Gov’t steps up measures to protect women against violence

ANKARA

Officials are putting final touches on a draft bill that seeks harsher punishments for those who commit violence against women in Turkey, where incidents of femicides and other acts of violence against women have often made headlines for years.

The Draft Law on Violence Against Women and Amendments Envisioned to be Made within the Scope of Combating Violence in Health, jointly prepared by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), was submitted to the Turkish Parliament.

According to the draft bill, perpetrators will not be able to benefit from a reduction in sentence due to what is known as good conduct time, and this will apply not only to perpetrators of violence against women but also to those committing other crimes.

Under the new draft, the sentence for voluntary manslaughter will be increased from life imprisonment to aggravated life imprisonment, while the minimum sentence for intentional injury offense will be increased from four to six months.

The draft also aims to increase the lower limit of the sentence for intentionally injuring a woman from four months to six months in prison and the lower limit for the crime of threatening from six months to nine months.

While the three-year lower limit for the crime of torture against women was revised to five years in prison, stalking will be considered, for the first time, an offense. The new draft also foresees violence against healthcare workers to be classified as a catalog crime.

Meanwhile, the Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu explained the measures taken by his ministry and law enforcement officers within the framework of combating violence against women to members of the Parliamentary Commission on the Investigation of Violence Against Women.

Soylu said that violence against women is a subject that is fed by different dynamics, has its own characteristics, has a more complex structure than other public order incidents and needs more expertise, stressing that there can be no justification for violence against women.

The minister also announced the latest statistics on KADES, an emergency support application for women which directs security units to the place of violence in just minutes upon notification, which became operational in this context in 2018.

Noting that the application has been downloaded by nearly 3.4 million women, he stated that all 337,355 notifications made through the application have been reached immediately, and 189,437 incidents, which are non-false notifications, were immediately intervened.

The minister also emphasized that a center was established that can monitor 1,000 electronic cuffs at the same time, and a total of 1,384 cases have been followed up from this center so far.