There Must Be A Reason for This by Yiğit Bozkurt

Turkish women suffer on a daily basis, much like women from any other country. That much I and anyone not living under a rock knows. We also know how women suffer, right? In a way, yes. Men know from observing said suffering and women know from going through it. But that doesn’t really mean we know how women suffer in a way that can help us end it. See, everyone has an idea of what the biggest challenge women face is but everybody's idea is different from each other. This “realization” hit me during my research prior to me writing this. I started off by asking my friends, teachers and family members what they thought about the subject. I never got the same answer twice. This struck me as odd at first, but I chalked it up to a myriad of reasons, the main one being the casual nature of the conversation we'd just had. Following this I started looking up statistics, research papers, polls and such and to my surprise, I still couldn't find a specific “biggest challenge”. These research papers talked about inequality, abuse of different kinds, unemployment, the lack of education and many more; all incredibly important issues we must address, but none of them was superior to the other. This lack of a consensus coupled with the horrifying nature of the subject of my research made me take a break. But in the back of my mind, I was constantly thinking: There must be a reason for this. Then it hit me: all these people that I talked to, all the research papers that I read, we’re actually talking about the same thing. I just needed to take a step back to see it. See violence, inequality and such are at the surface different but they all branch out from the same underlying cause. The perception of women in our society. 

Women in Turkish society are seen as weaker servants to the men, they must take care of the house, the children, they must cook, they mustn’t have sex before marriage and so on. At least that’s what the traditional mindset tells women. But the catch is; these ideas, these 

expectations don’t come from a place of rationality and they certainly don’t come from a place of compassion and care. Where they come from is an outdated set of morals dictated by hundreds, if not thousands of years old religions and cultural practices that we still unfortunately follow. Why do we still follow them? I didn’t have a concrete answer. I had parts of an answer that I could talk about, but what good would it do. In cases like this finding and attacking the root of the issue is the way to go. You wouldn’t cut one of Hydra's heads and wait, No! To kill a Hydra you must attack it as a whole. The same logic applies to societal issues. So I once again thought: There must be a reason for this. 

The answer to this is quite simple: We don’t learn; we don’t even try to learn. I just couldn’t figure this out because I expected too much from society. I expected people to talk to victims, do research, read studies… Once I managed to lift these expectations of mine, it was clear to me. People raised with a traditional mindset do not question their way of life. Firstly, because they don’t feel the need to but secondly and more importantly, they don’t know how to question it. No one taught them how to do so. This leads to my conclusion on the biggest challenge women face in Turkey: A lack of systematic education of empathy, logic, morality, ethics. In our current educational system children are taught close to zero of what I just mentioned and the parts they are taught go together with the traditional mindset. They aren’t taught to question ideas. Schools shouldn’t teach kids these, right? It seems like a simple solution to an incredibly big problem. But the ones in charge of the government and the educational system were also raised with the same traditional mindset so that’s what they teach the younger generations and the cycle continues. 

The solution? We learn more and we teach more otherwise the suffering will not end.