Homegrown Progress

Cânân Arin casually shrugs when describing the occupational hazards of being a leading women’s rights advocate in Turkey. A few years ago, Arin recalls, a doctor in Istanbul survived a beating from her husband that left her spine broken in three places. When Arin helped the doctor initiate divorce proceedings, the abuser came after her as well.

“He threatened me, he tried to bribe me, he tried everything against me because there was no way to break me,” says Arin, a lawyer who has pioneered the movement to provide shelter and legal services for domestic violence victims in Turkey. An unfaltering, powerful woman of 63, Arin knew she was the last line of defense for the woman; her family had turned her away and her abuser had evaded jail by paying a $2 fine.

Another client’s violent husband once tried to discredit Arin by accusing her of kidnapping his child for ransom. When police stopped her and found no baby in her car, they took her in for questioning, during which she shrewdly refused to sign any papers without receiving her own copy. Eventually the case was dropped after the court claimed to have lost the file.

While Arin downplays the menace of angry husbands, the staff in her warm, serene Istanbul office subject would-be visitors to rigorous questioning and cross-referencing in order to identify potential assailants. For Arin, the elaborate security protocol is just one of the many obstacles on the long, arduous and often circuitous path toward advancing women’s human rights in Turkey.

It has often been said that Turkey sits at the crossroads of East and West, a geographical position that has created overlapping cultural dichotomies. Nowhere is that clearer than in Turkey’s largest city, Istanbul, which the swift currents of the Bosporous Strait have cleaved into European and Asian halves. Discos with flashing lights pump music around the cor- ner from market stalls selling traditional kilim rugs, and Homegrown

Progress Turkish Human Rights Defender Cânân Arin Takes a Bricks

and Mortar Approach to Building a Movement for Women’s Rights By Carin Zissis

women in head scarves walk on the same crowded streets as teenaged girls sporting tank tops.

While economic growth has brought prosperity to pockets of the city, poverty and persistent unemployment from the rural areas of the country have metastasized to zones of urban suffering. Over the past few decades the population of Istanbul has swelled to 9 million, with migrants from the poor eastern and southeastern regions of Turkey moving into poorly built, overcrowded apartment blocks in the city’s outer neighborhoods. Research conducted by the Istanbul Municipality in 2002 found that half of the city’s households earned a monthly income of less than $250.

Though violence against women in Istanbul—and in Turkey at large—cuts across class and geography, women from poor families predictably have fewer places to turn for help. There is a critical shortage of women’s shelters across Turkey, and a recent survey shows that only one-third of families are willing to accept an abused woman back into their homes after she has fled her marriage.

“They can hardly manage their own lives,” explains Arin. “To have her in their house again, that is someone else to feed. And usually she isn’t by herself—there are her children, too.” Much of Arin’s work focuses on securing shelter and legal services for abused women. In December Amnesty International sponsored her trip to Washington, D.C., where she met with U.S. lawmakers and AI members to inform them about violence against women in Turkey. Although the Turkish government maintains no official statistics related to violence against women—demonstrating its indifference on the issue, says Arin—AI estimates that as many as half of all Turkish women have been subjected to some form of violence. In the impoverished, largely rural Anatolia region in the southeast, 51 percent of women in a 2000 survey of 600 reported that they had been raped by their husbands. A 2003 study of middle and upper-class women in Turkey found that 63 percent had suffered some form of sexual assault.

As a child, Arin knew nothing of gender-based violence or the notion that one gender could dominate another. She grew up on the European side of Istanbul during a time when Turkey’s blossoming republic actively promoted women’s equality. The oldest of four children in a comfortable middleclass family, she was never expected to cater to her brothers and recalls, “We always set the table in turns.”

Neither her mother, a bank manager, nor her father, a lowlevel government official, pushed her toward any specific profession. Arin was interested in theater, which she finds entirely compatible with her decision to pursue a law degree. “A good lawyer must speak the language perfectly, she must be interested in literature, psychology, sociology, everything,” says the well-traveled Arin, who delights at discussing the architecture in Edinborough, Scotland and Diego Rivera murals in Mexico City.

Arin received a scholarship to study constitutional law at the London School of Economics and after returning home became active in the Turkish women’s rights movement, which gained momentum after a 1980 coup splintered the nation’s

Only one-third of families are willing to accept an abused woman back into their homes after she has left to marry. And Turkey has only 14 women’s shelters, while Sweden has 120 for a population just one-tenth the size.

As a founder of a trifecta of groups working to protect and advocate for Turkey’s women, Cânân Arin fields a constant stream of calls and meets with women in crisis in her Istanbul office. Copyright Toshi Kazama

leftist movement. While meeting with other women activists— sociologists, lawyers, students of international affairs—Arin realized that in spite of institutional promises of equal rights, backwards beliefs kept women trapped in cycles of violence behind closed doors across Turkey.

Over the next 25 years, Arin worked methodically to build an infrastructure for women’s rights advocacy and secured herself a place of honor in Turkey’s women’s movement. In 1990 she co-founded Turkey’s first autonomous women’s group, the Purple Roof Foundation, based in Istanbul, with a satellite opening later in the capital city of Ankara. The foundation established a women’s publishing company to raise funds and published Scream So Everyone Can Hear You, a collection of testimonies by battered women. “We got so many letters,” says Arin, holding out her arm at waist level to indicate the piles of mail that arrived in response to the call for submissions. “It was the first time we were dealing with violence against women, and it was the first time we brought the subject before society.”

In 1995 Purple Roof opened a women’s shelter— Istanbul’s first—with capacity for 19 women and 20 children. In spite of some public criticism, Purple Roof continued shelter operations—its location is a zealously guarded secret in order to protect the women who take refuge there. The shelter began sending clients for legal counsel at the Istanbul Bar Association Women’s Rights Enforcement Center, another organization Arin co-founded. Arin became intimately familiar with how

The heterogeneity of Turkey is amplified on the streets of Istanbul. © Toshi Kazama

her nation’s laws shortchange women in domestic abuse cases. That led her to form the Association for Support and Training of Woman Candidates to help more women enter politics.

As the hub of this network of key women’s organizations, Arin has begun to take part in national policy-making. In 2005 she played a significant role in shaping Turkey’s revised penal code, which includes several provisions protecting abuse victims. These include the call for stiffer punishments for perpetrators of abuse and sexual crimes and the abolition of virginity tests.

Turkey last approved a penal code 80 years ago when the founding father Mustafa Kemal Atatürk—a firm supporter of gender equality—was molding a secular republic. His 1926 code gave women equality in the areas of education, authority over their children and rights to divorce. Polygamy was abolished and women were no longer required to wear headscarves. But in spite of the historical promotion of equality and the passage of the new penal code, enforcement of women’s rights law continues to lag. “Women, veiled or unveiled, still are at a disadvantage in the halls of power and as subjects of laws,” says Jenny White, author of Islamist Mobilization in Turkey and president of the Turkish Studies Association. During the 1990s, secular Turkey experienced an upsurge in Islamist political activity, leading to the election of the current prime minister, conservative Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The fact that tradition often trumps law in Turkey is shown by the infrequent but enduring practice of so-called “honor killing”—a term coined to describe the murder of a woman by a relative seeking to protect the family’s reputation. The horrific practice has spread from villages to urban migrant neighborhoods, where tradition and modernity collide. A study by the Human Rights Association of Turkey counted 40 “honor killings” in 2003, although some murders go unreported, others are disguised as suicides, and, in some cases, women are induced to kill themselves. One recent university study conducted in southeastern Turkey found that 37 percent of respondents supported killing a woman who commits adultery, and many suggested punishments that included cutting off an ear or nose.

The new penal code promises harsher penalties for those who carry out these murders, and Arin and fellow activists are working to close loopholes and ensure enforcement. Although Turkey’s government has jumped through hoops to bring the country closer to European Union membership, Arin believes local NGOs deserve the credit for these recent victories in women’s rights. “We are working very hard and changing many things without the help of anybody.”

On the other hand, the government has failed miserably in protecting women from physical violence. In 1998 Purple Roof temporarily shut down its shelter due to lack of funding, despite the demand for its services. Turkey has only 14 women’s shelters (five in Istanbul), while Sweden has 120 for a population just one-tenth the size of Turkey’s. The Turkish government passed a law requiring more shelters, but it has rejected every new application. AIUSA’s Alyson Kozma, coordinator for the Women’s Human Rights Program, says women’s groups are mired in red tape and “feel like they’re being stonewalled.”

Women’s rights activists have begun to bypass the government by offering direct education to women about their legal rights. Last fall Arin joined AI Turkey’s Stop Violence Against Women Campaign Bus during a six-city tour, and Purple Roof sent activists on a similar boat trip to towns along the Black Sea coast.

“In the beginning, when they come to you, you see something so broken—it’s awful,” says Arin, reflecting on her work with abuse survivors. But she remembers one client whom she helped win a divorce case. When the woman later visited her to thank her, she proudly told Arin, “This is the first time in my life that I have paid the rent myself.”

For Arin, changing the lives of women like these is a fundamental step toward a more open society in Turkey. “You cannot change a society before you change the lives of women,” she says. “You cannot have a democratic country before you have democracy in the home.” ai

AI Boosts Efforts to Build Women’s Shelters

As many as half of the women in Turkey may be victims of family violence, according to Amnesty International. Millions have been beaten in their homes, and many others have been raped, killed or even forced to commit suicide. The Turkish government passed a law in December 2004 that requires municipalities with more than 50,000 residents to fund and establish women’s shelters. AIUSA activists are lobbying mayors of two of these Turkish municipalities to establish shelters.

ACT Please send letters to the mayors of the cities of Izmir and Bursa to encourage full implementation of the Law on Municipalities No. 5272 in their cities, funding of shelters for women fleeing violence and adherence to universal shelter principles. Appeals to: Sayın Aziz Kocaoglu/Belediye Baskanı/Izmir Büyüksehir Belediyesi/Cumhuriyet Bulvari No.1/Konak/Izmir/Turkey and Sayın Hikmet Sahin/Belediye Baskanı/Bursa Büyüksehir Belediyesi/Atatürk Caddesi/Uçak Sokak No.1 Osmangazi/Bursa/Turkey (Salutation: Your Excellency). Postage: $0.80. »

To read the transcript of Cânân Arin’s AIUSA online chat: amnestyusa.org/countries/turkey