Around 150 women from the Platform against Violence Towards Women gathered at the Galatasaray Square in central Istanbul on Sunday (25 November) in order to remind people of the extent of male violence in Turkey.
The women spread a purple cloth on the floor and covered it with photos of murdered and injured women, then sat around the cloth.
Violence against women continues everywhere
The occasion was the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women on 25 November. The UN adopted this day in 1999 to draw attention to the continuing violence against women worldwide.
The protest in Istanbul was aimed at drawing attention to all kinds of violence perpetrated by the state, society and families:
"Shout so everyone can hear you, so that male violence stops" was the slogan of the protest.
Female passers-by also joined the protest, at which Turkish and Kurdish slogans were used, saying "Long live women's solidarity" and "long live women's freedom".
Violence experienced from childhood
The platform said in a press briefing, read in Turkish and Kurdish, that 72,643 women in Turkey were exposed to violence last year.
The statement spoke of "the hands which touch our bodies when we are children and do not even understand their meaning, in homes seen as "warm family environment" and schools called "homes of learning", the forcedsexual attacks of our husbands in bed, the indecent assaults and pressures on our bodies at our work places, the sexual allusions we are forced to listen to on big squares and at the office, the rape we have suffered in detention, accompanied by boots and truncheons, the assaults and rapes we have suffered in F-type prison cells, our being stripped naked in village squares in the name of the continuity of the state, our bodies being sold in brothels, us being killed in the name of "honour"..."
The statement defined violence as "protecting the control of patriarchy and capitalism over women's bodies and labour" and added that this violence had increased with the increase in nationalism and militarism.
"There are attempts to suppress the struggle for freedom of women on this soil, particularly Kurdish women. The violence which religious and nationalist conservatism has organised through male hegemony aims at limiting the sphere of women."
Solidarity with Kurdish women
The women emphasised the pressure and attacks towards Kurdish women who were resisting the "pressure, the stripping of their identity, the ban on organising, denial and destruction": "Our friends, the Sebahats, Sevahirs, Fatmas, who received thousands of votes and became MPs, have been made targets by the sexist chauvinist media."
"Today is 25 November. We say that women's solidarity against violence means solidarity with Fatma Kurtulan [the DTP MP from Van who has been accused of attending PKK camps after she was involved in the freeing of the eight hostage soldiers]."
Solidarity with all women
"It also means to unite the hands of the woman who is beaten at home and the Kurdish women whose voices are being suppressed. It means seeing that the murderers of transvestite Hülya, who had no choice but prostitution, and Güldunya, killed in the name of 'honour', are the same murderers." (NY/GG/AG)
