14
It all starts when she is fourteen. With an arranged marriage consented by her father, she leaves her home with a forty-year-old man. At the age of fifteen, she drops out of the school to give birth. Her husband doesn’t even buy her a pair of shoes, because he wants to impede her social interactions by not letting her out of the house. Each day, while she takes care of the children and cleans the house according to the same old monotonous schedule, her husband keeps himself busy with getting drunk at a local bar. He comes home at 01.00 am, screaming unpurposefully without even being able to standing upright. He vents his anger by splitting his wife’s lip. Then he falls asleep on the couch in peace. As he falls asleep his wife sits on the floor with blood leaking out of her mouth and a tiny drop of tear at the corner of her eye. She ends her day with another scar and sheds her tears inside to her gut. She gets humiliated and deterred. She gets silenced. She adapts herself to this sick lifestyle and endures it for years. After years of lovelessness and maltreatment, at a time when she feels ashamed of the scars on her face and the woman she turned into, she tries to escape from this labyrinth of violence. But eventually, her husband finds out about her plans. He grabs a kitchen knife, stabs her 13 times, puts her in a plastic bag and dumps the bag outside. Then he comes back home, lies on the couch and opens the television with an anxious but mostly relieved smile on his face. He quietly says to himself: “If she were to run away, what would the village think about me? ‘A man, who can’t even dispose a wife.’ I restored my honor.” A couple of weeks after his arrest, he goes to trial. He gets 5 years off for good behaviour and 3 years off for “reasonable motive”. On the 3rd year of his 17-year sentence, he is released on parole. Another hopeful girl marries him with a prearranged marriage. And this terrifying cycle repeats itself all over again.
During the last 5 years, 1134 women are slaughtered by their husbands in Turkey. And it’s not just the violence that is perpetuated against women. Even in “better” situations, there are way too many instances of men seeing women as property of their own. That’s why they think they’re justified in treating women terribly. As a society, we don’t seem to give enough consideration to these incidents. Maybe it’s because we are so busy with all the “men’s issues” -political problems, bombing attacks and martyr news- that the honor crimes stays at the background. Maybe we are so used to seeing front-page headlines such as “Man stabbed his wife to death” that we are numb against these news. Or maybe we just don’t know how to eliminate the disdain for women from our society, thus the only action we make our government take is to pass more laws protecting women rights. What no one realizes is that it’s not the laws that needs to get stricter in order to end this perpetual cycle. It’s notion of the society, which allows -more accurately, encourages- men to brutally murder their wives, if not, treat them badly under the title of “saving their virtue”. It is the lack of self-confidence of women, who can’t raise their voices against the contempt they face, that should be changed. It can be done so, only by releasing the Turkish people from their religious and traditional ties that bind them to this obsolete honor code. The key element that will make Turkey achieve this goal is to educate our society in a way that makes us embrace the idea of “science and knowledge is more of a guide to us than religion and tradition is.” I know that because compared to very few chances given to women in our society, I’ve been given the chance to become educated. I’ve been given the chance see men and women equally, and I’ve been given the chance to fight for this equality. That’s why I know that when we set free ourselves from the drawbacks of conservativeness, we will be able to raise women, who are not forced to become a woman at the age of fourteen, who are self-confident, and who are not considered as a property, but as an individual.