ISTANBUL — On August 10, I met Gizem through a women’s rights group. Afraid to give her real name, she told me she had lived in fear of her abusive estranged husband for a year and a half, hoping that once their divorce was finalized he would stop threatening her and her family. Her fears are not unfounded: the number of women being killed by current or former partners in Turkey appears to be on the rise, and the Turkish government is trying to weaken one of the strongest protections for women against intimate partner violence.
Her fears are not unfounded: the number of women being killed by current or ex-partners is on the rise in Turkey.
Gizem now feels protected from her ex-husband, in part because Turkey is a member of the European treaty on domestic violence known as the Istanbul Convention. But others are not so lucky, as the brutal murder of student Pınar Gültekin in July showed, sparking violent protests across Turkey.
Advocacy groups that monitor violence against women say the problem is only getting worse. We Will Stop Femicide, an advocacy group that tracks domestic and gender-based violence against women (also known as femicide), suggests that murders have been steadily increasing over the past decade. More than 2,000 women were killed between 2008 and 2017, according to the group’s data. While the government has declined to comment on the rise in femicide, a recent report by a Turkish law enforcement agency claims a similar figure, concluding that nearly 2,500 women were killed in the same year. Both data points show a sharp decline only in 2011, when Turkey signed and promoted the Istanbul Convention.
However, despite feminists calling for the treaty’s full implementation, the Turkish government is considering withdrawing from it. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling AKP party is meeting on August 13 to decide whether Turkey should withdraw from the international agreement.
The government’s lack of enthusiasm has a lot to do with a disinformation campaign pushed in recent years by religious and far-right columnists who have sought to recast the treaty as a Western tool designed to destroy family ties and to link the treaty’s gender protections with LGBTQ advocacy.
Such sentiments overlap with Erdogan’s strongly nationalistic and religious stance as he seeks to shore up support for his Islamist-rooted political party, whose approval ratings have fallen according to some polls, even as he continues to crack down on opposition parties.
These sentiments are in line with Erdogan’s strong nationalist and religious stance as he works to strengthen the base of his Islamist-rooted political parties.
In May, the Islamist lobby group Turkey Thinking Platform submitted a detailed report to Erdogan arguing that Turkey should withdraw from the treaty (it later retracted its criticism). Still, emboldened by Erdogan’s recent move to desanctify Hagia Sophia and reclassify the historic landmark as a mosque, Islamist groups have doubled down on their conservative policies, even going so far as to call for the establishment of an Islamic caliphate.
It wasn’t always this way. Until recently, Turkey was a strong supporter of the Istanbul Convention, which is where the convention got its name. When Erdogan came to power in 2002, the AKP adopted a pro-Western political platform. Erdogan’s stable and balanced policies transformed Turkish society and the economy began to flourish. Remember that Erdogan’s AKP was once called the “Islamic Democratic Party” for its blend of conservative religious identity and liberal values.
While Erdogan had already signaled a shift towards more authoritarian and illiberal policies in 2012, a decisive turning point came with the environmental protests, known as the Gezi Park protests, which spread across much of the country in 2013. After these protests, Erdogan decided to concentrate power in the hands of the majority, severely polarizing society and worsening relations with Western allies. A failed coup attempt in 2016 led to a two-year state of emergency, thousands of people were removed from public office, and more than 100 media outlets were closed. Hundreds of journalists lost their jobs and some were imprisoned for their journalistic work.
To this day, dissent is subject to censorship, repression and arrest. After a 2017 referendum, Turkey moved from a decades-old parliamentary system to a highly centralized presidential system that gave President Erdogan greater powers, including over membership of the Istanbul Convention.
All of this makes Turkey’s women’s rights movement all the more striking: the only Muslim country to adopt, with some modifications, the secular Swiss civil code in 1926 under the rule of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the modern state. Waves and factions of feminism have flourished over the years, but today these groups are united mainly in reaction to the misogynistic rhetoric of politicians who have warned women not to laugh in public, called those who reject motherhood “incomplete” and “defective,” asserted that women are not naturally equal to men, and described contraception as “treason.”
The rise in femicide and domestic violence has led to widespread mobilization of women. But more importantly, social changes have led to women becoming more visible in work and social life, and more confident in how they appear in public. And of course, this has led to a backlash from men.
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In response to viral campaigns like the #challengeaccepted social media campaign, Islamist groups continue to portray feminists as enemies of the state. Prominent Islamist columnist Abdurrahman Dilipak wrote an article calling AKP women who supported the Istanbul Convention “whores.”
So it’s no surprise that victims of domestic violence are worried about the future of women’s rights in Turkey: As Gizem told me, she can’t imagine what her life would be like without these international safeguards, and she clearly doesn’t believe Turkey’s leaders can protect women on their own.
