‘Violence against women cannot decline in such an environment’

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In a written statement, main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) Women's Branch Chair Aylin Nazlıaka has denounced the Interior Ministry, which has recently announced that the number of feminicides has decreased by 27 percent in Turkey in the first 10 months of 2020.

In the related announcement, the Ministry has referred to the Women's Support Mobile Application "KADES" and stated that the efforts to combat domestic violence and violence against women have borne fruit.

As reported by ANKA news agency, CHP's Nazlıaka has slammed this announcement, indicating that "violence does not decline in an environment where the İstanbul Convention is opened to debate."

She has asked, "In an environment where over half a million women have downloaded KADES, who believes that femincides have declined? How will we consider the women and children who do not have smartphones, whose every movement is kept under control and who have to live with the assaulter due to violence, threats, poverty and, to top it all, in pandemic conditions?"

She has also underlined that "in an environment where women are killed in the middle of the street despite protection orders or beaten because the meal is not salty enough and where children are killed as a revenge on the family, there needs to be a full-scale struggle against violence."

"Report lines cannot be any consolation in the face of a sense of justice where men are patted on the back with 'good conduct' time and sentence reduction due to 'unjust provocation'," Nazlıaka has protested further.

Concluding her remarks, she has noted that men killed at least 229 women in the first 10 months of this year, inflicted violence on 80 women and abused 25 children only in October 2020:

"This is the data that was reported in the press and could be obtained by women's organizations. But what about the incidents that are not let out? What about the silence and despair taught to women and children through gender roles? While violence has been increasing incrementally, only the tip of the iceberg is talked about." (EMK/SD)