The Turkish government believes the treaty violates traditional family values. Some conservative figures have argued that it leads to more divorce because it encourages women to leave their husbands. Also the focus on gender equality in the treaty would not fit into Turkish culture.
The conflict between the progressive women’s movement and the conservative AKP government has less to do with recognizing the problem of femicide. “Nobody’s saying femicide is okay,” Onder says. “But we have to look at the cause and the solution. We have to work on equal gender roles in the family. Otherwise you won’t solve the violence.”
Protest is crushed
Demonstrations for women’s rights, especially those on International Women’s Day, are regularly put down by police, tear gas is fired and activists are arrested. Last year, the protests attracted a lot of attention. Polls showed that a majority of Turks disagreed with Erdogan’s decision to withdraw from the Istanbul Convention. There was also a lot of support for the Convention within AKP circles. Not least because the daughter of President Erdogan, president of a conservative women’s organization, championed it.
Erdogan kept his supporters happy by stating that Turkey would actively fight violence against women, but in its own way. There was a notification app for women in need and a bill to increase penalties.
Last weekend, President Erdogan invited a group of relatives of victims of femicide. In the presidential palace they were allowed to break the fast of Ramadan, together with Turkey’s most powerful man, to eat Iftar. “We are determined to do something about violence against women,” he said. “We will get rid of the shame of femicide.”
‘They can’t stop us’
Erdogan might have been given the benefit of the doubt from the Turkish women’s movement had it not been for a judicial battle over the survival of the organization that put femicide on the agenda that same week.
“We see that our struggle has a major impact on society,” Onder said. “When we started, the government didn’t even recognize the term femicide. Now we even hear the president speak about the problem of femicides in Turkey.”
On the day of Erdogan’s iftar rally in Ankara, the women took to the streets hundreds of miles away in Istanbul, carrying banners and photos of murdered women as usual and the now familiar slogans: ‘We will never walk alone’. and ‘We will stop femicide’. Now it has been added: ‘They can’t stop us’ and ‘We will continue’.
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