Three ministers and the head of Turkey's Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) met on Wednesday in the Turkish capital Ankara to introduce a new action plan for 2022 to tackle violence against women, a complex issue highlighted by domestic violence and femicide committed by their former or current spouses or other family members. Ministers hailed progress in reducing the disturbing number of "femicides" but also acknowledged the need for more collaboration on the issue as they signed a cooperation protocol between their ministries.
The protocol covers increased coordination between the Interior Ministry, which handles the criminal side of the issue, the Family and Social Services Ministry, which is at the forefront of efforts to provide shelter and awareness to women in danger, and the Education Ministry, which aims to educate people at a younger age to raise awareness on the issue that is still largely tied to a patriarchal mindset.
The action plan focuses on five aspects – access to justice for victims, policies and coordination, preventive and protective measures, public awareness and collecting accurate data on the issue.
Family and Social Services Minister Derya Yanık said at the meeting that successive governments of the incumbent Justice and Development Party (AK Party) implemented numerous regulations and measures to curb violence against women on the principle of "zero tolerance" in the past two decades but the process was not "complete" yet. "We will work to ensure the implementation of privacy rulings for women (to protect the identity of domestic violence victims), we will work for efficient implementation of health measures and consultation services for victims," she said.
Yanık said the violence has become "diverse" now. "Apart from physical, psychological, economic and sexual violence, we now have virtual violence, something we need to work to prevent," she highlighted, referring to cybercrimes targeting women, including stalking and bullying. The minister also dismissed the claims that restraining orders were scarce or not implemented well in domestic violence cases. "This is not something which can be simply prevented by implementing restraining orders for perpetrators. Unfortunately, we have seen in the past five years that about 81% of women's murders were committed by perpetrators they did not seek restraining orders for earlier," she said.
Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu said they had plans underway to tackle the different aspects of the issue and among their priorities is increasing the number of women with access to KADES app from 3.4 million to 5 million. KADES, which stands for Women's Emergency Support App, is a smartphone app that allows potential domestic violence victims to alert security forces, basically, a "panic button" with a short emergency response time.
Soylu said they were also working to make it easier for domestic violence victims at risk by protecting their identity, especially in legal procedures or formal transactions where they have to provide proof of ID. He said their IDs will be protected by a new privacy regulation. He said they would also increase the number of Electronic Monitoring Centers by 500 to 1,500 across the country, "within a month." The centers track the movements of perpetrators, if they are convicted or have a restraining order against them, or under suspicion of committing such acts and/or have a criminal complaint filed against them. The minister said they were also seeking to increase the number of shelters for women fleeing their violent partners and called upon the municipalities in charge of those shelters to boost their capacities.
"We achieved progress in the fight against violence toward women but unless we have zero cases, we don't consider having achieved comprehensive progress. As of March 22, the number of women's murders decreased by 29% compared to last year but this is not enough," he said.
For his part, Education Minister Mahmut Özer said the robust solution to the issue would be educating children from the pre-school level. "Studies show that the more children are educated, the less they have criminal tendencies in the future. Thus, starting the education at an early age is important," he said, noting that they were planning to open 3,000 more nursery schools in the coming years. He said they employed some 60,000 counselor teachers, providing psychiatric consultancy services at schools and all of them were trained on raising awareness to violence against women among students.
Ali Erbaş, head of Diyanet, said they were delivering sermons at mosques to help bring down violence targeting women and the sermons would continue this year as well to bring the issue to the attention of the male mosque congregation. He said they were also offering spiritual counseling to women staying in shelters escaping domestic violence.
