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Turkey will take new steps to prevent violence against women and improve women's social and economic status, President and Justice and Development Party (AKP) Chair Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has said.
"We are setting up a new committee at the parliament ... We can't leave this to the main opposition or others. We'll do our best to the fullest extent," he said today (March 8) at the congress of his party's women's branch in Ankara.
"Women, who make up fully half of humanity, cannot and should not be excluded from politics or any other domain of life," Recep Tayyip Erdogan told a meeting of the ruling party's women's branch.
Women also constitute almost half of the AKP's 11.5 million members, Erdogan added, stressing the importance his party places on women.
Currently, 53 of the AKP's 290 MPs and two of the 16 ministers are women.
"If there are the name and sign of women in every field from politics to economy, from business world to civil society activities, this is because of the efforts of the AK Party and you," he said, addressing his party's women members.
Erdoğan asserted that the rate of feminicides in the countries where women's rights are supposedly in a better state is many times higher than in Turkey: "Those who ignore this fact have a problem with Turkey."
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"We defend women's rights not because some people impose this on us but because this is a commandment of God," he remarked. "...Some negativities we encounter from time to time shows that we have drifted away from our old values."
"The sacred hearth that we call family..."
"The sacred hearth that we call family, is the guarantee of our common future with its qualities that preserve the generation. It is not possible to sustain society when the family dissolves.
"Woman is primarily the mother and the child's first homeland. Each of us, starting with every word that we utter in our own family, will set an example for our children so that we can raise the generations we miss.
"We hear that some are calling on girls to leave their fathers' homes as soon as possible. This is happening now. They tell children to take to the streets. The mentality that provokes children against the family is a sign of mental illness. Turkey will somehow solve the problem of violence against women; the real threat is this diseased mentality is taking root." (AS/VK)
