Birds With Broken Wings
If we think of humans as birds, women in Turkey are birds with broken wings. They have the ability to fly but the circumstances make them unable to fly by breaking their wings. “Earning money is your husband’s duty. You can’t work, sit in your house and look after your children!” “Don’t go there without a man with you!” If you are a woman and you are living in Turkey you can’t avoid hearing some of these phrases. But how are we going to heal the wings of those birds and solve this problem then? “If I had an hour to solve a problem I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions”, said Albert Einstein. I think this is exactly what we should do in order to help those birds fly.
First of all, we should think about what the main problem is. The problem is that women are seen as they are less precious than men. I think this is what causes other problems facing women like: problem of freedom and the problem of violence to women. Everyday we read rape, assault, and murder news with woman victims. This sounds like a whole another problem but in fact it isn’t. The victims are more likely to be women because according to the society they are less valuable than men. Plus women seem to have less rights and freedom than men because of the same wrong thought of our society, which is that women are less precious. Therefore women start feeling as they are less important than men, and they act that way. Then one day they wake up and find out that their wings are broken, which avoids them from flying freely as other birds do.
Why is it like that? What causes it? There isn’t such an underrating in the laws or something. Therefore I think what causes this underrating is misunderstanding some of Islam’s statements and advises. Actually there’s a deeper reason of this thought that women are less important, which explains everything: illiteracy. People are illiterate so they understand İslam’s statements in a wrong way. Plus government influences them easily also because they are illiterate and they don’t question. To sum up, there are three circumstantial reasons that break those birds’ wings: illiteracy of the society, misunderstanding İslam, and our government.
Finding a solution is the last step we should take in order to heal those birds’ wings. The best solution is making people aware that, women are also really precious and they also have rights like men. How are we going to manage this, is it really easy to make those illiterate people understand this? It obviously isn’t, but the key is lying out there: wisdom. If we solve the problem of illiteracy about Islam all the problem of women and men inequality will be solved. I know that encouraging people to go to schools won’t help a lot because government is already trying to do that and it isn’t the best solution in this problem. Therefore instead of school education we should focus more on the education aimed at teenagers and upper ages.
Making this appear on media based things like TV shows, films, and news will make a big impact. Illiterate middle-aged people are more likely to be influenced by media. In addition government and important people should change their reactions and comments on these kinds of situations, where women seem less precious than men. They should refer that women are equal to men in terms of rights and life standards, in their speeches and announcements. Organizations, which support feminism, can organize events and make psa’s (public service announcements). Healing those birds’ wings and their freedom, lives are in our hands!