More than 1.4 million women in Turkey reported being subjected to domestic violence between January 2013 and July 2024, the Birgün daily reported, citing data from the Family and Social Services Ministry.
According to Birgün, an average of 10,343 women per month of the total 1,437,688 women have reported experiencing domestic violence to the ministry’s Violence Prevention and Monitoring Centers (ŞÖNİM) over the past 10-and-a-half years.
Between 2013 and 2018, the total number of women who applied to ŞÖNİM was 271,058. However, this figure saw a dramatic increase, rising to 164,945 in 2019 alone. The number of women reporting domestic violence increased to 255,515 in 2021 and to 273,222 in 2023, the data showed.
Femicides and violence against women are chronic problems in Turkey, where women are killed, raped or beaten almost every day. Many critics say the main reason behind the situation is the policies of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government, which protects violent and abusive men by granting them impunity.
Turkish courts have repeatedly attracted criticism due to their tendency to hand down lenient sentences to offenders, claiming that the crime was “motivated by passion” or by interpreting victims’ silence as consent.
According to the We Will Stop Femicide Platform (Kadın Cinayetlerini Durduracağız Platformu), which monitors domestic violence in Turkey, Turkish men killed at least 205 women in acts of domestic violence in the first six months of 2024, while 117 others died under suspicious circumstances in the same period.
The platform argues the number of women killed by men in Turkey has increased since Turkey withdrew from the Istanbul Convention, an international treaty that requires governments to adopt legislation prosecuting perpetrators of domestic violence and similar abuse as well as marital rape and female genital mutilation.
Turkey officially withdrew from the convention on July 1, 2021 after President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan issued a decree in March 2021 that pulled the country out of the treaty despite opposition from the international community and women’s rights groups.