“What is the biggest challenge facing the women and girls in your country?” by Alara Bizcanlı

Every female has some challenges to face according to their surroundings. I live in Turkey. In my country, women and girls have a lot of hardships to deal with. One of the example is the non-equality between genders. To open it up a bit, it simply means that women and men do not have the same opportunities or rights. For instance, Istanbul Contract is a contract for women to proof their rights which includes the topics like female murders, crucial violence against women, discrimination between genders and gaining the most simple equal rights for women to live peacefully etc. However, our government didn’t seem too friendly to the Istanbul Contract itself and refused to sign it. 

First of all, what is going on in Turkey? Actually the crime and violence against women increased patethically at these previous years and at the moment the amount of it still continues to rise. People started to judge girls and women by the way of their clothing, their attitude for life, their jobs, their acting the way of their own behavior, their choices for their own life and such more. They even applied to violence such as rape and murder just because women and girls had their own ideologies. They started to blame women for their own choice of violence because they think women and girls can’t have the right to be free. Women and girls couldn’t stand these kinds of acts as it predicted. Therefore they wanted their voice to be heard. They started to protest all around the country to notice themselves and share their traumas with the other victims of these violences to tell what they had been through. 

Nevertheless, these acts didn’t stop the murderers, rapists and criminals from what they have been purposing. Surprisingly these murderers, rapists and criminals was mostly had a strong relation with the victim. It was mostly the girls’ and women’s ex-husband or ex-boyfriend. These stone-hearted criminals thought that the female they were in love with shouldn’t be in love with someone else or they shouldn’t find anybody else except themselves. They said it like women shouldn’t have their own thoughts or own choices other than criminals’ own good in front of the judges. When the case isn’t about the “ex”, it is usually about the people who saw women and girls in the street who dressed in the way that those people don’t accept that way of dressing in their mind. Those people get intense and wrong feelings and start to think in a sexually way which is never must be forgiven. When they had the chance to be alone with that female, they attent to sexually assault her. Women and girls were sick of these acts and wanted freedom and a guarantee for their lives. 

While these were happening, some groups from the public occured and said that one of the contracts that guarantees women’s and girls’ security and been signed in 2011 by the government and also called “Istanbul Contract” is ruining the family roots, traditions and customs with specific articles which is written and been in force for years. Government didn’t keep it’s silence but it did for the violence against women and said “If our citizens don’t want it, then we don’t need the contract anymore.” and refused to resign. Women and girls all over the country were in horror because of the decision that the Turkish government made. They wanted to raise their voice as loud as possible to get the contract in force again. Days, months passed but there wasn’t any result that had been gained from the acts or effort that had been put into this case. Government ignored the women and girls for months. At the end, women and girls unfortunately failed to receive any good news for their sake. Nothing happened. The contract had slipped through their hands. 

Taking everything into consideration, we as Turkish women and girls, gained the rights of a modern life before most of the countries all around the world with the reforms that Mustafa Kemal Atatürk -founder of the Turkish Republic- had made years ago. On the other hand, nowadays we want to live peacefully and with the simple rights we should have had before. In our country, this is one of the cases we have to face and deal with. We want equal rights for each one of us without any kind of discrimination.