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.
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