By Burku Karakaş, journalist, Deutsche Welle correspondent in Turkey
In a country where political oppression permeates our daily lives, to the point where it’s harder to breathe every day, I’m a “feminist journalist”: I see life and journalism from a feminist perspective. I can’t think of another way to look at things in Turkey, where women’s rights are constantly under attack and not a day goes by without a woman being killed. However, despite this reality, we must have hope, as the feminist movement in Turkey sheds light on the oppression of women in this country.
Authoritarian regimes share many common traits, the main of which is to attack human rights gains achieved after long years of struggle and to prioritize the concept of family. This trend is clearly at play in Turkey. However, one must always remember that when there is an attack, there is a defense and in the last decade, Turkey has witnessed an inspiring organized movement of women to fight against these systematic attacks on women’s rights. We are constantly subjected to discourses that maintain that destructuring families would disrupt society and that the LGBTI+ community threatens the social order. “Those who do not form a family are not with us”, or “those who divorce are traitors” are common examples of this speech.
Turkey was the first country to ratify in 2011 the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence, better known as the Istanbul Convention. The Convention, whose objective is to eliminate gender-based violence and whose implementation is the responsibility of States, entered into force in August 2014. However, since then Turkey has not applied it. Tellingly, media organizations close to the government and members of the conservative religious community have repeatedly argued that the agreement “has been disrupting the institution of the family” and have demanded its annulment, claiming that the number of divorce cases has increased. These baseless accusations are mainly based on the increase in the number of women filing for divorce and the growing intolerance towards women taking decisions about their own lives into their own hands.
