Stoic and prematurely graying, she said her husband had since kidnapped her
mother and stabbed her brother, trying to force them to reveal her whereabouts.
She repeatedly turned to the police. But, she said, they chided her to return
to her husband. Once, after her husband came to pick her up at the police
station, she said she heard an officer advise him to break her legs so she
could not escape.
“Our state is the No. 1 enemy of women,” Gokce said
recently at a women’s shelter here in Istanbul, declining to use her last name
for fear of her husband. “I was 14 when my husband started to abuse me, and now
I’m 37, and I am still living in fear for my life despite all my cries for
help.”
While reliable statistics are hard to come by, given
what Turkish experts say is the serious underreporting of domestic violence
here, rights groups point to a recent spate of high-profile attacks against
women to raise the alarm that Turkey is backsliding on
women’s rights. They say women’s progress is being undermined by Turkey’s flagging prospects for European Union membership and
a Muslim-inspired government that is increasingly embracing the conservative
values of the Arab world it seeks to lead.
So bleak is the situation that this year one outreach
group suggested that the state should simply arm women and provide shooting
lessons.
Fears that the governing party is diminishing women
were fanned this month when President Abdullah Gul approved a controversial
bill that extended compulsory education to 12 years but allowed home-schooling after the first
eight, which critics said could encourage the practice of taking child brides.
The government rejected such criticism, saying the changes brought Turkey in
line with international education standards.
The culture wars over women’s role in Turkish society
also reflect tensions in a majority Muslim country where the state’s official
secularism is clashing with an ascendant class of religious conservatives. With
their rise, rights groups say, men appear to be increasingly acting with
impunity against women.
Last year there were 207,253 cases of deliberate
injuries to women across the country, compared with 189,377 in 2010, according
to official data collected by the National Police Headquarters in the capital,
Ankara, and provided to Vildan Yirmibesoglu, the general secretary of Kader, a
leading rights group.
A United Nations report
published last July indicated that the incidence of domestic violence against
women in Turkey topped the percentages in the United States and Europe. The
report — based on data from a 2009 Turkish government study in which 12,785
women were interviewed across 12 regions — said 39 percent of women in Turkey
had suffered physical violence at some time in their lives, compared with 22
percent in the United States and between 3 and 35 percent in 20 European
countries.
In February 2011, Turkey’s justice minister shocked the
country when, in response to a parliamentary question, he said that there had
been a staggering increase in the murders of women, from 66 in 2002, to 953 in
the first seven months of 2009. But while the change is large, the numbers are
still relatively low for a country of 80 million, possibly skewed by
underreporting. After the governing Justice and Development Party of Prime
Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan came
to power in 2002, determined for Turkey to join the European Union, women’s
rights were a priority. Laws that discriminated against women were removed.
Others were added: rape within marriage was criminalized, and life sentences
became possible for perpetrators of so-called honor killings. But analysts say
women are now losing ground.
While the governing party insists that it is simply
socially conservative and pro-family, Nigar Goksel, a senior analyst at the
European Stability Initiative who wrote a major study on women in Turkey,
argued that rising domestic violence and women’s low participation in the work
force (at 28 percent, less than half the European Union average) reflected that
family integrity was valued over a woman’s individual rights.
“The government started off as an unlikely feminist but
has dropped the ball,” Ms. Goksel said. “Equally, the Arab Spring is pulling
Turkey in a more conservative direction.”
Mr. Erdogan, a pious Muslim, attracted the ire of many
feminists here when during last year’s election campaign he called on women to
have at least three children and argued that birth control advocates sought to
weaken Turkey. With subsidized child care rare, many women protested that he
was pushing them back into the kitchen.
Ayse Bohurler, a founding and leading member of Justice
and Development, said that the education of women had improved under the government,
which she said was also taking a strong stand against domestic violence. Others
argued that claims of a sexist society smacked of hyperbole, given that women
in Turkey hold prominent positions in business and politics, and that the
country has even had a female prime minister.
In March the Turkish Parliament passed a variety of
legislation friendly to women, including a law forcing husbands deemed abusive
by the courts to wear electronic monitoring devices and allowing the police to
issue protection orders if a family court or prosecutor is unavailable. The
police are also to receive training on women’s rights.
But legislation, however well intentioned, may not be
enough to change mentalities in an abidingly patriarchal nation, or to ensure that
new laws will be fully implemented.
For instance, every municipality here with more than
50,000 people is required by law to have at least one women’s shelter. But the
current count nationwide is just 79, a number that is woefully low for a nation
that size, rights groups say. One local official in Ankara recently told a
conservative women’s group that opening more was ill advised since they enabled
women to leave home, according to a member of the group.
But finding protection is proving elusive.
In one murder case last year, a woman named Arzu
Yildirim was shot eight times by her partner in the middle of a busy Istanbul
street, even though, women’s rights groups said, she had filed for legal
protection more than 10 times. A copy of her most recent letter of complaint
was found in her blood-stained purse.