They did it again. First, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Nov. 5, “As a conservative democrat party, we have the responsibility to provide security to all the children in this country belonging to mothers, fathers, and their relatives. We do not allow boys and girls to stay together in public dormitories, and we won’t allow it to happen.” When those remarks received significant backlash, Muammer Guler, the interior minister, felt the need to provide explanation, which only made things worse. He argued that the prime minister did not intend to express concern about the boys-and-girls risk of sharing some sexual appeal under the same roof, but that they worried that these kinds of coed accommodation made it a recruitment ground for terrorist organizations.
“In our studies regarding terrorism, one of the key findings is that the terrorist organizations have started to significantly abuse the relationships between the boys and girls, those among the university youth. They use it as a recruitment base to their organizations,” Guler said on Nov. 6. “In the latest operation, 31 out of 85 arrested were females. We have seen the terrorist organizations using the youth for their own purposes. This is the terror aspect of the issue. It’s not about people legally being together or those being together in the student homes, but it is a fact that these children have been targets of terrorist organizations. The families have a right to know where their kids are. The state has a responsibility to protect the youth, and therefore take protective measures. This is the terror aspect of this matter.”
