women.

In April, 28-year-old Kyriaki Griva, who had a male friend escorting her, was stabbed to death – outside a police station in Athens where she had gone seeking protection from her ex-partner.

She was told to go outside and call a police hotline, where she was told that “police cars aren’t taxis” – just before she was jumped from behind and killed. It was a sensation and brought protests against domestic violence. For about a week.

She’s been forgotten, along with a long line of other victims because unless a case is horrible enough to grab the public’s attention, or involves a well-known figure, women are being beaten senseless every day and no reports of anything happening to the men who do it.

The case of Apostolos Lytras is beyond fiction. The well-known criminal attorney is in pre-trial detention on charges of punching his wife in the face repeatedly and savagely enough to make her fear she would drown in her own blood.

Don’t know which law school he went to, but it must have been the University of Mars (nod to Alex Karras) or maybe he learned to punch women at the School of Hard Knocks – but he doesn’t have a degree in Rocket Science, that’s for sure.

How else to explain why a criminal attorney – now a CRIMINAL attorney (nod to ‘Breaking Bad’) thought he could get away with beating up his wife – who’s also his law partner, trying to cover it up by saying she fell down the stairs (yes, but 12 times?), and then allegedly sent her threatening text messages.

Did this guy win any cases? He’s not going to win any Husband of the Year Awards – and he has now become the cover face for domestic violence in Greece. But just to show even celebrity cases don’t change anything, police said there were dozens more cases the next day. It’s just the nature of these beasts.

When I was the Overnight Editor at the Boston Globe many years ago there were few calls on the police scanner as chilling as the too-ubiquitous and calmly delivered message from a dispatcher for units to go to a certain address with the notice: “Woman taking a beating.”

The Lytras case led the New Democracy government, which at least is trying to do something, to propose more measures trying to safeguard women even though they won’t work because nothing is going to stop wife beaters and abusers of women, Greece having the ignominious reputation of constant femicide.

Some activists want femicide to be a separate category of crime, as if that might bring back the dead, because homicide by any other name is just that, and the approach should be to try to stop the violence before it reaches murder.

How? More criminologists have failed trying to figure that out than diplomats trying to reunify Cyprus, and no minister, no judge, no politician, no advocate, no women’s rights group, and no Prime Minister has any real answers – because there aren’t any.

There are deterrents, but those aren’t to be found in the courts or educational seminars on how not to beat your wife. Those solutions are what are euphemistically called extrajudicial – taking the law into your own hands.

This is the point where you gasp and say “that’s inhuman” and “let the justice system work.” Well, it doesn’t, of course – and in many of these cases of domestic violence the only answer is prevention through violence. It works every time.

Otherwise the #MeToo movement will become #HerToo and the list of victims will keep growing.

If it’s your sister or mother or friend who’s being beaten you aren’t going to stop it with a counseling session for the abuser, who will need a more emphatic form of counseling, and we can only hope Lytras will have his moment in jail to be a woman.