Nükhet Sirman

Feminism in Turkey set off with the maxim of bringing domestic violence to the attention of public, and relating this violence to patriarchy. If the march of Yoğurtçu Park, dated 1987, is accepted as the declaration of this rise, easier said than done, 21 years have passed. We have to say that we have accomplished to bring domestic violence into public agenda, but have failed to relate this to patriarchy in the meantime. It is the aim of this essay to try to examine the reasons for both our success and failure.

After the 1980s when women,who started to think about womanhood and question their lives and identities within the framework of the theories produced by European feminism in the consciousness-raising groups attempted to call themselves feminists and make politics through this identity, they were not late to discover the central role of violence in woman’s life. The “Campaign Against Beating” (“Dayağa Karşı Kampanya”) organized at the very beginning of the feminist movement started out with the analysis, as the booklet “Cry Out, Let Everyone Hear” (“Bağır Herkes Duysun”) published in 1988 also states, that violence against women is the result of male dominance and this violence is supported by the state. While claiming that every woman from any class whether educated or not is under the threat of violence, the booklet also importantly appoints that the core of violence against women is the family. 10 years later, family is no longer regarded as the core of violence. Yet this time violence is divided into two as violence in private space and violence in public space. In years an expertise about violence was also developed. The reasons of violence against women (such as religion, custom, media, economy, and law) and the types of this violence (psychological, sexual and economical violence are placed in this list alongside physical violence) have been able to be enumarated.

However, for me these kind of analyses are not enough to question violence against women in Turkey. I think the problem stems from dealing with and enumarating some concepts abstractly in a list which in fact denote complex relations. For instance, private space-public space binary is one such. Saying that violence against women stems from both private and public space does not question how these two are related and the reason for this relation. Under the circumstances violence against women becomes an essential quality of these spaces. In a same fashion the series of religion, custom, economy, media is far from explaining why there is violence against women in these areas. This enumaration could function as definitions that show how this violence can be reproduced at the most; they cannot explain the reasons for violence.

How violence is defined confronts us as another problem. For some, violence arises when power and authority collapse (Arendt); for others any power, especially power which enacts laws can only exist with violence (Benjamin). Feminist theory has not been engaged with this question either in general or particularly in Turkey. There is a basic agreement among feminists in Turkey that violence against women in in the most general sense serves to control women. This control may originate from both power and weakness as it is. The first known laws in the world are the laws derived from kinship. In all the societies based on kinship it is really such that both women are secondary in comparison with men and violence exists in all of these societies. As a matter of fact Tillion thoroughly tells how valid the kinship law is in agricultural societies based on established kinship and the relation of this to keeping woman under control in her book Le Harem et les Cousins. However, one very important fact Tillion points out is that with migrations from the country to town, in the face of the impossibility of preserving the kinship order intact, pressure upon women and violence increase. It is also possible to say the increase in the violence against women is due to weakness in this case. Yet, what is to be done is to observe the difference between structural violence and conjunctural violence and to make the analysis accordingly.

In Turkey’s case we could easily see the weight of the structural violence mentioned when we take into account the role kinship has in ordering the everday life. Unfortunately a belief as to the presence of this kinship laws only in tribal socities has been gaining strength lately. A difference is set between custom murder and honor murder by this means and it is manufactured that custom murder is something peculiar to the Kurds. But the kinship law is also valid with might and main in societal formations that are not tribes. Otherwise the concept of honor would anyway not have come into presence. The most meaningful way to define honor is that it is the form of expressing social status in societies based on kinship. It includes one’s identity, social position and codes required by this position. Every one of kinship forms –whether tribal organization or not- enables individual to comply with societal norms willingly by this concept of honor which is regarded as the highest value. In this sense, honor is the law-making violence of the kinship society.

Today we in Turkey have the claim that the kinship concept does no longer order our lives. We are able to think that we are modern in this manner. And we state this belief with a widely-known formula: Previously there was the extented family (absolutely not the tribe!), now we live in a nuclear family. Yet when modern patriarchy was being founded with the 1926 Civil Law, the honor of women and the whole family was assigned to husbands with the word “aile reisi”. (Literally, the leader of the family). And the public space was not founded as a space of freedom for expression where people free from private identities could attempt discussions for the sake of the society. All of our relations which are not determined by law still posses meaning after being filtered through kinship relations. Hierarchies established according to age and gender continue to be among the organizing norms both in everday life and of our politics (Then we had fathers, at one stage mothers came in to the stage, nowadays big brothers have appeared!).

Feminists in Turkey established at least one of the relations between private space and public space during the campaign carried out against the 438th article. When they saw the distinction between chaste/corrupt women reproduce a particular societal system and laws are for the continuation of this system, they marched on the streets telling “we are all prostitutes”.That is, they have shown that preserving the family and the hierarchy within the family requires some are less valuable than others and that there are organic ties between in inside and the outside of the family. Yet when after the 1990s the gradually emerging project feminism made towards imagining the society as a rag bag consisting of parts whose relations to each other are left ambiguous, the analysis this protest rested on was forgotten.

In order to resist to the violence against woman, we should at first properly state the reasons for this violence in the society we live in. Feminist movement geneally adopted an attitude which criticizes the family remarking family opresses woman. It was not able to establish the relation of this family to the societal system outside of it; it contended only with saying “both here and there, everywhere”. Feminism had a great ally for support in condemning domestic violence: our desires for modernization. That there could be no violence against woman in a modern society was settled without any dispute just like other unwritten laws acknowkledged by the society. Feminist strived very much for this matter. They tried to explain on every opportunity that beating is a matter of fact in every section of the society; they underlined violence against woman is common also in the western societies, yet the maxim “baby in the belly, rod in the back” could only be denounced in the name of modernity. As the proliferation of the human rights discourse, the denouncement of domestic violence was perceived as a prequisite of modernity (and imposition of globalization to an extent) instead of an acceptance of these concepts as a principle with respect to their contents and thus complied with even though unwillingly at times. But after the concept of honor murder put forward, some forms of violence against woman came to arouse indignation in the society and to show up in newspaper headlines.

In this atmosphere of indignation there are some forms of violence which are somehow never recognized. Abuse on the street and at work, rape within marriage, economical and psychological violence are some such. None of these has been able to busy the social imagination as much as tribal murders. Perhaps the saddest of all, the concept honor murder has started to be forgotten in this atmosphere of indignation. The distinction between tribal murder and honor murder was subjected to progressive/obscurantist, developed/backward classification that was again enabled by the modernization discourse and so was easily accepted. Attributing the revolt against this backwardness to partly made-up tribal customs, serials and documentaries made possible that an indignation against these customs which is far from any consideration was created, Kurds were subjected to a racist segregation, and perhaps the most important of all violence resulting from honor was disregarded and forgotten.

Feminist have to be very careful when approaching this wide social agreement formed as to the issue of violence against woman. Feminism is without a doubt, a modern discourse but it cannot be claimed it is a modernist one. It should be supposed that a discourse that brings forward difference that much, that makes a distinction between difference and uniformity should at leat not fall into some traps of modernization. Nevertheless it is true that feminism does not completely advocates a relativism. It is possible to stand out against any kind of customary violence against woman and present the power relations inside customs. Yet, while doing this it becomes important not to get caged in discourses that shelters another kind of power relation and be able to become critical of approaches like modernization which renders some others secondary.