Turkey shocked by double feminicide

The murder of two young women in Istanbul dramatically reveals a climate that is not very favorable to the emancipation of women in Türkiye. The responsibility of politicians, up to President Erdogan, is pointed out by the women’s movements.

Turkey is tragically addicted to femicide. We don’t know their exact number, but they fill the column every day. In the absence of reliable official statistics, associations scan the press and compile complaints from families. Their figures therefore represent the tip of the iceberg. For this year, they recorded 297 proven feminicides and 160 suspicious deaths, women who fell from their balconies for example. So nearly 460 feminicides at least in 9 months.

Two murders of young women have just shaken the country. Particularly because they did not occur in a remote province, at night, but in the heart of Istanbul, in the conservative district of Fatih. Two young women of 19: one with her throat slit, the other decapitated on the city walls, by a young man of their age who then committed suicide. This young man, with suicidal and disturbed tendencies, had been harassing them since high school. Her mother had requested follow-up, the young girls had filed a complaint against the harassment, to no avail. And it is unfortunately emblematic of the difficulty women have in obtaining justice. Their complaints are dismissed in the police stations, and when the justice system issues an injunction to remove a jealous ex-spouse, it is not able to enforce it. Perpetrators of femicide often have a long record and are repeat offenders, but when convicted are often released early for “good behavior”.

But civil society is not giving up: demonstrations took place across the country, from Diyarbakir in the east to Istanbul, Eskisehir, Izmir, Bolu…

This is the watchword of these gatherings. The women’s movements mean by this slogan that it is the political discourses, at the highest level of the State, which maintain a climate allowing abuses. When Turkey withdraws from the Istanbul Convention, when it wants to re-discuss the only law protecting women against violence, law 6284 that the president’s allies want to overhaul, when President Erdogan glorifies the family, sacred – where yet the majority of violence is committed – and not the woman, when he believes that a woman is fully fulfilled by being a mother and not by looking for work, when the violence is attributed to alcoholism or drugs and not to culture of the dominant patriarchy…

They want to force us to stay at home, denounce Turkish women and they even want to force our bodies. They recall comments that the first lady has just made, believing that good mothers give birth naturally and not by cesarean section. Control therefore goes a long way.

President Erdogan has certainly asked that sentences, particularly in cases of violence against women, be toughened, that pre-trial detention be systematic when the suspect has a record, and that early releases be better controlled. Measures which could go in the right direction but its detractors fear that they primarily concern not the perpetrators of attacks against women but those whom the government pursues with its vindictiveness. As one of them writes: “How can we not say that these rules will be applied not to murderers but to journalists, not to thieves but to those who express their opinions, not to harassers but to those who act against them ?”

For now, the first decision taken by the Turkish government is to block access to the Discord platform. Discussion forums there would have rejoiced over the murders of the two young women in Istanbul. This is not the response from the State that Turkish women are expecting.