Femicide and social structure

According to the “We Will Stop Femicide Platform,” 394 women were murdered in Turkey last year. Unfortunately, 166 of the perpetrators found at the crime scene were the women's husbands. This is a truly terrifying statistic: living with your killer. 

According to the figures, a woman is murdered in this land every day, and many more are subjected to violence. On the other hand, the situation globally is not very encouraging either. Are there structural reasons behind the oppression, violence, and even murders directed at women? The reason for writing this article is essentially the existence of this question. Let's see what we find on this matter.

While talking to a friend recently, the subject turned to femicide. My friend rightly complained about the indifference and silence of men on this issue. They said something to the effect of, “If men raised their voices as much as women, then we could discuss these murders on a more meaningful and promising ground.” Our state of involvement in a subject and the way we establish a relationship with that subject as a subject is important, because the ground from which you speak can be as meaningful as the voice itself. I hope that the voices on this issue will grow day by day and reach a point aimed at healing a social wound.

We stated above that we would try to question the social reasons behind femicide. 

Let's begin then.

According to 2019 OECD data, the country with the highest rate of violence against women in the world is Pakistan at 85 percent. This ranking is followed by Senegal at 78 percent, Yemen at 67 percent, and Afghanistan at 61 percent. It is worth considering whether the common characteristics and structural assumptions of these countries can give us an idea about femicide. Certainly, each country should be handled separately, but the first similar situations we see regarding these lands appear in their economic and social structures: these countries are generally poor and Muslim. Therefore, it is necessary to question the link that poverty and religious tradition maintain with violence in all its dimensions and in depth. By the way, I am looking at poverty from a broad perspective; poverty can also bring deprivation along with it. When poverty and deprivation come together, it is not easy to predict the results.

A statistic similar to this data also appears in the Global Gender Inequality data. There, too, the countries we listed find themselves at the bottom. In summary, Gender Inequality questions access to rights, resources, and opportunities. As a result, the further behind men women are in these statistical data, the worse the result of Gender Inequality is in that country. Our country's situation is also dire in this sense; according to the World Economic Forum's 2024 Global Gender Gap Report, we are ranked 127th out of 146 countries.

This data is quite striking for us. 

Because with this data, we can question the murder of a woman in our country almost every day from a more realistic ground in terms of social, political, and cultural values. That is to say, the subject moves beyond the individual sphere here and opens up a space for discussion about the social structure. If the data and the environment of violence complement each other, then we must engage with the issue through a relational and structural analysis. Therefore, the side we stand on regarding daily conversations, articles, and all production taking place in every field of life should be the ground of social existence. In which social structure are we located, and as a product and reflection of which social conditions are we trying to exist? I think the light that will guide the discussions will reflect from these points.

Nazım Usta expresses this reality regarding women in a very meaningful way in one of his poems and says: 

“And those who die as if they had never lived.

And their place at our table,

Coming after our ox...”

It is not a coincidence that women, as an identity that cannot find a place for itself at the table, in speech, in politics, on the podium, at home, or at work, who become displaced and subsequently unvalued and dehumanized, face violence; it is a result of all these processes. Social phenomena that complement each other and draw strength from tradition, social assumptions, and the blockade of belief and culture become the determinants of social life. Ultimately, whoever the social structure is built in favor of, they seize the dynamic of power and sovereignty. The more toxic the power, the greater the practice of violence, and painfully, the more normalized it becomes. 

By the way, as we mentioned at the beginning of our article, the state of the world is not good in this sense either. According to one study, violence against women in America is 36 percent, and in European countries, it ranges between 20 and 30 percent. However, countries like Canada and Chile, where violence against women has fallen into the single digits, show us the practice of another life here and offer hope.

When addressing a social issue, we must, of course, understand the matter through a multi-faceted and multi-dimensional approach and build the solution at the current stage based on this reality. In this respect, it is important to uncover and make visible every phenomenon that causes femicide. But beyond all this, what we see is that we have inherited a legacy under the influence of historical burdens on women, and that legacy has not yet been consumed. Therefore, the primary phenomenon we must face is hidden in the burden of that poison carried in the bosom of the past.