Last week, the late Ozgecan Aslan was memorialized and mourned by the world in a hashtag that swept across Twitter and resonated with individuals far beyond her home country of Turkey. A mini-bus driver allegedly attempted to rape and then killed Aslan, a 20-year old student at Cag University.
Her body was found two days later, displaying stab wounds and burn-marks, in a riverbed in the Southern province of Mersin. Since then, the hashtags #OzgecanAslan and #sendeanlat, or “you speak out,” have been trending as hundreds of thousands of women flocked to social media to show solidarity and share their own stories.
Of course, Aslan’s murder is not the first of its kind. The general consensus seems to be that men too often come away unscathed when they commit acts of violence against women in Turkey. According to The Wall Street Journal, crimes against women have increased in recent years, and Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, has done little to address such crimes.
What are the practices and policies that make violence against women so prevalent in Turkey? President Erdogan has publicly spoken out against gender equality legislation and is adamantly anti-abortion. Other senior government officials, such as Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc and Health Minister Mehmet Muezzinoglu, have also made public statements that angered women’s rights advocates in Turkey. Arinc has urged women not to laugh in public, while Muezzinoglu recently declared, “the most important career for women is motherhood.”
Although the AKP created a commission to investigate violence against women in 2012, Al Jazeera reports that, “the implementation of the 2012 law and national action plan has been poor.”” A European Commission report from October found a lack of trained staff, funding, objectives, and monitoring. Moreover, Human Rights Watch says the Turkish government “favors family integrity over women’s rights, and there’s still massive impunity concerning violence against women.”
Aside from their social media efforts, Turkish women and activists have taken to the streets in a number of major cities across the country. Protestors have been holding banners, chanting, marching, and dancing despite a few police attempts to stop them. During Aslan’s funeral, a group of women insisted on carrying the victim’s coffin although it is customary for men to do so.
Why exactly Aslan’s case has sparked so much outrage among the Turkish public is unclear. Many have compared this instance to the 2012 gang rape in New Delhi, after which laws were rewritten to increase the penalties for crimes against women. Already, the outpouring of advocacy and support for Aslan’s cause seems to indicate that the Turkish people are ready for change. Whether the government agrees with its constituents and will bring Aslan’s killers to justice remains to be seen.