In Turkey, where at least 1134 women were murdered between 2010 and 2015, “dying the hair”, “buying new clothes”, “not cooking meatballs”, “not passing the salt” or just “being annoyed” were used as excuses for femicide. Murderers are the husbands, boyfriends, fathers, sons, brother of those women; in short, they are killed by their relatives.
Ceyda Ulukaya created a website (kadıncinayetleri.org) based on the data from bianet.org and it was launched on November 25. In this website, there is a map showing the distribution of femicides by cities and provinces between 2010 and 2015 and it is possible to access the details of the murders like the perpetrators and their excuses for murder.
Can you briefly talk about the purpose of this mapping project?
Every day, women are murdered because of various excuses, but then people forget about them. Those murders become nothing but a number. However, there are things that we should know about those murders: What are the excuses that are used for murdering those women? Were they subjected to violence and threats before the murder? Did they apply for protection? Our purpose was to create a database that shows this information.
There is some remarkable information and numbers on the website.
Yes, 608 out of 1134 women were murdered by their husbands or ex-husbands. 161 women were murdered by their boyfriends or ex-boyfriends. It means that the perpetrators are the men in the lives of those women. Based on this data, we concluded that 217 of these women were subjected to systematic violence and harassment. 141 women were murdered despite the fact that they applied to authorities; some of them went to a police station to make a complaint, some turned to prosecution, some asked for protection and some sought refuge in a women’s shelters. 234 women were killed during the process of separation or divorce.
There is a detailed analysis under the title of “excuses”.
When we analyze the excuses, we see that women’s demand for divorce or separation is used as excuses for murder. In addition, there are way more absurd excuses. For instance, woman’s not cooking meatballs or a difference of opinion about a trivial issue is used as an excuse; there are men who are reckless enough to say that they killed a woman just because “they are annoyed”. Or, there are men who say, “There is no reason, I just killed her.” It is just that simple; they think that they have the right to end a person’s life. Thus, the purpose of this website is to make people see these data in a detailed way and to understand what kind of precautions should be taken in order to prevent femicide.
Why did you prefer to use word “excuse” instead of “reason for murder”?
The reason of this choice can be seen in media. The stories about femicides tend to consider them as just judicial cases or simple events. However, it must be emphasized that femicide is a systematic crime. The way media handles femicides is very problematic; the stories are based on the statements of the murderers. First of all, the stories about femicides shouldn’t be third page material. The stories should emphasize women’s claim for their rights, question the policies for preventing femicides, point out why a particular femicide happen and what we can do prevent them. The language that media uses is also problematic. We had to use the news reports for this project, but when I was summarizing the reports, I made some changes: for instance, instead of saying “the woman was beaten”, I wrote “the woman was subjected to violence.”
What is the next step?
We will add 2015 data as soon as possible. We will keep updating the website and the map in accordance with the data that bianet.org provided.
