The government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is facing mounting criticism over the rise of gender-based violence in Turkey, which ranks among the world’s worst countries for violence against women.
Just last week in Istanbul, a 19-year-old Turkish man killed two young women — first, his 19-year-old girlfriend at his home, and then a woman, also 19, whom he met in the city. He beheaded the second victim and threw her head over a wall onto a crowded street before taking his own life.
Critics contend that the traditional values-based policies of Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) are contributing to a growing number of femicides — the killing of women — and Turkey’s entrenched domestic violence problem.
“We Will Stop Femicide Platform,” a Turkish advocacy group known by the initials KCDP, reported 3,185 women were killed by men between 2008 and 2019, and at least 1,499 from 2020 to September 2024, with the number of femicides rising each year. The deaths of about 1,030 women were also found suspicious.
More than 1.4 million women reported they had faced domestic abuse between January 2013 and July 2024, the Turkish Minute news site reported, citing data received from the Family and Social Services Ministry by the daily newspaper Birgün.
Hundreds of demonstrators took to the streets of Istanbul and other cities in Turkey last week accusing Erdogan of failing to protect women from violence.
In the facing of such accusations, Erdogan vowed last week to strengthen legal regulations concerning crimes against women and children and promised to set up a new unit at the Justice Ministry to monitor such cases.
However, the Bursa Women’s Platform, which organized sit-in protests in Turkey’s Bursa province, accused Turkish authorities of acting only on “social media reactions rather than the testimonies of those subjected to violence.”
Human Rights Foundation, a New York-headquartered international watchdog, accused the Erdogan government this week of failing to “adequately prevent femicide and violence against women, children, and gender minorities.”
The Turkish government exercises “increasing control over social media platforms” posing “serious threats to freedom of expression,” the HRF said Thursday in a letter to the United Nations Human Rights Council.
Independent research published this year in Frontiers in Psychology argued that the Turkish government’s tightening grip over what people can see in the media and the ruling party’s gender policies based on the stereotypes of women’s societal role and appearances contribute to the stigmatization of feminism and dehumanization of women.
Erdogan’s own words have been cited as contributing to the problem. In widely quoted remarks made in 2014, he said it is “against nature” to “put men and women on equal footing,” and argued that feminists do not understand the importance of motherhood.
“President Erdogan and the AKP have increasingly taken an explicitly anti-feminist stance, in particular over the last decade. Consequently, anti-feminism in Turkey has taken on a top-down outlook,” said a recent article in the peer-reviewed academic journal Mediterranean Politics.
The article said an “environment created by the AKP” had empowered anti-feminist actors in Turkey to push back against legal reforms advocating for gender equality and women’s rights.
The paper uncovered an AKP-linked Turkish network of social media accounts including conservative civil society organizations, media representatives, social media influencers, writers and academics, celebrities” who articulate and amplify anti-feminist sentences, while exerting “significant influence in political sphere.”
VoxEU, a forum for columns by leading economists, published a study in March finding that victim-blaming is common in Turkish society, along with an attitude that a woman should not provoke her husband.
Hardliners from Erdogan’s party have argued that a man’s testimony should be given more weight than a woman’s in domestic violence cases.
Turkish judges hand down lenient sentences to domestic abusers, or otherwise impose minimal sanctions against abusers who violate civil protection orders. Law enforcement, the analysts and activists say, is often slow to react to instances when these civil protection orders are violated.
KCDP and others have documented instances when women were killed by men against whom they had taken out restraining orders. Women are particularly prone to facing violence at home, and the perpetrators are overwhelmingly spouses, men they are romantically involved with, family members, or other acquaintances.
In July 2021, Turkey withdrew from The Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence, also known as the Istanbul Convention. Turkey was the first country to sign the Istanbul Convention in May 2011.
Turkish authorities claimed to be acting because the Istanbul Convention had been “hijacked by a group of people attempting to normalize homosexuality,” which it said, “is incompatible with” the country’s “social and family values.”
On October 8, Erdogan said Turkey’s “withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention has not had the slightest negative impact on women’s rights,” adding “there is no opposition party that can teach us a lesson on women’s rights” or “help us strengthen women’s status.”
Republican People’s Party leader Ozgur Ozel disagreed.
“This government has not only failed to protect women and children but is also stepping back from positive actions. The clearest example is the sudden withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention in 2021,” Turkiye Today cited Ozel as saying on October 8.
