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June 20, 2006

Turkey: New Strategy To Address Muslim Honor Killings

On May 28, we discussed how the issue of Muslim honor killings are intrinsically linked to both arranged and forced marriages, and described how the practice of honor killing had previously been treated with leniency in Turkish law. Since Turkey began to make changes in its legal system to become eligible to join Europe, the argument of "mitigating circumstances" could no longer be employed to lessen the sentences imposed in such cases. A person guilty of an honour killing is no longer seen to be acting to protect Islamic or family "honor", but is now treated as a murderer.

At the start of this year, a steep rise in suicides amongst young girls in the southeastern Kurdish regions of Turkey was seen by women's rights activists as a sign that young girls were being forced to commit suicide to maintain a family's "honor" within the Muslim community. Yakin Erturk, the UN special rapporteur on violence against women, travelled to the area to investigate. One of the places she visited was the Kurdish city of Batman, where 10 women and girls under the age of 23 had committed suicide.

We related in our special report on forced marriages that Ms Erturk found that the traditional practices, including forced marriages and also domestic violence, played a key role in the heightened number of female suicides. She said: "The majority of women in the provinces visited live lives that are not their own but are instead determined by a patriarchal normative order that draws its strength from reference to tradition, culture and tribal affiliation and often articulates itself on the basis of distorted notions of honour."

"Diverse forms of violence are deliberately used against women who are seen to transgress this order. Suicides of women in the region occur within such a context."

Today, the Italian news agency AKI reports that the Turkish government's religious affairs department is now introducing a new initiative to attempt to reduce violence against women, including honour killings.

The way that the department is intending to address the issue is to commission a team of Islamic scholars to create a book, to be entitled Mohammed's Message to the Contemporary World which will stretch to five volumes and is expected to be published next year.

Ali Bardakoglu, the president of the department, hopes that the book will show that Mohammed valued women as equals (even though a man has the right to marry four wives, and can divorce any one of them merely by saying "Talaq" three times, whereas a woman can only be married to one partner, often sharing him with other women, and cannot divorce her husband unless an imam orders it).

Bardakoglu condemned the statements made in extremist religious publications, such as "Women with tattoos are cursed," and "If a society is ruled by a female then it is impossible for that society to develop".

The book will be especially designed to target men in the southeastern Kurdish regions of Turkey, where Muslim sexism is strongest and most "honor" crimes take place, Bardakoglu announced. He said: "Mohammed did not make any statement deprecating women or inciting men to use force against women."

In 2004, there were 43 recorded honour killings of women in Turkey. Recently, Turkish media has highlighted such incidents and have brought many Turks to a position of outrage about such practices.

Posted by Giraldus Cambrensis at June 20, 2006 8:44 PM

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