TURKISH DELIGHT. Partners in crime

As India grapples with deep-seated violence against women, so does Turkey. In mid-April, Turkish novelist Elif Shafak tweeted a disturbing statistic: in 2013, 61 Turkish women were killed by their husbands or boyfriends. Those were official statistics; actual figures could be far higher. In 2014, 27 women were killed in the first two months of the year.

Many cases have been very brutal. In January, a mother of three seeking divorce was stabbed 13 times by her husband, despite having a restraining order against him. In March, a 20-year-old man shot his mother for divorcing her abusive husband, in a macabre mirroring of Shafak’s 2012 novel Honour .

In April, American Esther Parker, mother to a 16-month-old boy, was stabbed to death by her Turkish husband. Parker was an economist and editor, and seemed an unlikely victim of spousal abuse. Most victims are killed, often in broad daylight, by husbands who don’t want to give them a divorce, or relatives who don’t believe in divorce.

Like India, Turkey too boasts of plenty of legislation, which work only on paper. Two years ago, the government passed a law against domestic violence, but nothing has changed since then. Incidents of domestic violence have grown sharply in the past few years, and activists attribute this to official apathy. Turkish police, like their Indian peers, are often reluctant to interfere in domestic matters.

“Unfortunately, we don’t see an improvement, but a deterioration,” Zelal Ayman, a coordinator at Women for Women’s Human Rights - New Ways, a rights group in Istanbul, told Al-Monitor recently. “If the government is really serious about gender equality, it has to spread that mentality through the state hierarchy, to the police, the judiciary and religious authorities.”

If a Turkish woman does pluck up her courage, grab her children and leave her husband, she is likely to have no place to go. There are only 800 shelters in the entire country, though the 2012 law required one to be built in every neighbourhood. Most shelters can only hold up to 10 people. Still, the government continues to build mosques, roads and malls at breakneck speed.

Meanwhile, increasing attempts are being made to force women back into the often lethal embrace of the family, just as in India. Prime Minister Reycep Erdogan has called for all women to have at least three, preferably five, children. Erdogan has also tried to restrict abortions, criticised contraception and offered incentives for stay-at-home moms. Turkey already has the lowest rate of women in the workplace in Europe; just 30 per cent of Turkish women work outside the home.

Stung by criticism, the government has handed out panic buttons to many women, which when pressed, bring a police officer to the house. This Mother’s Day, Erdogan told a crowd, “A hand raised against a woman is a hand raised against all humanity”. He also announced a new draft bill with longer prison sentences for violence against women and children.

But will this help? Laws won’t help until the society changes. Patriarchy stands between Turkish women and justice. In 2011, Shafak wrote in The Guardian , “Unless we change the way we raise our sons and discard our belief that they are superior to our daughters, unless we mothers stop treating our sons as the sultans in the house, nothing will be enough.”

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

The writer is a journalist based in Bangalore and Istanbul