Turkish women’s rights organizations held demonstrations in İstanbul and several other cities over the weekend in the wake of the brutal murder of two young women by a 19-year-old man on Friday, demanding more effective and stronger measures for better protection of women and an end to impunity for the perpetrators of violence against them.
Turkey was shaken by the murder of Ayşenur Halil and İkbal Uzuner by Semih Çelik within 30 minutes of each other in İstanbul’s Eyüpsultan and Edirnekapı neighborhoods on Friday afternoon.
The DHA news agency reported that the man had beheaded Uzuner on the city’s historic walls in Edirnekapı. Turkish media reports were filled with graphic content that detailed the brutal nature of the women’s killings.
Both women were also aged 19, the İstanbul Police Department said in a statement. Çelik died by suicide by jumping off the walls after killing both women the same day.
According to media reports, Halil was Çelik’s girlfriend, and he had sought a romantic relationship with Uzuner earlier and was rejected. A video of Çelik circulating on social media showed that he had revealed his intention to kill Uzuner a year ago in the video.
The motivation behind the murders remains unclear, but police found drawings in Çelik’s home that show the naked body of a dismembered woman.
Çelik’s father Adem told police that his son had mental issues, was using drugs and had once attempted suicide.
Women’s rights organizations such as the We Will Stop Femicide Platform (Kadın Cinayetlerini Durduracağız Platformu), which monitors domestic violence in Turkey, women’s organizations from the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) and the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party) and other feminist groups held a demonstration in front of the historic walls in Edirnekapı on Saturday where one of the women was killed.
Tarihi surların kadın cinayetleriyle anılmasına yol açanlar, 6284'ü etkin uygulamayanlara karşı umut burada!
Bu ülkede adalet yoksa, kadınları koruyacak bakanlar yoksa kadınlar var, LGBTİQ+lar var. Bugün burada buluşanlar kadınların eşit ve özgür… pic.twitter.com/2DimH27fbp
— Kadın Cinayetlerini Durduracağız Platformu (@KadinCinayeti) October 5, 2024
The women carried banners and chanted slogans, calling on the authorities to take action to stop violence against women and to stop granting impunity to perpetrators of violence against women.
Güneş Fadime Şahin, a representative from the Young Feminists Federation who delivered a speech at the protest, accused the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government of failing to protect the young women despite the fact that their killer announced in a video that he planned to kill Uzuner and had been harassing her for a year.
Referring to the remarks of Family Minister Mahinur Özdemir Göktaş, who claimed that the government shows zero tolerance for violence against women in a statement she made after the brutal murders, Şahin said it is hard to understand what kind of zero tolerance it is since men who commit acts of violence against women go unpunished most of the time.
“Every day perpetrators [of crimes against women] freely roam the streets. … Everyone talks about a state of impunity in the country these days. You brag about having built the biggest courthouses, but women don’t need big courthouses — they need justice in the real sense of the word,” Şahin said.
Other women who also spoke at the protest asked the government to implement the relevant laws concerning crimes against women in addition to restoring 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.
Women also took to the streets in other cities such as Ankara, İzmir, Çanakkale and Eskişehir over the weekend, when they called on the authorities to take effective measures to prevent acts of violence against women.
The women said as long as the impunity afforded the perpetrators of violence against women is not addressed, the femicides will continue.
The murder of the two women came on the heels of public outrage caused by the release of two men from police custody who were caught by a security camera sexually harassing a woman in İstanbul’s central Beyoğlu neighborhood.
The incident, which took place in the early hours of Tuesday, attracted widespread attention and condemnation when its video circulated on the Internet later in the week.
The suspects were detained and subsequently arrested by a court following the public outrage over their initial release.
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 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, 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.