Black day in Turkey: seven feminicides recorded throughout the country in less than 24 hours

Seven women were killed by their spouse or ex-husband in one day on Tuesday across Turkey, according to a census conducted by private television Haber Türk.

“A total of seven women were brutally murdered in Izmir, Bursa, Sakarya, Erzurum, Denizli and Istanbul,” the channel reported, listing the country’s major cities in the west, as well as Istanbul, the economic capital, Bursa or Izmir. , on the Aegean coast, than in Sakarya (north) or Erzurum, in eastern Anatolia, are reputed to be more conservative.

Bullets or knives

“The suspects were either their current spouses or spouses from whom they were separated,” says Haber Türk, which names the victims and posts photos of each of them on its website.

These women, aged 32 to 49, were killed by bullets or stab wounds; at least three killers committed suicide, two were arrested, and another, who was wounded during arrest, died.

The fate of the seventh, who escaped from prison to kill his wife, is not specified.

315 murders in 2023

In 2023, the women’s rights platform We Stop Feminicides recorded 315 murders of women (65% of whom were killed in their homes) and 248 “suspicious deaths,” which authorities called “suicides” but which feminists attributed to a third, noting suspicious increase in defenestrations in Turkey. In contrast, NGOs note that “in fifteen years, the only year in which the number of feminicides decreased was 2011, the year of the adoption of the Istanbul Convention.”

In 2021, the country withdrew from the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women, known as the Istanbul Convention, which requires authorities to investigate and punish violence against women.

A procedure launched in 2022 by an Istanbul prosecutor against the We Stop Feminicides platform with the aim of banning it for “immoral activities” was finally dropped in September.