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http://www.clarionproject.org/news/turkey-epidemic-murders-women-seeking-divorce
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TURKEY – EPIDEMIC OF MURDERS
OF WOMEN SEEKING DIVORCE
A
new kind of honor violence against women has emerged in Turkey: the murdering
of women seeking divorce from their husbands.
Muhterem Gocmen
with her son
November 24, 2014
- A new kind of honor violence against women has emerged in Turkey: the murdering of women seeking
divorce from their husbands.
Last month on an
Istanbul street, Hulya Cadirci, a 28-year old mother in the middle of divorce
proceedings, was stabbed to death by her
40-year old husband in front of their child. Hulya’s murder is the latest in
the 287 cases that have been documented by a Turkish human rights and advocacy
group “We Will Stop Women Murders.”
Many of these
cases were women seeking divorces; most were murdered in honor crimes by
husbands or family members.
The numbers are
already up from last year’s, when the group documented 238 such cases,
including that of Muhterem Gocmen, a 30-year old mother of two seeking a
divorce from here abusive husband Serdar.
In broad daylight,
Serdar walked into the hair salon where Muhterem was working and stabbed her to
death. Two days previously, Serdar had beaten up Muhterem in a café. The day
before the murder, despite a restraining order, Serdar had threatened his wife.
Police were called, yet Serdar was let free by them. It only took Serdar five
seconds with a kitchen knife to murder Muhterem the next day.
During the course
of their marriage, Muhterem had endured a miscarriage after being thrown down a
flight of stairs by Serdar, threats from Serdar’s family and months of being
denied outside contact while being abused and held hostage her husband.
“We have passed
the phase of traditional honor killings,” said Gulsum Kav, a medical
ethics doctor in Istanbul who founded "We Will Stop Women Murders."
“Now we are facing modern murder. Women want a divorce, and the families aren’t
adjusted to it.”
Even though Turkey
has a reputation as a modern country, rights activists charge that in the years
since 2003, when the Islamist AKP party came into power, violence against women
has skyrocketed. According to the Turkish Ministry of Justice, from 2003 until
2010, there was a 1,400 percent increase in the number of murders of women.
“The AKP
government came under harsh criticism after the release of this information, so
in a last-ditch effort to save its reputation, [after 2010] it started altering
the numbers,” charges Pinar Tremblay, a
Turkish journalist and visiting scholar of political science at California
State Polytechnic University.
Tremblay quotes
Hulya Gulbahar, a lawyer and a women's rights activist and one of the founders
and former head of the Association for Supporting Women Candidates in Politics,
explained how, after the embarrassing “1,400 percent headline,” the government
simply did not report on thousands of women who were murdered. More accurate
numbers can be found merely by adding up the number of women murdered as
reported in the news, she says.
“No one can argue
violence against women has become a norm in contemporary Turkey,” Tremblay
writes. The question is, she asks, why have the numbers increased so
dramatically in contemporary Turkey?
Tremblay points to
three factors: First, although the value of women in Turkish society has always
been low, she says, it has sunk even lower in the past 10 years.
Data from the
World Economic Forum, showed that in 2013, Turkey ranked 127th among 136 countries in the gender gap
index of “economic participation.” Tremblay cites research which shows that as
education and economic independence of women increases, they are subjected to
less domestic violence.
Conversely, women
who live in societies like Turkey where this “gender gap” is wide, are
subjected to greater violence at the hands of their husbands, fathers,
father-in-laws, brothers and even sons and grandsons.
The second factor,
says Tremblay, is the concept of honor. Turkish society traditionally blames
the woman for a variety of “crimes,” from refusing to marry a man chosen by the
family to asking for a divorce, even from an abusive husband.
“Honor is a
fragile and versatile concept for Turkish men … Social pressure is an
undeniable factor that contributes to honor killings … internal family dynamics
force a male member to step up and clean the family name,” says Tremblay.
In fact, Turkey is
now ranked as one of the worst countries to be a woman. Forty percent of
Turkish women experience some form of physical violence in their lives, a rate
much higher than that in Europe or the U.S.
The third factor
is leniency in punishment for honor violence. According to the penal
code, “if there were motives involving honor, passion or family privacy,
then the sentence can be easily reduced," says Tremblay.
"If the
murderer behaves properly, he can receive amnesty in a year or two. This
leniency feeds from the fact that a woman’s life is worthless in Turkey and
encourages other murderers. Indeed, there have been police reports that
perpetrators have Googled possible punishments they
might receive before killing their woman,” she added.
Although Tremblay
says that changing the penal code alone will not solve the problem, she
contends it could be a deterrence in a significant number of cases.
Already in the
first half of this year, murders of women increased close to 47 percent from
the same period last year, revealed Aylin Nazlýaka, a
member of the parliament from the Republican People's Party (CHP), the main
opposition party.
Tellingly,
Nazliaka came under fire from Ankara’s Islamist mayor Melih Gokcek after she
criticized TV hostess Seda Sayan for bringing on her “Bachelor” show the
“eligible” Sefer Calinak.
Calinak had
murdered his two previous wives and was now searching for a new wife. He spent
four and a half years in prison for the first murder and six years for the
second.
While introducing
him, hostess Sayan asked, “Have you ever seen a murderer with such a smiling
face?” Laughs and cheers emanated from the studio audience.
Sayan threatened Nazliaka
after the MP lambasted her. Ankara’s mayor praised Sayan for making the threats
against Nazliaka.
A scary response
from the man in charge of Turkey’s capital.