Kasaba R. The Cambridge History of Turkey: Volume 4, Turkey in the Modern World

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because the new property regime applies only to marriages that take place

after the amendment passed, and are working to have the law cover marriages

conducted before the amendment.

Violence against women and institution building

In the 1980s, feminists prioritised the ﬁght against domestic violence and in

the 1990s they began building institutions around this cause. A group of femi-

nist women founded the Purple Roof Women’s Shelter Foundation (Mor C¸ atı

Kadın Sı

gınma Vakfı) in Istanbul in 1990. The foundation was established with

the explicit aim of opening a women’s shelter that would be run by femi-

nists and operate on feminist principles. Mor C¸ atı made several unsuccessful

attempts to secure funding from local municipalities with the condition that

feminists be free to run the shelter, and ﬁnally turned to the state. Despite fund-

ing from the state, the shelter could be kept open only for about ﬁve years.

In September 2005, the Beyo

glu district administration provided a shelter for

Mor C¸ atı to run, which they accepted quite willingly.

Independent of the shelter itself, Mor C¸ atı was crucial because it was a sym-

bol of feminist opposition to domestic violence and a major voice in feminist

organising in the country. The foundation provided counselling services to

women affected by domestic violence. Particularly in the early 1990s when

it led the struggle against violence towards women, members of Mor C¸ atı

participated in conferences and panel discussions, and gave interviews in tele-

vision channels and newspapers, carving out a space for feminist concerns in

public life at a time when feminism did not have the legitimacy that it has

more recently gained.

Feminists in Ankara founded Kadın Dayanıs¸ma Vakfı (Women’s Solidarity

Foundation) and Altında

g Kadın Danıs¸ma Merkezi (Altında

g Women’s Con-

sulting Centre) a year after Mor C¸ atı with the similar purpose of opening a

shelter. Their shelter likewise ran for about seven years before closing down

due to ﬁnancial difﬁculties, and they too disseminated a consciousness about

domestic violence and feminist values at large.

Theﬁght against violence was not conﬁned to the western regions of Turkey.

Feminist projects undertaken in the west generated a synergy. In 1997, a group

of women led by Nebahat Akkoc¸ founded Ka-Mer (Women’s Centre) in the

primarily Kurdish city of Diyarbakır. Members of this group had participated

in a research project on women in east and south-east Anatolia initiated by the

feminist advocacy group the Women’s Human Rights Project, and realised

through the interviews they conducted that they could do something to ﬁght

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Women’s struggles for empowerment in Turkey

the oppression of women in their own region.

At its inception, the centre

received help from Mor C¸ atı Women’s Centre Foundation in Istanbul, which

sent representatives to Diyarbakır to relate their activities, and later brought

women from Diyarbakır to a short training course in Istanbul at Mor C¸ atı.

Ka-Mer was strikingly successful in responding to local needs. To make

women conscious of their rights in a context where violence of many kinds was

omnipresent, the centre organised feminist consciousness-raising groups that

lasted about thirteen weeks. The women of Ka-Mer initiated an emergency aid

line to reach women exposed to violence, provided women with psychological

counselling and helped them ﬁnd jobs. They recognised the need to foster a

milieu where women could have lives outside their families and opened a social

centre for women to socialise and attend conferences. They saw the need to

offer non-sexist child-care that cultivated non-violent behaviour, and opened

a child centre.

Ka-Mer soon grew beyond its Diyarbakır limits and opened centres in other

provinces of the region. In 2003, Ka-Mer women developed the Project to

Develop Methods in the Struggle against Killings Committed in the Name

of ‘Honor’ in the South-east and East Anatolia Regions. With this project

they aimed to reach ‘women who are likely to lose their lives as a result of

killings committed in the name of “honor”.’

The project was carried out in

thirteen provinces of the region: Diyarbakır, Mardin, Urfa, Bing

ol, Batman,

Hakkari, Mus¸, Van, Siirt, Bitlis, Adıyaman, Malatya and S¸ırnak, all in the eastern

periphery of the country.

In 1998, a national network of women’s organisations against violence was

established through the Assembly of Women’s Shelters and Solidarity Centres.

The 2004 meeting of the assembly brought together about seventy organisa-

tions that worked against violence. The assembly allowed women to express

demands for the prevention of different types of violence, including rape,

incest, sexual assault and honour killings, as well as domestic violence. The

annual conventions became a medium of communication and networking

among women.

Feminist efforts to create shelters met with obstacles, but their example led

the state to recognise the need to protect victims of domestic violence. The

Sosyal Hizmetler ve C¸ ocuk Esirgeme Kurumu (Institution of Social Services

21 Nebahat Akkoc¸, ‘Diyarbakır Ka-Mer’in kurulus¸ hikayesi ve y

utt

uc¸alıs¸malar’, in

Bora and G

unal (eds.), 90’larda T

urkiye’de feminizm,p.206.

22 Ibid., pp. 207–15.

23 KA-MER, Kes¸ke dememek ic¸in: no more ‘if only’s’ (Diyarbakır: Berdan Matbaası, 2004),

p. 112.

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and Protection of Children) opened houses for women exposed to violence,

which numbered only thirteen by 2004, yet pointed to the public recognition of

a problem that had long been ignored. In 2004, a law was passed that required

municipalities with over ﬁfty thousand residents to open shelters for women

and children who needed to be protected from domestic violence. In 2004,

mainstream organisations and politicians launched two major campaigns to

ﬁght violence towards women: one named End to Domestic Violence organ-

ised by the major daily H

urriyet, the television channel CNN Turk, Foundation

for Contemporary Education (C¸a

gdas¸E

gitim Vakfı) and the Governorship of

Istanbul; and the other named End to Violence towards Women, organised

by the United Nations Population Fund and the Directorate of Women’s Sta-

tus. These campaigns were signiﬁcant because they showed that the issue has

become a priority not only for feminists or the state, but for major media

and civil society groups, and these groups are able to form coalitions to ﬁght

violence against women.

Violence against women and the penal code

In ﬁghting against violence towards women, feminists challenged the state

because of its legislative structure. After much lobbying of the minister of

state responsible for women and family, and under criticisms levied against

the state at CEDAW committee reviews, the government passed the Law

for the Protection of the Family in 1998. This law allowed the courts to protect

the spouse exposed to domestic violence by giving the public prosecutor the

right to ﬁle a suit against the guilty partner and prevent further harassment of

the victim at home or in the workplace.

However, the legal framework in general was far from effective at deterring

violence against women. Until its amendment in 2005, the Turkish criminal

code considered sexual crimes committed against women as crimes against

public morality and social order, rather than as direct violations of individual

women’s rights. In cases of rape and sexual attacks on women or honour

killings, punishments werenot prohibitive. When rapists married their victims,

their punishments were deferred. The law allowed extenuating circumstances

of tradition and undue provocation to reduce the punishments given in cases

of ‘custom’ or honour killings. Women were punished more harshly than men

in cases of adultery.

Women had prioritised the amendment of the civil code and campaigned

for it at least for two decades, but their struggle for the amendment of the penal

code was swifter. The effective organisation of women’s groups and the need

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Women’s struggles for empowerment in Turkey

to conform to the egalitarian principles of the EU legal framework brought

about quick results. After the new civil code became effective in January 2002,

feminists focused on the shortcomings of the penal code and utilised all their

acquired skills and power to make sure that the reforms they wanted were

enacted.

By 2002, when the penal code reform process began in parliament, feminists

in Turkey had gained enough experience not only to make their demands

heard, but also to ensure that the state responded to them. Initially, they

formed a working group, proposed more than thirty amendments for the

new code and began their lobbying efforts. An early election decision taken

by the governing coalition created a new set of opportunities and obstacles for

the realisation of their proposed amendments. The interim minister of justice,

Aysel C¸ elikel, was a feminist lawprofessor who had initiated an egalitarian draft

proposal for the civil code and the penal code. C¸ elikel formed a commission

that included women working on the penal code, and had it prepare a new draft

code. However, after the 2002 elections brought the Justice and Development

Party to power, the new government formed its own committee and ignored

that draft.

In response, feminist collaboration evolved into a more vigorous and

focused campaign. A group of thirty civil society organisations, calling them-

selves the Women’s Platform on the Penal Code, worked relentlessly to ensure

that the changes women wanted would be reﬂected in the code. The members

of the platform displayed the range and diversity of women’s activism in the

country. The coalition included women’s organisations in the eastern Anato-

lian city of Van as well as those from Istanbul, Izmir, C¸ anakkale and Edirne.

The Amnesty International Turkey branch, gay lesbian groups such as KAOS

GL and LAMBDA, and the more traditional women’s groups such as the

Republican Women’s Association and the Turkish Women’s Union joined the

platform. The feminist non-governmental organisation Women for Women’s

Human Rights – New Ways coordinated the activities of the platform.

When Prime Minister Tayyip Erdo

gan made a last-minute intervention to

criminalise adultery through the code in 2005, women’s groups set their media

and European networks into immediate action. In response to the domestic

and international pressure the platform activated, the government retracted

the proposal. Compared to women’s organisations, the press was slower and

less effective in defending its rights and failed to stop the inclusion of articles

restricting press freedom in the reformed penal code.

The new code was important because it proposed a new liberal, as opposed

to the earlier communitarian, framework, to assess women’s rights in society.

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According to the new code, crimes related to sexual violence are now deﬁned

as ‘crimes against individuals’ rather than as ‘crimes against public morality’.

Sex crimes are now punished with heavier sentences, and the new code crim-

inalises sexual harassment as well as sex attacks and rape. Marital rape and

harassment at the workplace – neither of which was recognised as an offence

before the amendment – are now both recognised as crimes. The reformed

code also increases penalties for domestic violence as well as sexual violence

towards children. A number of discriminatory articles in the old code have been

removed, including the article that assumed that consent could exist in cases

of child abuse, the article that allowed for the deferral of punishment when a

rapist married his victim and articles that discriminate between married and

single women or virgins and sexually active women.

Feminists, who achieved the passage of twenty-four amendments out of

the thirty that they campaigned for, argue that some inegalitarian provisions

remain. Even though honour killings are now more heavily punished, they are

not considered to be aggravated homicide. Feminists also argue that the law

must include a more effective ban on virginity testing, and the consent of the

woman concerned should be required if testing is a necessity. Feminist activists

have also argued that consensual sexual relations between minors should not

be criminalised and that discrimination based on sexual orientation should

be explicitly recognised as a crime. Even though women continue to contest

shortcomings in the legal code, the state has nonetheless made extensive

concessions to feminist activists and thereby changed the way it relates to

women.

Demands for representation and KA-DER

Women constitute roughly one-third of academics, doctors and lawyers in

Turkey. Yet, in formal politics, they have been invisible. Since the extension

of suffrage in 1934, the percentage of women in parliament never increased

beyond 4.5%. After the 2002 elections, there were 24 women in the 550-member

parliament. The proportions were even lower at the local electoral levels.

Under these circumstances, feminists have organised to increase the number

of women representatives in politics. Despite their success in the amendment

of the legal framework, they have been largely unsuccessful in increasing the

number of elected female politicians; nor have they persuaded the government

to establish a quota for women.

In 1997, a group of mostly feminist professional women came together

to establish an organisation to help promote women in electoral politics.

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Women’s struggles for empowerment in Turkey

KA-DER, the Association to Support and Educate Women Candidates, started

with the goal of promoting at least 10% women representatives in parliament.

From its inception, the organisation tried to bring together women of different

ideological backgrounds, including those who do not identify as feminists. A

major founding principle of the organisation was its non-partisan approach to

different political persuasions and its commitment to promote women from

different political parties. With its 12 branches, 8 initiative groups in different

provinces and about 2,500 members, KA-DER is a conspicuous national organ-

isation by Turkish standards. It is attractive to a large constituency because it

pursues the empowerment of female from diverse backgrounds, at the local

as well as the national level. Both the journalists in its own ranks and female

reporters and columnists in the media have collaborated to promote KA-DER.

The press has widely covered its activities, seminars and projects. When Pres-

ident Clinton visited Turkey in 1999, KA-DER was one of the few civil society

organisations and the only women’s organisation that he met.

The aim to bring together women of different persuasions to help women

standing for different political parties has caused internal strains among

KA-DER membership. Tension between secular and Islamist women, as

well as between secular women who felt threatened by Islamists and those

who felt they could collaborate with them, marked the activities of the

organisation. Conﬂicts between different branches and different regions

also undermined more effective collaboration, but the organisation pursued

its goals with determination, bringing Islamist, Kurdish and Alevi women

together with those from more politically established groups in electoral

campaigns.

Since its 1999 electoral campaign, KA-DER has promoted a quota forwomen

in politics. The European Council’s recommendation of 2003, which advised

member states to promote women in politics and urged for quotas, helped

KA-DER launch its campaign for a 30% quota for women in political rep-

resentation. With the help of the Ankara University Research and Practice

Centre for Women’s Problems, the Turkish Women’s Union and the Asso-

ciation of Republican Women, KA-DER created a legislative proposal with

amendments that would initiate a quota in Turkey. Feminists in the univer-

sities as well as civil society organisations helped KA-DER build a coalition.

KA-DER had the professional links and could muster the technical expertise

to propose the legal changes required in the constitution, political parties

24 KA-DER. Kadın Bas¸ımıza:Yerel y

onetimlerde kadın katılımı ve temsili kampanyası (Ankara:

Yalc¸ın Matbaa, 2004).

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and electoral laws for a minimum of 30% representation for either men or

women.

The government, including the female minister of state responsible for

Women and Family, Nimet C¸ ubukc¸u, was restive. The minister publiclyargued

that quotas should be used at the discretion of political parties and not enforced

through national legislation, which in effect meant keeping the status quo.

Despite the feminist-friendly rhetoric of almost all ministers occupying the

position, the required changes have never been made.

The minister has not yet changed her position, but feminist activists have

continued to use their European links to pressure the government to adopt a

quota. The report presented to the European parliament by the Committee

on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality in April 2005 ‘on the role of women

in Turkey in social, economic and political activities’ notes the low rate of

women’s political representation, and suggests in article 22 ‘the adoption of a

mandatory quota system combined with a zipper placement on the election

lists as the best possible way to improve women’s participation in Turkish

politics in the short term, [and] proposes that the relevant Turkish laws be

changed accordingly’.

KA-DER had little success in increasing the number of women elected to

local and national ofﬁce, but it has propagated feminist values in Turkey. It

is perhaps the most visible women’s group and a major locus of feminist

activism in the country. The organisation enhances its legitimacy through the

professional support it can command from academics as well as the media in

its projects to provide education to political candidates, organise conferences

and extend services to female candidates. With its relatively large network and

professionalism, it gave critical support to the major campaigns organised to

amend the civil code and the penal code.

Demand for religious recognition: Islamist women

Most of the feminist activists who demanded legal reform, an end to domestic

violence and political representation did so within the established secular con-

text of the Turkish Republic. However, other women challenged the nature of

this secular framework, in the 1980s and since. As the inﬂuence of Islam became

25 KA-DER. Es¸ittemsilic¸in cinsiyet kotası: Erkek demokrasiden gerc¸ek demokrasiye (Istanbul:

Acar Matbaacılık, 2005).

26 Emine Bozkurt, ‘On the Role of Women in Turkey in Social, Economic and Political

Activities’, unpublished report, 2004/2215(INI), European Parliament, Committee on

Women’s Rights and Gender Equality, 2005.

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Women’s struggles for empowerment in Turkey

more pronounced in Turkish politics, many women were attracted to Islam.

Various factors and processes helped spread Islamist ideology. The problems

of mass migration to urban areas, the inability of the state to distribute the

fruits of modernisation fairly and the inﬂuence of the Iranian Revolution all

contributed to the strengthening of Islam and women’s involvement in it.

The appeal of Islamist teachings led womento adopt the headscarf in greater

numbers. The practice conﬂicted with state policies in higher education.

Women who wanted to cover their heads and attend universities precipitated

a confrontation with the state, which banned head covering in universities.

Most of these covered women did not call themselves feminists, though some

did, and many did not work to expand women’s opportunities. However, most

of them covered their heads out of personal choice, not because they were

forced to do so by their families or the Islamist groups who subsidised their

education.

Manyamong this new generation of Islamist women had attended

secular state schools and believed in basic secular rights, individual autonomy

and self-expression. Although the constitutional court decisions against them

questioned their allegiance to the secular state, these women by and large had

adopted the fundamental principles of the Republic. They wanted a secular

university education so that they could have a profession and partake in public

life. The Republic rather than Islamist teachings encouraged them to do so.

They did not want polygamy or unilateral divorce. Even those few who were

sympathetic to Islamic law conceived of one where liberal civil rights were

respected.

Women who wanted to attend universities with head covering engaged in

numerous cases of civil disobedience. They protested in front of university

gates, organised demonstrations outside the universities, wrote about their

victimisation in newspapers, journals and novels, and formed platforms to

promote their right to wear the headscarf. Through the monthly journal Kadın

Kimli

gi (Identity of Woman), which began in 1995, a group of Muslim women

who covered their heads aimed to nurture their Islamist identities and also

engage in a dialogue with women who did not cover their heads. The Istanbul

okkus¸a

gı Kadın Platformu (Rainbow Istanbul Platform of Women, 1995–8)

and Bas¸kent Kadın Platformu, Ankara (Capital Platform of Women, 1996–)

brought together Islamist women’s associations and women’s committees in

Islamist foundations. These platforms helped increase the public visibility of

headscarved women and develop their presence in civil life.

27 Ye s¸im Arat, Rethinking Islam and Democracy: Islamist Women in Turkish Politics (Albany:

State University of New York Press, 2005).

28 Ibid.

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Other Islamist women channelled their protest at the secular framework

into their engagement in Islamist political parties. In about six years, women

working for the Islamist Refah Party registered about a million women as

members of their party, an unprecedented ﬁgure in a country where female

party membership is negligible. Many among these leaders in the party ranks

were embittered by the ban on the head covering, because it restricted their

opportunities for education and employment.

Islamist women’s demands led to divisions among women who were rec-

onciled to the secular framework of the Republic. Some of them resented

Islamist women, others felt threatened by them, and some defended Islamist

women’s claims to their headscarves.

Many secular women perceived the emergence of Islamist groups and head-

scarved female activists as a threat. Particularly in the 1990s, when the Refah

Party became the leader of the coalition government (in 1996), groups of secu-

lar women protested against the Islamists. In 1994, 300 female academics sent

a letter to the prime minister and the head of the Higher Education Council

complaining that the number of female students entering classrooms wear-

ing headscarves had increased despite the legal prohibition.

In 1997, secular

women organised a Women’s March Against Shariat attended by ﬁfty-two

civil society and political party organisations in Ankara.

They argued that

the Islamist groups would enact Islamic law and restrict women’s rights.

Other secular women and some secular feminists, while wary of the

Islamists’ potential to restrict women’s rights, support women’s right to deﬁne

Islam on their own terms, particularly concerning the issue of headscarves.

These feminists respect Islamists’ right to shape their religious beliefs because

they value women’s agency. They also argue that women should have a right

to university education and participation in public life, regardless of whether or

not they wear headscarves. Perhaps ironically, they claim a common denomi-

nator in their position against the state, which historically promoted women’s

rights as part of its Westernising efforts. Even though Westernisation opened a

vital opportunity space, secular feminists,like Islamists,have been critical of the

attitude that the state knew women’s interests better than women themselves.

Secular feminists sought substantive gender equality while Islamist women

sought extension of religious rights. On the other hand, both Islamist femi-

nists and secular feminists contest male patriarchy in their respective realms.

Islamist women claim that they want to recognise no authority above them

29 Cumhuriyet, 28 March 1994.

30 Milliyet, 16 February 1997.

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Women’s struggles for empowerment in Turkey

besides that of God. Both groups oppose the commodiﬁcation of women’s

bodies and the sexual exploitation of women, even though Islamists argue

these abuses result from deserting religion and aping the West, whereas sec-

ular women agree with feminists in the West who also criticise these abuses

and work to prevent them in a secular context.

As Turkey has become more integrated into Europe, Islamists have

attempted to stake their claims in this new framework just like secular fem-

inists. After Turkey signed a protocol with the Council of Europe whereby

individual citizens could take their cases to the European Court of Human

Rights, Islamists adopted this method of legal contestation. In 1998, a female

student who wore the headscarf, Leyla S¸ahin, applied to the court arguing

that the headscarf ban in higher education violated her rights and freedoms

under the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental

Freedoms. S¸ahin argued that the ban constituted an unjustiﬁed interference

with her right to freedom of religion. She said that ‘her manner of dressing

had to be treated as the observance of a religious rule which she regarded

as a “recognized practice”’ and that ‘the manner in which she had chosen

to comply with what was a religious obligation was neither ostentatious nor

intended as a means of protest and did not constitute a form of pressure,

provocation or proselytism’.

She insisted that ‘the Islamic headscarf did not

challenge republican values or the rights of others and could not be regarded

as inherently incompatible with the principles of secularism and of neutrality

in education’;

however, she did not convince the court.

The court ruled against her and in favour of Turkish government, which

had claimed that principles of secularism and equality necessitated the ban.

In its judgment of 1989, the constitutional court had stated that ‘secularism

in Turkey was among other things, the guarantor of democratic values, the

principle that freedom of religion is inviolable to the extent that it stems from

individual conscience and the principle that citizens are equal before the law’.

Islamist women claimed that secularism and headscarves could be compati-

ble, but the Turkish government disagreed and the European Court supported

the government. If secularism is the guarantor of democracy, Islamist women

who did not reject secularism, yet wanted to expand its boundaries, were

excluded in this democracy. They did not succeed in lifting the ban, but they

have challenged the limits of Kemalist-style secularism in the country, and have

31 European Court of Human Rights, ‘Case of Leyla S¸ahin v Turkey’, application no.

44774/98, Strasbourg, 29 June 2004,pp.16, 19.

32 Ibid., p. 19.

33 Ibid., p. 24.

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