Turkish court makes landmark ruling on women’s murders
In a first for Turkey, a court has penalized the state for failing to protect a woman who was killed by her husband.
Almost on a daily basis, Turkish women perish at the hands of violent husbands. The murders have become a fixture in news bulletins, and security camera footage of husbands stabbing their wives in the streets can be found on the Internet.
Despite their frequency and ferocity, women’s murders are widely perceived as a domestic issue and treated as ordinary homicide. Both politicians and society tend to make no difference between those murders and the many others committed in the streets. But given the alarming number of cases and the killers’ peculiar motives, the murder of women appears to have become a distinct and systematic phenomenon.
According to figures by the We Will Stop Women Homicides Platform, a Turkish advocacy group, husbands were responsible for half of the women killed in 2014. In a recurring pattern, the victims had made or sought to make an independent decision about their lives, mainly divorce — meaning, they were killed for attempting to break free of social roles imposed on them.
Hence, the term “women’s murders” does not denote all murders in which the victim is a female, but rather those in which her gender is central to the murderer’s motive. That’s what makes them different from other kinds of homicide.
