Outrage over murders of women forces Turkey’s Erdoğan to harden laws

A series of horrific killings of women has sparked national outrage in Turkey, forcing President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to pledge to harden the country’s criminal law.

Violence against women is a widespread crime in Turkey — with almost 300 women murdered so far this year — but protesters have long felt the ruling Islamist AK Party does not view women’s safety as a political priority.

A trio of high-profile murders has, however, propelled the subject to the top of the agenda, with hundreds of protesters marching in various cities, appealing for the government to end impunity for culprits and take more action against the wave of violence.

In a case that sent sent shock waves through the nation, last week, Semih Çelik — a 19-year-old butcher — killed and beheaded a woman named İkbal Uzuner, before killing himself. The murderer threw Uzuner’s head from Istanbul’s historic city walls while her mother was present. Çelik also killed another young woman, Ayşenur Halil, by slitting her throat the same day. 

These deaths came hard on the heels of the murder of a 26-year old policewoman in September, who was also killed by a suspect with a long criminal record. 

In response to the growing public anger, on Wednesday Erdoğan told his ruling AK Party’s parliamentary group: “A series of recent events, from the martyrdom of a policewoman to the brutal murder of our young women, have provoked a justified reaction within our nation.”

“It bothers us, as it does everyone else, to see criminal types with dozens of cases on their criminal records, walking around freely,” he added, promising to toughen up the sentence enforcement system and stop early releases.

But many women are skeptical of Erdoğan’s latest promise, since the president unilaterally decided to withdraw from the Istanbul Convention — which is designed to prevent and combat violence against women — in 2021, under the pretext that some of its clauses are harmful to traditional family structures. The convention also aims to protect LGBTQ+ communities in the country. 

The “We Will Stop Femicide Platform” reported that in Turkey, 34 women were murdered by men, and 20 more died under suspicious circumstances in September alone. 

According to The Monument Counter, a digital platform that updates the unofficial numbers of women killed in the country, 297 women have been killed in 2024 so far. The toll was 416 in 2023.

Hülya Gülbahar, a prominent women’s rights activist and lawyer, said Turkey’s Law No. 6284, which provides protection for domestic violence, is sufficiently strong in itself, but it is not being implemented properly. 

“If 6284 was implemented, thousands of women’s lives would have been saved … But impunity is a systematic state policy” she argued. 

The anger in Turkey has reached every level of society to the extent that celebrities, politicians and social media users are now actively involved. 

Justice Minister Yılmaz Tunç said on Wednesday that an Ankara court had decided to ban access to instant messaging platform Discord on suspicion that it had been used for crimes of “child sexual abuse and obscenity.”

There were also reports that Discord users had praised the gruesome killings of the two women by Çelik. 

Ceren Kalay Eken, a women’s rights lawyer from Ankara, said she believed Turkey had been swept into a spiral of violence with fatal consequences, and that scrapping the Istanbul Convention had made things much worse. 

“After 22 years of AK Party rule, we now have young boys who turn out to be victims or murderers,” she said. 

“The state cannot protect women and children.”