Twenty-one women were murdered by men in Turkey in February, while 16 died under suspicious circumstances, the Mezopotamya news agency reported on Monday, citing a monthly report from a leading women’s rights group.
The We Will Stop Femicide Platform (KCDP) released its latest report Monday, detailing the number of women who were killed by men last month as well as others who died under suspicious circumstances.
According to the report all of the victims were killed by a male relative or acquaintance, with four murdered by their husbands. Eleven of the victims were killed in their own homes. The report found that 19 percent of the women were murdered for making decisions about their own lives.
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 KCDP, the only year when the number of femicides dropped was 2011, the year when Turkey signed an international treaty, known as the Istanbul Convention, aimed at combatting domestic violence.
Despite opposition from the international community and women’s rights groups, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan decided to withdraw Turkey from the convention in March 2021. The treaty required 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 Istanbul Convention in July 2021.
Erdoğan claimed at the time that the treaty had been “hijacked by a group of people attempting to normalize homosexuality” which he said was “incompatible” with Turkey’s “social and family values.”
Since Turkey’s withdrawal from the treaty, Turkish authorities have been pressuring women’s rights organizations for their activist work.
Despite the pressure, the organizations have said they will continue monitoring violence and femicide in the country.
A 2022 Human Rights Watch (HRW) report criticized Turkey’s approach to addressing violence against women, pointing out that the government frames the issue in paternalistic terms, seeing women as needing protection rather than promoting gender equality. Emma Sinclair-Webb of HRW noted that this approach undermines efforts to effectively combat gender-based violence.