There is a Way Out of Turkey’s Femicide Epidemic

“Your daughter is in safe hands,” said an unknown man to İkbal Uzuner’s mother over the phone on the afternoon of October 4. Later that day, İkbal’s mother called back, and the unknown man told her and İkbal’s father, Hasan, to meet at the historic Edirnekapı city walls, near their home in Istanbul, to collect İkbal’s phone. But when Hasan and İkbal’s mother arrived, it wasn’t to retrieve the phone. Instead, they were met with the sight of 19-year-old Semih Çelik — a man who had a history of harassing İkbal in school — throwing İkbal’s severed head from the top of the city walls.

Çelik had killed their daughter. After throwing İkbal’s head over the walls, he threw himself over the walls, too.

News reports of the tragedy would flood in thereafter, and İkbal’s parents would learn the whole truth: Çelik had not only killed their daughter that day, but also 19-year-old Ayşenur Halil, whom he was dating at the time. The media have labeled it a “double femicide.”

These young women were murdered the day before I arrived in Istanbul, in the Eyupsultan and Fatih districts, where I would subsequently be staying. They had their whole lives ahead of them. And yet, they now join scores of women in Turkey who have met the same fate.

The deaths of İkbal and Ayşenur are part of a growing crisis of violence against women in Turkey. Every year since 2018, more than one woman has died every day on average, according to the femicide tracker The Monument Counter. In 2023 alone, 417 women were murdered by men, according to the tracker. These numbers are a significant incline from 2008, when the number of femicides was just 68. As of October 31, approximately 380 women have been killed in Turkey, and the number keeps climbing as news unfolds. 

Given this, Turkish women are taking matters into their own hands by calling into question the laws that are supposedly in place to protect them and bring attackers to justice. Following the double femicide, women’s rights protests have broken out in cities across Turkey. Turkish women have also taken to social media to voice their experiences with the viral hashtags #TurkishWomenAreInDanger and #TurkishWomenNeedHelp. 

A woman named Şevval, whose full name is kept private for safety reasons, spoke out against femicides in a viral TikTok video.

“As a 20ish-year-old woman living in Turkey, I do not feel safe and comfortable walking in certain circumstances,” she told me. “The courage we used to have to walk alone in the darkness of our streets is gone,”

Showing her support for the nationwide protests, Şevval said the protests “are not just raising awareness. [They] remind us that we are not alone in this, and give us a sense of comfort. One of the slogans I heard most during this period was, Keep your anger alive and your head up. Hold your sister’s hand tight.”

While reaching a global community on TikTok, Şevval said she has also been on the receiving end of death threats from users online. 

The deaths of İkbal and Ayşenur follow the killing of a young policewoman, Şeyda Yılmaz, who was shot in September by a 19-year-old man she was pursuing while on duty. And further back, they follow the disappearance of 8-year-old Narin Guran in August, who was found after a 19-day search, strangled and discarded, in the Eğertutmaz Stream near her home in the Turkish city of Diyarbakır. (Narin's uncle, Salim Güran, her mother, Yüksel Güran, her older brother, Enes Güran, and the family's neighbor, Nevzat Bahtiyar, have been indicted for this crime and are scheduled for a preliminary hearing this week.)

“The main reason for the increase in femicides in Turkey is the policies pursued by the government. The root cause of [the femicides across Turkey] is gender inequality,” Esin İzel Uysal, who works with the advocacy group We Will Stop Femicide in Istanbul, told More to Her Story.

Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has been known to make controversial remarks on the topic of women’s rights, claiming in 2014 that, “You cannot put women and men on an equal footing… It is against nature.” In 2021, Erdoğan’s government cemented this belief, withdrawing Turkey from the Istanbul Convention, or the “recipe for the salvation of women,” as the president of The Federation of Women Associations of Turkey, put it. At the time, the decision was made by the Turkish government under the guise of protecting “family values.” 

Social media continues to have a big impact on the spread of the Turkish women’s movement against femicide despite government rhetoric. For instance, internet outrage following the release of two men who were reportedly harassing a woman in Istanbul's Beyoğlu district in September pressured local authorities to reincarcerate them. 

The Turkish government has since broken its silence under this social media pressure. In October, in an address to the Justice and Development Party’s parliamentary group, Erdoğan claimed that “a series of recent events, from the martyrdom of a policewoman to the brutal murder of our young women, have provoked a justified reaction within our nation.” 

“It bothers us, as it does everyone else, to see criminal types with dozens of cases on their criminal records, walking around freely,” he said.

Amid growing unrest, the former co-chair of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party, Selahattin Demirtaş, who is imprisoned on “terrorist propaganda” charges which he denies, wrote a letter from prison to the main opposition leader, Özgür Özel. In it, he recognizes that, “this is a call for all men, including myself, to face the reality of our mindset. Violence against women is not a reflection of an individual problem, but of a societal one. We must not leave this struggle to women alone. Men must shoulder responsibility.” 

But what can be done to curtail this crisis? Advocates from We Will Stop Femicide believe that enforcing Law No. 6284 is the main solution. Law No. 6284, enacted in 2012, protects women, children, families, and stalking victims who are at risk of violence. With the continued work of Turkish women’s rights organizations, some government officials are now emphasizing the importance of this law, believed to be in response to the continued efforts and proposed policies of We Will Still Stop Femicide, advocates tell me.

With widespread protests gaining traction across the country, advocacy groups like We Will Stop Femicide continue to hold perpetrators to account by educating the public on the root causes of femicide in Turkey, highlighting the unsolved cases of murdered women, and publishing data on femicides and suspicious deaths of women throughout the country. All this to “create a roadmap” for a country where Turkish women feel safe.

The deaths of women across Turkey signify more than acts of male dominance and control; they underscore a profound erosion of Turkish women's autonomy over their own bodies and their human rights. Turkey is a beautiful country, rich with history. It is devastating to see these acts of femicide persist, especially when, in Şevval’s own words, “Turkish men committing these crimes do not represent our fathers, brothers, male friends, or spouses.”

The message is slowly being heard, but trust in women’s safety must be restored.