2012 Press Statement
We are women, not the family; we are in feminist revolt!
Since last March 8, policies centered on the family, within which women are oppressed, exploited and subjected to violence, have grown stronger. Policies, practices and rhetoric that sacrifice women for the family have intensified and continue to do so. The clearest sign of this is the abolition of the Ministry for Women and the establishment of the Ministry for the Family during the AKP’s latest term in power. The law supposedly drafted to empower and protect women against male violence, especially male violence within the family, was passed by the Grand National Assembly of Turkey on March 8, once again under the name of “protecting the family.” Throughout this process, we women’s organizations engaged in an unending struggle with an AKP government that de facto refuses to recognize equality between women and men. While three women were being killed every day and we women were fighting male violence daily, the assembly was almost empty on the day the draft was debated: this revealed the state’s will to combat violence. Although the law contains some positive provisions for preventing male violence, it carries significant uncertainties concerning the empowerment of women subjected to violence and their access to social rights. For the AKP government is not interested in empowering women; it seeks to condemn them to the family. What is the education model recently put on the agenda if not the product of a mentality that forces girls into, and confines them to, the family?
Which family are we talking about?
The family that positions us women as good wives/self-sacrificing mothers, places responsibility for caring for children, the sick and the elderly on our shoulders, controls us through beatings, rape and death threats, and appropriates our bodies, labor and surnames (identities)?
The family in which male violence is concealed and accepted as legitimate, in which every evil is hidden?
All women now know that the family is the “nest” in which men subject women to violence and exploit their labor.
Women’s unpaid labor is for the “family.”
Even when they work for wages, women are condemned to low-paid, flexible work, again to protect the “family” so that women can continue their family duties uninterrupted.
The Prime Minister’s order to women to “have three children” is for the continuity of the family, so that women carry on their sacred maternal duties within it.
The Family Minister’s refusal to recognize lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people is also intended to keep “family values” from being shaken.
It is also for the family that three women are killed every day on such pretexts as not lengthening their skirts, always cooking pasta, visiting their mothers without their husbands’ permission, and wearing tight clothes.
Male-dominated justice does not take the raped woman’s testimony as its basis in rape cases; instead it investigates her family, searches for “consent” in rape, questions victimized women and puts them on trial.
Male-dominated justice reduces the sentences of the murderers of women who seek divorce or rebel, under the headings of unjust provocation or injured manhood.
Organizing state policies around the family and erasing the word woman from written documents is no coincidence: it is the foundation of your system of male domination.
We reject the mentality that refuses to regard women as individuals and condemns them to the family!
We know that male violence will not disappear from our lives as long as we women remain imprisoned within the family, as long as this family system goes unquestioned, and as long as this heterosexist form of the family, which tries to bind women to men, continues.
Your mentality that rejects equality between women and men, and your family policies that reinforce heterosexism, cause three women to be killed every day and the continued killing of trans people.
We revolt!
Femicide is political!
The murder of trans people is political!
We all witness Kurdish women, doubly victimized by the war that has been going on in this land for years and by the anti-peace mentality, being imprisoned one by one.
Women have been and continue to be imprisoned for taking part in organizing March 8, teaching, thinking, expressing their thoughts, and simply being Kurdish.
We feminists demand that this hunt against our comrades stop immediately and that our friends be released; we revolt against arbitrary arrests.
Our revolt is for our liberation.
Our revolt is to put an end to our unpaid labor at home and to prevent our exploitation when we work for wages or without pay.
Our revolt is against male violence and against a judiciary that searches for “consent” in rape and “provocation” in murder.
Our revolt is against those who cannot call us “women,” but call us girls, wives, ladies, females, spouses, mothers, grandmothers, sisters, families, dependents, our girls and our wives, imprisoning us in these identities.
Our revolt is against those who control our bodies and try to limit our sexuality through men’s minds.
Our revolt is against the increased harassment, rape and male violence we struggled with while trying to rebuild our lives after the earthquake disaster.
Our revolt is against war and military operations.
We reject your family built on male domination and heterosexism, and we reject your surrounding our lives in order to strengthen that family.
We celebrate March 8 as the day of women’s collective revolt.
Long live women’s solidarity! Long live feminist solidarity!
Istanbul Feminist Collective
March 8, 2012