WOMEN’S RIGHTS ARE A COUNTRY’S PRIORITIES by Pervin Janset Cengiz
Most of us can witness the problems that a woman or a girl is facing in our daily lives. The difficulties faced by women are experienced in social life, sometimes in education life and most of them are in business life. On the other hand, the most important thing that shows how developed a country depends on the fact that most of these difficulties are not experienced by women and that these difficulties now seem like primitive and not related problems. If a woman can walk freely on a street in whatever clothes she wants and lives this freedom by dedicating it to the laws then we can infer that the country is a developed democratic free country. In other words, the difficulties that a woman experiences in the country are inversely proportional to the development level of that country.
On the other hand, not every woman faces the same issues. Women of every country face different problems. To talk about my homeland, Turkey, violence is by far the biggest problem in our country. According to the 2020 report of the We Will Stop Femicide Platform, 300 women were killed, 171 women were found suspiciously dead. Of the 300 women killed in 2020, 97 are married men, 54 are men, 38 are acquaintances, 21 are men with whom they were married, 18 are sons, 17 are fathers, 16 are relatives. That is called femicide and the violence that we are facing is not by women. We are facing domestic violence. Every single day.
The second biggest problem that women face is in working life and political representation. In the report, which stated that women could not find a place for themselves in male-dominated politics on March 31, 2019, Local Elections, it was stated that only 652 of the 8,257 major candidates were women. In the same report, it is stated that in almost all societies, women cannot find a place in political activities that require intense tempo since women have been “assigned or born” the duty of being a wife and mother in the family.
To solve these problems firstly we should raise the awareness of the society for the solution of this kind of gender inequality and femicide. Especially the new generation who are growing up and being educated should be sensitive about this issue, therefore, in all curriculum programs and teaching materials, especially books, the approach that shows women under men and women only at home, should be abandoned, and the issues of gender equality, women's rights and freedom should be taught as a lesson and underlined by teachers. The second solution would be strengthening the laws to protect women's rights and freedom, threats to women should be considered as an imminent and active danger, and such threats should be prosecuted as public cases. The third solution would be to criticize if the new Turkish series is encouraging or not about domestic violence to women. Because we’ve been seeing lots of drama series that have taken domestic violence as a topic and people watch these types of series for three hours a week. And these series were actually has been made to raise awareness about this issue but it unpurposely encourages these issues to happen more. So The Press Council and RTUK should warn the language, news, stories, and series that encourage violence against women without causing censorship or punishment.
In summary, a woman's rights and freedom should be the priority of a country and if there are problems faced by women in the country, these should be addressed first and solutions should be found. Undoubtedly, if a woman's rights can be protected by the state, people will be more concious of those kind of social problems. The sons raised by these women are like a sapling in the sun for the future of the country. For this reason, our women and their rights should be the priority for a good future.