Nüket Paksoy Erbaydar

390 Intimate partner violence: Turkey’s femicide problem

Background Throughout Turkey, violence that women have been subjected to is still widespread. Murder of women or femicide involve intentional-murder-of-women because they are women and increasing worldwide as it is in Turkey. In spite of juristic-regulations and precautions made to prevent violence against women, femicide in Turkey has not stopped-proof that the problem is structural in-nature. Collecting correct-data on femicide is challenging, largely because police and medical-data-collection-systems on homicide often do not have satisfactory-information or do not report the victim–perpetrator relationship or the motives, let alone gender-related motivations for murder. The study objective is to collect data on number and some characteristics of femicide in 2012 in the newspapers and compare the numbers them with other available data. Methods 2012 issues of four top-newspapers from different media-agencies are reviewed. For every femicide a file-created, and collected-data from four-newspapers merged according to the 37 items of data-collection-sheet. Results 202 femicide cases were found. Of the victims 31.7% were aged 25–34, 43.1% were married, 59.4% had children, 4% were pregnant. Of the perpetrators, 26.7% were aged 25–34, 56.9% were married, 48.5% had children, 41.1% were the victim’s-husband, 7.4% were the victim’s-separated-spouse, 5.9% were the victim’s-ex-husband, 19.3% were victim’s-boyfriend and 4.5% were victim’s-ex-boyfriend. Of the femicides, 33% had discord, 18.4% had violence, 9.4% had intimidation-history. 8.9% of women demanded police-protection. Firearm use was 44.2%, and 54.5% cases’ place of death was home. Conclusions A huge gap between existing laws and what is happening in reality and femicide which is a common criminal problem in Turkey. But data is not consistent. In 2012, according to newspapers 202, Ministry of Family and Social Policies 145, woman organisations 210 femicide were detected mainly due to the definition-differences. In spite of the limitations, newspapers are the only accessible-source at the national-level. The penalties of the Law (Protection-of-the-Family-and-the-Prevention-of-Violence-against-Women) are not a deterrent force and in spite of juristic regulations and precautions made to prevent violence against women, femicide in Turkey has not stopped-proof that the problem is structural in nature. Thus, ending this problem requires additional reforms and the establishment of new sustainable policies with the ultimate aim of reconstructing society.