409 women killed, 387 children sexually abused in Turkey: 2017 Report

Eyüp Serbest – ISTANBUL

A total of 409 women were killed and 387 children sexually abused in Turkey in 2017, according to data compiled by the “We Will Stop Femicide” women’s rights activist platform.

Some 337 women were subjected to sexual violence, said the organization’s report, which used figures from 2017.

Some 45 women were killed by their family members and 41 children were sexually abused in December alone.

In 2016, 328 women were killed, and in 2015, 303 women were killed, according to the platform’s previous reports.

A total of 10 children were killed by their fathers in 2016, according to the report.

In 2017, 88 women were killed because they had decided to choose how to live their lives, and 30 were killed because they wanted a divorce.

Some 134 suspicious female deaths and 110 undetected female murders also took place in the same year.

The age range of the women killed decreased in 2017. A total of 65 women in the 15-25 age group were killed in 2017.

The place with the most murders of women in 2017 was Istanbul with 57, followed by the western province of İzmir with 32, the Mediterranean province of Antalya with 25, the Marmara province of Bursa with 18, the southern province of Adana with 17, the southeastern province of Gaziantep with 15 and the central Anatolian province of Konya with 12.

The 2017 report also mentioned atrocities involving child abuse and violence against women that occurred during the year.

In the eastern province of Van, a newborn baby weighing four kilograms was killed after being sexually abused. In the Marmara province of Yalova, a five-year-old girl kidnapped from a playground was found dead five days after she went missing. Her corpse showed signs of rape.

In the southeastern province of Diyarbakır, a 37-year-old father raped his nine-year-old daughter over a one-month period, the report said. The rapist father said his daughter had a “constipation” problem, according to the report.

In another incident, a girl suffered harassment from a taxi driver as she went to a bakery to buy bread.

“You can’t go to buy bread with those shorts. The bread is forbidden to you. Everything that passes through your throat is forbidden to you. Tell your father that he must tell you how to dress,” the taxi driver said.

In December 2017, a 20-year-old university student living in Ankara was harassed on her way home because she was wearing shorts.

In the western province of Uşak, a 16-year-old woman sexually abused by her fiancée became pregnant. She had to give birth in a public bathroom because she was frightened of her own family.