2012 Press Statement
We are women, not the family; we are in feminist revolt!
Since last March 8, family-centred policies under which women are oppressed, exploited and subjected to violence have proliferated. Policies, practices and discourses that sacrifice women for the family have grown stronger and continue to be strengthened. The clearest sign of this was the abolition of the Ministry for Women and its replacement by a Ministry for the Family during the AKP government’s latest term. The law passed by parliament today, March 8, supposedly intended to empower and protect women against male violence, particularly within the family, was once again enacted in the name of “protecting the family”. In this process, we women’s organisations were drawn into an endless struggle with an AKP government that does not recognise women’s and men’s equality in practice. While three women are murdered every day and we fight male violence daily, parliament was almost empty on the day the bill was debated. This revealed the state’s commitment to fighting violence. Although the law contains some positive provisions to prevent male violence, it leaves major uncertainties concerning the empowerment of women subjected to violence and their access to social rights. The AKP government is not interested in empowering women: it seeks to confine them to the family. What is the education model they have most recently put forward, if not the product of an approach that makes girls dependent on and confines them to the family?
Which family are we talking about?
The family that positions us as good wives and self-sacrificing mothers, burdens us with caring for children, the sick and the elderly, controls us through beatings, rape and death threats, and appropriates our labor, bodies and identities?
The family in which male violence is covered up and legitimised, where what happens at home stays at home?
All women now know that the institution of the family is the “home” where men use violence against women and exploit their labor.
Women’s unpaid labor is for the “family”.
When women do paid work, their confinement to low-paid, flexible employment also serves to protect the “family”, so that women can continue their family duties without interruption.
The prime minister’s command that women have three children is also about the continuation of the family and women’s supposedly sacred duties of motherhood within it.
The family minister’s refusal to recognise lesbians, bisexuals and trans people as legitimate is also about keeping “family values” intact.
Three women are murdered every day, supposedly for the family, for such reasons as not passing the salt, always cooking pasta, visiting their mothers without their husbands’ permission, or wearing leggings.
In rape cases, patriarchal justice does not take the raped woman’s account as its basis. Instead, it investigates her family background and looks for “consent”, questioning and judging the victim. In the name of the family, it grants reductions in sentences to men who kill women for wanting a divorce or refusing to obey: reductions favouring men, under the heading of unjust provocation.
Defining state policies around the family and erasing the word woman from written documents is no accident: it is the foundation of your male-dominated system.
We reject an approach that does not recognise women as individuals and confines them to the family!
We know from our own lives that male violence will not disappear while women remain trapped within the family, while this family structure goes unquestioned, and while this heterosexist form of the family, which seeks to make women dependent on men, continues.
Your mentality, which rejects equality between women and men, and your family policies, which reinforce heterosexism, lead to the murder of three women every day and to the continuing rise in murders of trans people.
We revolt!
Femicide is political!
The murders of trans people are political!
We have all witnessed Kurdish women being imprisoned one by one, doubly harmed by the war that has continued on these lands for years and by an anti-peace mentality. Women have been arrested, and continue to be arrested, for participating in organising March 8, teaching, thinking, expressing their thoughts, or simply being Kurdish. We feminists demand an immediate end to this witch hunt and the release of our friends. We revolt against arbitrary arrests.
Our revolt is for our liberation.
For an end to our unpaid labor at home, and to exploitation in both paid and unpaid work.
Our revolt is against male violence and a judiciary that looks for “consent” in rape and “provocation” in murder.
Our revolt is against those who cannot call us women, who address us as wives, ladies, spouses, mothers, our mothers, grandmothers, older sisters, sisters, the family, our girls, our women, and imprison us in these identities.
Our revolt is against those who control our bodies and seek to limit our sexuality through men’s ways of thinking.
Our revolt is against having to fight increased harassment, rape and male violence while, as earthquake survivors, we try to rebuild our lives after disaster.
Our revolt is against war and military operations.
We reject your family founded on patriarchy and heterosexism, and your encirclement of our lives in order to strengthen it. We salute March 8 as a day of women’s solidarity and revolt. Long live women’s solidarity! Long live feminist solidarity!
Istanbul Feminist Collective
March 8, 2012