Combatting violence against women in Turkey: structural obstacles

ABSTRACT

This paper uses the ‘social conflict' theory to analyse the challenges to combatting violence against women in Turkey. It argues that these obstacles that are grounded in unequal social power relations are structured in the political landscape where decisions over who gets what are made. The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP)'s ‘male biased' political decisions such as withdrawing Turkey from the Council of Europe's Convention on Preventing and Combatting Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (Istanbul Convention) reflect the current conditions of the balance of societal interests in the political order. Turkish women’s struggle for equality requires a shift in existing conditions of power in favour of pro-gender equality forces that would enable the representation of their preferences and interests in the political landscape, which is always tilted towards certain groups and their interests.

KEYWORDS:

• Violence against women
• social conflict
• gender relations
• Turkish women’s movement
• Istanbul Convention
• Turkey

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Owen Miller, Eliza Gheorghe, Feride Acar, Bilin Neyaptı, and Contemporary Politics' editors and reviewers for their contributions to this article. Special thanks are due to Astrid Schnitzer- Skjønsberg, Işık Beyza Aksoy and Helin Rana Toprak for their excellent research assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The United Nations describes spikes in domestic violence and other forms of violence against women since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic as a ‘shadow pandemic’. For detailed discussion of the effects of the COVID-19 crisis on violence against women, see UN Women, 2020.

2 Given the already low rate of reported cases and disruptions in the provision of protective and support services due to diversion of resources to essential services during the pandemic, the scale of domestic abuse faced by women and girls during lockdowns (and they have had to stay with their abusers at home) is likely to be much larger than what the official figures suggest. Following the introduction of curfews and mobility restrictions, the Council of Judges and Prosecutors (HSK) ruled on 30 March 2020 that court requests for protection measures, such as restraining orders, specified in the ‘Law No. 6284 to Protect Family and Prevent Violence Against Women’ should be processed in a way that would not pose a threat to the perpetrator’s health (Erem, 2020).

3 This slogan originated from the plea of a femicide victim in a video that circulated on social media in August 2019. The victim’s name was Emine Bulut. She was a 38-year-old informal care worker and stabbed by her ex-husband before their daughter in a small-town cafe. In the video filmed by eyewitnesses, she is heard screaming ‘I don’t want to die’, while her daughter begs her, in tears, not to die.

4 KADEM, founded in 2013, rejects feminism and defines women’s identities in terms of the family rather than as individuals. Its mission includes ‘formulating common public awareness in society in terms of women’s rights and equal opportunities within the family and in social roles’. For details see, https://kadem.org.tr/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/The-Women-and-Democracy-Association-KADEM.pdf.

5 This argument draws on the point Jayasuriya and Rosser (2006) make in relation to the implementation of liberalisation reforms in the aftermath of the 1997 financial crisis in Southeast Asia.

6 Aside from the Kemalist version of state feminism, the Islamist and socialist approaches to the status of women prevented the development of an autonomous feminist movement in Turkey (Coşar & Onbaşi, 2008). Notwithstanding their differences over the character of the state, these three opposing ideologies were similar in that they all viewed women as a threat to public order, focused on women’s bodies as the battleground for political contestation and treated women as asexual beings (Müftüler-Bac, 1999). While Islamist discourses depicted women ‘as symbols of chastity and authenticity vis-à-vis Western immorality’ (Coşar & Onbaşi, 2008, p. 329), Turkish socialists preferred the term ‘baci’ (sister) in their references to woman comrades as a way of eliminating the threat of sexuality (Müftüler-Bac, 1999).

7 TUSIAD (Association of Turkish Industrialists and Businesses) was founded by giant conglomerates in 1971.

8 This religious order was founded by the state-salaried preacher Fethullah Gülen in the 1960s with the objective of fighting against communism and raising a ‘golden generation’ of pious, hardworking, well-educated individuals with a strong sense of loyalty and discipline. Through establishing a large network of educational institutions, civil society organizations, media companies, businesses, trade associations and ‘colonising’ the state bureaucracy with the members of the so-called ‘golden generation, Gülen’s followers sought to transform the secular foundations of the state from within (Gumuscu, 2016).

9 WWGPC was formed as an umbrella organisation in 2002. It was inspired by the women’s movement’s successful advocacy efforts for reforming Turkey’s civil code in 2001, which abolished the status of the husband as the head of the family. Involving representatives from women’s non-governmental organisations, law societies and universities from different regions of Turkey, the WWGPC campaigned for a holistic reform of the penal code (Ilkkaracan & Ercevik Amado, 2008).

10 According to World Bank data, five big Turkish construction companies, Limak, Kolin, Cengiz, Kalyon and the MNG, are among the world’s top ten most public tender winning companies over the period between 1990 and 2019. For details, see (World Bank, 2020).

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Selver B. Sahin

Selver B. Sahin is the author of International Intervention and State- Making: How the Exception Became the Norm (Routledge, 2015). Her research is focused on the forms and consequences of institutional capacity development interventions in fragile countries and has been published in Development Policy Review, Democratization, International Peacekeeping, Asian Survey, Australian Journal of International Affairs, and the Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies.