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, according to a platform monitoring domestic violence in Turkey.
The figures were announced by Fidan Ataselim, secretary-general of the We Will Stop Femicide Platform (Kadın Cinayetlerini Durduracağız Platformu), at a news conference in İstanbul on Thursday. The platform regularly releases statistics of domestic violence.
Ataselim said the platform sees news report about murdered women every day and can only share the data about the women it has knowledge of, while criticizing the government for not keeping an accurate record of women who have become victims of domestic violence.
“Who killed these women? Forty-two percent of the women were killed by their husbands. Eleven percent were killed by their partners and 9 percent by their fathers. This means the women were killed by men in their close circle,” Ataselim said, adding that 57 percent of the women were at home when they were murdered.
She also said 59 percent of the women were killed by a gun, suggesting that imposing restrictions on personal firearms could help protect women.
According to Ataselim, 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.
Ataselim said the number of women killed at the hands of men in 2021 was 131, while 99 women died under suspicious circumstances that year, when Turkey withdrew from the Istanbul Convention. She said the number of femicides in the country has increased since then.
She said the femicides decrease when women’s fight against domestic violence becomes more visible, for instance in March, when International Women’s Day is marked on March 8 and events and protests are held everywhere against domestic violence.
Ataselim accused the government of leaving women without protection against violence by promoting policies that allegedly prioritize family over women’s rights.
Femicides and violence against women are serious problems in Turkey, where women are killed, raped or beaten every day. 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.