Syrian refugees' camp in Cappadocia, Turkey. Image: Fabio Sola Penna / Flickr
There are three million registered migrants in Turkey,
90% are from Syria of whom one and a half million are women. Interviews with migrant women reveal that many are exposed to
sexual harassment and assault during war, migration and resettlement processes,
with the perpetrators including soldiers, border officers and migration
officers. Turkish NGO’s have collected women’s testimonies, some of which are
translated for this piece, such as this one,
given by a 27 year old woman who came to Turkey two years ago with her husband
and children:
“The ISIS members used the women as
slavery. They came to my neighbours’ door and said ‘Your daughter is beautiful;
you must give her to us.’ They cut her husband’s head. My neighbour was forced
to give her daughter to them because they are frightened to death. Then she came to us. She had been scared
and looked crazy.”
A woman who lives in a camp in Turkey gave this account:
“We were living a camp with my
husband. I was working as a cleaner with one of my Syrian friends. She took me away
to a field and she started to take off her clothes. I was scared. At that
moment; a soldier’s car stopped in front of us and asked us ‘What are you
doing?’. I started to cry. He said the other soldiers ‘go’, called me and took
my identity card and started to say ‘Your eyes are beautiful.’ Then he threatened
me: ‘I take possession of (Turkish ‘genel’)
your identity card. If you report this, I could say you are
a prostitute and they send you to Syria again.’ I was scared and didn’t say
anything to anybody. He called me the next day in order to give my identity card.
Then he took away me to a house and raped me. After that day, he threatened me
again. He wanted me to have sexual intercourse with his friends too. Due to the
fact that I was afraid of my husband, I didn’t speak. Whenever my husband asked
questions about me, I said I was sick. It continued for 20 days. My
psychological problems started and I attempted suicide. At last, I reported the
event, but no one took action. I told everything to the authorities, but they only
sent me to another camp.”
Without
an identity card, women cannot access services. They cannot report sexual
harassment, go to the police, or even go to hospital. If they try, the services
don’t take any action, they take them away them to migrant offices first.
Whilst
Turkey has adapted international law into national law to offer some
protection, there are major implementation gaps. Activists struggle with discrimination,
racism and patriarchal values which mean that state agencies fail to fulfil
their duty to protect against and investigate cases of violence. The Ministry
of Family and Social Policies requires that shelters only work with women where
the violence has taken place within Turkey. However, many women leave their
countries due to violence, and are in need of accommodation when they arrive. They currently cannot access shelters, most
of which in Turkey are run by the state.
For the migrant women who are accepted, they can face discrimination and
racism from other women (Turkish nationals) living in shelters, and their
children are shunned. Women talk about shelter
staff ignoring the abuse and choosing not to intervene.
Many
shelter staff, police officers, and other officials are not trained in
migration law, resulting in violations
of the human rights of migrant women. Turkey is a party to the İstanbul
Convention, but has failed to fulfil a number of its requirements, including
training for professionals to ensure women’s right to protection from violence
is realised. For example, in all legal
procedures there should be access to interpreters, but the absence of them,
especially in police stations and women’s shelters, limits access to
justice. NGOs try to fill the gaps, but
this is a state responsibility.
Women
migrants living in Turkey face discrimination and many forms of violence: sexual
harassment; forced and early marriage; polygamy; trafficking for sexual
exploitation. This is seen in this account of
sexual harassment given by a 16 year old young women living in Izmir:
“They treat
Syrian girls as if they are cheap goods. They look at them with an evil eye. At
work, our boss said to one of my Syrian friends, ‘Would you like to marry my
son? Why are you working in this job? Come and be a housewife.’ My friend didn’t accept this and so he
offered one thousand Turkish Liras to my friend in order to marry his son.”
Speaking
about provinces where refugees live densely, Batman Bar Women's Rights Commission
Member Lawyer Secil Erpolat states:
“…a new prostitution sector
has been formed and Syrian refugees are abused in this sector. According to the
information we got from the prosecution, girls are forced into prostitution in
exchange for 20-25 TL (6-8 Euros). In some cases they don’t give any money;
instead they give food or any other helping material.”
Only
one in 5 women are in paid employment in Turkey. Combined with this, language
issues and gender based discrimination means that few women refugees can find
paid work other than low paid cleaning or child care outside the formal economy,
increasing their dependency on men. Women who migrate with their children face
further barriers, as they cannot combine child care and employment: this is one
of the contexts in which ‘early marriage’ of girls becomes a survival
strategy. Marriages under the age of 18
are not recognised in Turkey, they are common among Syrian migrants for young
women. Viewing this as a ‘cultural
difference’ means that there is limited if any protective intervention. The
experiences of NGOs indicate that the authorities ignore official complaints
and are not willing to do legal sanctions. Some ‘early marriages’ could be
understood as a form human trafficking: in the border provinces, young women
are persuaded to come to Turkey with promises of a better life only to find
they are forced to either marry a Turkish or Syrian man (possibly as a second
or third wife), or forced into prostitution.
Whilst
there is no statistical data on the scale of sexual harassment among migrant
women, NGO’s know it happens to both registered and unregistered women. Control
of women within their own community prevents them from learning Turkish and
means they remain unaware of their rights to protection from violence, as made
clear by this account by
a Syrian woman:
“We shouldn’t go out of the house, we are in the
houses all the day. We don’t have any connection with anybody. We don’t know
the language. In Turkey, it is the same thing for us, existing or not.”
Feminist
NGOs in Turkey have undertaken studies and support work with women migrants,
but the scale of the problems are so large that this is only a sticking
plaster. It is for this reason that they
are calling on the Turkish authorities to ensure that women migrants are
afforded their rights under the Istanbul Convention: the European convention on
Violence Against Women that was finalised in Turkey in 2011.
Read more articles on openDemocracy in this year's 16 Days: Activism Against Gender-Based Violence. Commissioning Editor: Liz Kelly
