Imagine an “object” that feeds and raises your child, does all the cleaning, cooks your meals, washes your clothes... You commit violence to train that object but it still continues doing all that work for you. Now, imagine that object is a man. In Turkey, this narrative can never be associated with a man. In fact, this scenario is what a woman can potentially be exposed to. Why do many women’s lives have to be like this nightmare in my country? To me, the main problem is: the normalization of violence against women.

  We open the news everyday and this is what we hear: “A young woman got killed by her husband on the day she filed a divorce case in the court.” “A thirteen-year-old girl committed suicide after being forced by her family to marry her cousin who was twenty years older than her.” “A boy stabbed to kill his sister who was pregnant after a rape from another family member” and the images of relatives bursting into tears during their funerals... We came to a point where we fear turning the TV on. What’s even worse is, what we hear is only a small percentage of what’s happening since the rest is kept as a secret inside families.

  Men commit physical violence without feeling guilty about it. How? Unfortunately, the traditional patriarchal family structure, wrongly justified by our religion, Islam, supports this: “Women’s lives depend on their husbands’; women are not smart enough to have individual ideas so men should better dominate them; men can hit women in order to discipline; it’s a sin for a woman to leave some parts of her body open...” With all these prejudices, women end up fearing being abandoned; women tolerate being beaten because they think they can’t stand on their own feet without men. The common understanding of “women” is what destroys women’s self-confidence, making all the prejudices a reality.

  According to the Human Rights Association’s research in Turkey; one in every 4 women faces physical violence, every 4 hour a woman gets raped, one in every 4 women reported that their husband committed violence. These 4s won’t stop following us unless we say the 4-letter-word: “Stop!”. We should stop thinking that we’re making a change when we turn the TV off to blindfold ourselves not to see those events or when we post black images on social media to show our sadness every time a big incident happens. If we want to make a real change, we should start putting ideas into action.

  I believe that government is the voice and media is the bridge between citizens and the voice. The media shouldn’t work for the government’s profits. It should not be biased and it should stop choosing not to include these incidents because they reveal the fact that the government is incapable of taking necessary precautions to prevent these from happening. Just like a building cannot be built without its foundation, a country cannot be a country without its fundamental values. Violence against women is a fundamental issue because a woman who is oppressed by a man is nothing different than that man’s shadow, always following him from a lower level...

  We don’t need shadows to build up this country; we need equality. So, violence against women should be stopped. We should increase the level of punishments for violence against women, teach the religion properly, change patriarchal family structure and enforce education laws to make sure girls get equal education as boys. If everyone wakes up from this nightmare and brings the awareness to their acquaintances, we can turn “shadows” into human beings.

  I, as a lucky girl in Turkey, live in a “closed box”. I live in an illusion and I get the best of everything. I don’t know what’s happening in my own country, where do I actually live, who am I? What’s even worse is that there is a part of our population who live in the “closed box” with me. We should realize what’s happening around us. Us, the blindfolded citizens, have to break the walls of this box and help fixing the fundamentals of our country. We should never forget that it wasn’t anyone’s choice to be born outside the “closed box”.

Works Cited

  • "Her 4 Saatte 1 Kadın Tecavüze Uğruyor" ["Every 4 Hours a Woman Gets Raped"]. Milliyet. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 May 2016. <http://www.milliyet.com.tr/her-4-saatte-1-kadin-tecavuze-gundem-2015440/>.