Turkey: investigate real violence against women, not fiction
As she sat on the train to the Hay festival late last month, the London-based
Turkish novelist Elif Shafak received a chilling telephone call from her editor
in Istanbul. She was told that police officers had entered the publishing house
and taken copies of her books to a prosecutor, who planned to scour them for
evidence of her having committed a “crime of obscenity” by writing about, for
example, sexual harassment or child abuse. At the same time, the writer
witnessed an avalanche of abusive and misogynist messages directed at her on
social media – digital intimidation to accompany harassment by the authorities.
The targeting of
novelists in this way marks a new nadir in the Turkish government’s persecution
of journalists, intellectuals, writers and academics. As Shafak has pointed
out, the supreme irony is that real-life violence against women and girls is a
desperately serious problem in Turkey. According
to United Nations figures, 38% of Turkish women experience physical or sexual
violence from a partner. Women murdered by a partner or a family member
numbered 409 in 2017, up from 237 four years previously, according to the group We Will Stop Femicide. Self-evidently,
the authorities ought to be investigating real violence against women and
girls, not novelists legitimately pursuing their art. But there seems little
hope of this. In 2016 the government introduced a
bill clearing statutory rapists of their crime if they married their
victims. Back in 2014 Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, declared:
“You cannot put women and men on an equal footing. It is against nature.” He
has also called childless women “deficient, incomplete”.
Long before the
attempted military coup against Mr Erdoğan’s government in July 2016, press and
artistic freedom was seriously under threat in Turkey. Anti-defamation and
anti-terrorism laws had been used aggressively to target journalists and
writers. Shafak herself was tried and acquitted in 2006of “insulting Turkishness” because one
of the characters in her novel The Bastard of Istanbul referred to the massacre
of Armenians in the first world war as genocide... read more:
