‘Unsafe working environments pave the way for feminicides as well,' says TTB

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The Turkish Medical Association (TTB) Women's Medicine and Women's Health Branch has released a statement about the killing of nurse Ömür Erez by a man while she was working at a family health center in İstanbul's Kartal yesterday (January 20). The TTB has said, "We are sorry, we are enraged. Unsafe working conditions pave the way for feminicides as well."

The full statement reads as follows:

"Every day, we wake up to a day where women are massacred by men and justice is not served. A woman, a colleague of ours, nurse Ömür Erez has been massacred. We are sorry, we are enraged.

"Ömür was not only killed by a man. The ones who abolished the İstanbul Convention, the politicians who advocate gender inequality on TVs, the male judiciary and misogynist policies massacred her.

"The Minister of Health, whose only step is to tweet on social media though we have long been requesting safe workplaces and not one, but several incidents of violence happen in healthcare every day, is also responsible for this death. The existence of a ministry remaining a mere onlooker to dead bodies taken out of workplaces where we go to save lives is unacceptable.

"As the ones who have chosen to be physicians to save lives, we will keep waging our struggle especially for safe workplaces by taking part in the Struggle Against All Types of Violence Against Women as well. We do not have the patience to lose a single more woman, colleague, friend."

What happened?

Wounded by a man named Rahmi Uygun on January 20, 2022, nurse Ömür Erez lost her life at the hospital where she was taken. The male perpetrator who reportedly had 20 criminal records fled the scene of the incident. Uygun was caught in İstanbul's Bağcılar after the attack. (AÖ/SD)