On 20 March 2021, Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, announced his country’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention which aims to promote gender equality and prevent violence against women. The decision to annul Turkey’s ratification of the treaty came less than two weeks after the celebration of International Women’s Day on 8 March, and immediately incited widespread protests in Turkish cities from women's rights activists, lawyers and opposition politicians.
The move was widely condemned by human rights organisations both inside and outside Turkey. The Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, Dunja Mijatović, said the decision ‘undermines women’s rights and sends the wrong signal to all women in Turkey and beyond’. Meanwhile, the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and an associated group of regional human rights experts described the decision as ‘a very worrying step backwards’ which ‘sends a dangerous message that violence against women is not important, with the risk of encouraging perpetrators’.
Turkey’s decision to withdraw from the Istanbul Convention has clear implications for the country’s commitment to protecting women and preventing domestic violence. However, it is also symptomatic of a wider trend which has been referred to as the ‘global anti-gender movement’. This article will examine the deeper context of violence against women in Turkey and explain why the decision marks a dangerous milepost in the wider international struggle to acquire and preserve sex- and gender-based rights.
Women’s rights in Turkey: a discouraging picture
The Istanbul Convention – also known by its full title, the Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence – is a human rights treaty of the Council of Europe which came into force in 2014. Signed by 45 countries, it is the world's first binding treaty aiming to prevent domestic violence, which disproportionately affects women. Globally, almost 1 in 3 women have been subjected to intimate partner violence, non-partner sexual violence, or both at least once in their life. The Convention also covers other forms of violence against women including psychological and physical abuse, sexual harassment, stalking, and forced marriage. Signatories are required to implement practical measures to prevent violence against women, protect victims and prosecute perpetrators.
Although Turkey was the first country to ratify the Convention in 2012, violence against women and high rates of femicide remain an enduring social problem in the country. According to UN Women – the United Nations entity dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women – substantial discrimination and violence against women persist in Turkey due to ‘patriarchal attitudes, cultural and social practices, gender inequality and stereotypes’. A 2014 study found that 4 in 10 women in Turkey are exposed to physical or sexual violence in their lifetimes, while the murder rate of women increased by 1400% in the country between 2002 and 2009. The We Will Stop Femicide platform estimates that at least 300 women were murdered in 2020, while another 171 were found dead under suspicious circumstances.
Over the last year, COVID-19 lockdowns have resulted in dramatic increases in domestic violence rates around the world. Abusers have taken advantage of at-home isolation to ramp up violence and controlling behaviour, while reduced access to the outside world means victims have had fewer opportunities to report abuse and faced breakdowns in their support networks. Factors such as higher rates of unemployment, financial difficulties and lack of childcare may also have contributed to an environment of heightened stress and psychological tension in the home. In Turkey, law enforcement officers recorded 88 491 domestic abuse-related incidents between 1 January and 20 May 2020 alone. In Istanbul, Turkey’s largest city, the number of domestic violence incidents saw a 38.2% increase in March 2020 compared to the same month the previous year. Despite this, support for victims of abuse has not been prioritised, and Turkish laws to protect violence against women have been subordinated to laws protecting the health of perpetrators during the pandemic.
In Turkey these developments are set against a backdrop of increasing social conservatism, authoritarianism, and intolerance for progress in gender-based rights. The government, under the leadership of President Erdoğan’s Islamist-rooted Justice & Development Party (AKP) party, has promoted conservative perceptions of gender roles and sought to erode women’s civil liberties. Erdoğan himself has claimed that women are not equal to men due to ‘biological differences’, and argued that women’s social position is limited to motherhood. The government has also aimed to sideline oppositional activists supporting the implementation of the Istanbul Convention. Turkey’s women’s rights movement has been deeply critical of the country’s inadequacies when it comes to gender policies in recent years and was quick to denounce the decision to withdraw from the Convention.
Given this national context of growing challenges to the enjoyment and retention of gender-based rights, the role of international human rights instruments in upholding baseline standards when it comes to women’s rights and protections from violence is more important than ever. There is a clear need for more, not fewer, tools to combat gender-based violence and protect victims from harm. In this sense the decision to reverse Turkey’s ratification of the Istanbul Convention represents a concerning development.
The hidden agenda
Turkey’s withdrawal from the Convention amid a political context of growing conservatism also sheds light on a deeper problem which goes beyond the rights and protection of women. Though the presidential decree announcing the withdrawal did not initially specify a reason, the Turkish Presidency later claimed in an official statement that the Convention had been ‘hijacked by a group of people attempting to normalize homosexuality’ which it views as ‘incompatible with Turkey’s social and family values’. Indeed, the text of the Istanbul Convention requires its signatories to protect victims of gender-based violence without discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation or gender identity. Conservative and Islamist groups in Turkey have opposed the Convention on these grounds, arguing that the principle attempts to ‘undermine family values’ and ‘promote homosexuality’.
Since 2014, the AKP party has increasingly voiced anti-LGBTIQ sentiments and used homophobic and transphobic policy as a polarising tool in its crackdown on opposition voices. In February 2021, Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu referred to students protesting against the appointment of a university rector as ‘LGBT deviants’. Turkish authorities have also increasingly restricted LGBTIQ people’s right to assembly. Citing claims by religious and ultra-nationalist groups about threats to public morality, the Istanbul Governor’s Office banned the city’s pride parade in 2015. In early 2021, police reportedly attempted to prevent LGBTIQ people from joining assemblies in honour of International Women’s Day.
The recent surge in homophobic and transphobic rhetoric has been interpreted as a direct response to recent strides made by the LGBTIQ movement in Turkey. A burgeoning gay rights movement and expanding civil liberties in the early 2000s forged the country’s image as a haven of tolerance in the otherwise socially conservative Muslim world. However, recent developments are increasingly recognised as deliberate attempts to quell growing social acceptance. In 2020 ILGA Europe, an NGO which advocates for human rights and equality for LGBTIQ people at European level, ranked Turkey second to last in its rights index which covers 49 European countries.
The decision to withdraw its ratification of the Istanbul Convention is therefore driven by a hidden agenda of anti-LGBTIQ rhetoric, which forms part of a resurgence in polarising identity politics in Turkey.
The global anti-gender movement
Turkey is hardly the first country to precipitate a reversal in policies and protections tied to gender: researchers have identified an increase in global movements working to counter rights and protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity in the past few years. A recent report described the anti-gender movement as ‘a transnational coalition of conservative activists and organizations working to counter political and social gains made by local and international feminist and SOGIE [Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Expression] rights advocacy’. This international proliferation of anti-progressive movements, made up of forces which promote anti-progressive ideology on local, regional and international levels, has spread hateful discourse and notably targeted sexual and reproductive rights. It has also both harnessed and disseminated moral panic about growing LGBTIQ rights and visibility.
Right-wing populist parties in Europe have mobilised against gender politics and LGBTIQ rights concurrently. For example, Poland’s right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party has overseen a near-total ban on abortion which came into force in January 2021 after a ruling by the country’s top constitutional court. The Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights said that the current restrictions to the legal access to abortion goes against Poland’s international human rights obligations. Simultaneously, over the past two years Poland has been subject to strong criticism from the European Parliament and other actors over the decision by certain regions to declare themselves ‘LGBT-ideology free zones’. Meanwhile, in the United States, for instance, conservative (and primarily Catholic) organisations have touted the supposed need to preserve ‘traditional’ heteropatriarchal family values and structures. Recently, these groups have also sought to prevent the passage of the Equality Act, a piece of federal legislation that seeks to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
These movements are united around the derogatory use of the concept of ‘gender ideology’ as a catch-all term which signifies the ‘evils of liberalism in the realm of human sexuality’. Above all they are fuelled by a global imperative to entrench sex- and gender-based oppression as ‘natural’ and ‘biological’ and counter emancipatory conceptions of gender, sex, and sexuality. Importantly, as the discourse of anti-gender campaigns has shifted from religious justifications towards legal ones, this rhetoric has begun to enter human rights systems. In this analysis, then, the struggles of women are closely aligned with those of the LGBTIQ community. Aside from the obvious consideration that some women count themselves under the LGBTIQ umbrella, this also draws attention to the intersecting nature of human rights constituencies: the rollback of LGBTIQ rights is likely to operate as a harbinger of threats to the rights accorded to women more generally, with implications for non-LGBTIQ women in addition to those who exist outside of cisgender and heterosexual norms.
This shows that the global struggle to advance gender equality cannot afford to be LGBTIQ exclusionary, and vice versa. The connection between backsliding on women’s rights and on the rights of LGBTIQ people reveals how Turkey’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention can be placed in a wider context. Indeed, the decision should be recognised as the latest instalment in an incremental rolling back of rights based on gender, sex and sexuality. It demonstrates how an imperative to block LGBTIQ rights can provide a cover for backsliding on gender-based policies including protections from violence.
Conclusions
Turkey’s recent decision to withdraw its ratification of the Istanbul Convention is problematic on numerous levels. Deep-rooted conservative and patriarchal attitudes have led to endemic discrimination and high levels of often deadly violence against women, providing for a concerning national context in which more far-reaching policies are needed in conjunction with tangible social change. The decision is also symptomatic of a wider backsliding on gender-based rights, both in Turkey and beyond, chiefly exemplified by a surge in anti-LGBTIQ rhetoric and hate speech. The global anti-gender movement provides a background through which to contextualise this issue and understand the relationship between the multiple strands of emancipatory politics centred on gender, sex and sexuality.
Going forward, it is clear that Turkey should reverse its decision to withdraw from the Istanbul Convention. Further, those states who have signed but not yet ratified the treaty (including the Czech Republic, Hungary, Ukraine and the United Kingdom) should do so without delay. At national levels, greater protections for women are needed, but without a shift in cultural attitudes and norms around reporting violence these can have only limited practicability. Finally, given that a tide of anti-gender political organisation and rhetoric threatens both LGBTIQ freedoms and women’s rights and protections, there is an urgent international necessity to prevent the reinstatement of patriarchal gender roles as a biological and social norm. Ultimately, the Turkey case provides a lesson that human rights cannot be taken for granted, and instead need to be preserved and stridently defended if necessary.
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