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Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) MP Oya Ersoy has submitted a Parliamentary question to Minister of Justice Abdulhamit Gül and addressed him a series of questions about the sexual abuse of children in Turkey.
Ersoy has submitted the Parliamentary question because statistics on sexual abuse of children in 2018 have not yet been shared with the public.
According to bianet Male Violence Monitoring Reports, at least 184 children were abused in the first nine months of 2019.
In her Parliamentary question, HDP MP Ersoy has addressed a series of questions to Minister Gül including the following:
Ersoy has emphasized that while the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) was supposed to develop solutions for these worrisome incidents in its 17-year rule, it submitted a bill of law to the General Assembly of the Parliament in 2016, foreseeing that the child abuser would not be penalized in the event that he married the child.
She has reminded Minister Gül that this bill had to be withdrawn after women's and children's rights defenders condemned the proposed legislation and it caused a strong public reaction.
Oya Ersoy has reminded Minister Gül that Turkey is a party to the İstanbul Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence and made a call on the government to comply with the convention so that sexual abuse of children could be prevented.
Ersoy has also expressed her concerns and suspicions that the "Judicial Reform" Package will introduce reduced sentences for child abusers. Having shared the crime data with the public in detail every year, the Ministry of Justice has not yet announced the statistics on child abuse in 2018 because they are obscene, which raises these concerns and suspicions. (EMK/SD)