Begin With Seeing Women As Human
“A man, woman, or child of the species Homo sapiens, distinguished from other animals by superior mental development, power of articulate speech, and upright stance.” said Google when I wrote “human being” to the searching engine. As usual, in my country we use dictionary to learn the meanings of words we don't know, but dictionaries also define the situation of a country instead of itself when it doesn't speak. Dictionaries become its mouth and say what they see. However some people need to look again and recall what they've seen because the biggest challenge in my country that women and girls are facing is the thoughts about women, which are unfortunately against them.
Since our last government came to the head, violence against women has increased approximately fifty percent. It has been a long time since I haven’t heard about murder of women in news. It is really hard knowing everything but not being able to resist. People I see on the screen as “guilty” say, “she deserved it”. It is a harsher sentence than everything they could have said. Even just this sentence shows how they treat a woman or what they think about her.
Everything I’ve mentioned is physical and leads to big mental issues on women.
Every woman who was abused by her father, husband, or brother, in a process, start to think they are not equal to men around themselves. They think that they are not worthy enough to live as much as men are. That is the ugly truth about women in my country. As it’s visible, situations that are threatening women are both mentally and physically really effective.
After all I still think thoughts are changeable, and flexible. However there is still a solution. Ideas are built on a strong basis, but are prone to collapsing when new ideas start to come. The only thing we need to do is to ignore what they say against freedom of ours. Briefly, we don’t care. It is hard not to care about people’s thoughts but if we can begin once we can definitely put an end to this horrible reality, and taste freedom at last.
As a Turkish girl who knows her own country from west to east, from head to feet, I know how hard it is to live in Turkey as a woman. In my country, unfortunately, lots of things are going on everyday and sometimes I feel like I have nothing to do against those girl-haters, women-haters, nature-haters, ignorant fools, and everyone who acts blindfolded in this very, very dark game. Then I realize that games need more than one person to abide by its rules. If there is a game an “other side” is needed as well, and in life there is no side that exists by just one person. If someone, I, you, we do something, we as women will never ever be alone.