2014 Press Statement
Let Our Bodies, Our Lives, Our Decisions Be Ours!
Keep your family for yourselves!
We women are in Taksim again on the twelfth anniversary of our feminist night march! Every year, more women here proclaim our revolt against patriarchy, heterosexism and male violence.
We women repeat today, as on every March 8! We reject the sexist division of labor and practices at home, in the workplace, in the streets and in every area of life! Whether we work full-time at home or outside the home, we will never stop saying at every opportunity that men owe us for our unpaid labor, men who dump all housework and the burden of care on our shoulders.
Since March 8, the stories of women killed by men and victimized by violence have not stopped. We know that behind these stories lies the system of male domination that has continued for centuries!
Yet the AKP government, in power for eleven years, also takes steps through its conservative policies that increase male violence. The Prime Minister’s statement “I do not believe in gender equality” is the AKP’s view of women. The AKP shows its view that women are weak and needy by their “nature.” Solutions produced by this perspective are far from preventing violence!
Under the cover of increasing women’s employment, the AKP forces us both into flexible work and into bringing many children into the world. There is only one future the AKP has promised us: marriage.
The pressure to marry paves the way for those who want to marry women off by force!
Patriarchy and heterosexism, founded on protecting and perpetuating the family and directing sexuality toward reproduction, strike us women twice; our sexual orientation is either disregarded or we become objects of men’s desires and fantasies.
We revolt against the male-dominated heterosexist order because it makes us still more unprotected against sexual violence, harassment, rape, mobbing and discrimination simply because we are lesbian, bisexual and transgender women, and imposes the color of our identity cards on us as an absolute gender. When the AKP makes legal arrangements concerning hate crimes, we see it exclude LGBT people from protection. This is like an AKP declaration showing us that it will continue to watch the killing of LGBT people from afar.
Through our struggle against the abortion-ban law proposed by the AKP government and the Prime Minister, who said “Every abortion is a Qileban massacre,” we prevented them from banning our right to abortion. But the AKP does in practice what it cannot do through the law. Public hospitals turn women seeking an abortion on request away at their doors, even within the legal ten-week period. Most recently, we saw access to abortion blocked in İzmir by the removal of the abortion button.
Although two years have passed since Law No. 6284 was enacted to “protect women from violence,” women cannot benefit from the rights specified in the law. Although provided for in the law, they cannot receive temporary financial aid. Children’s right to confidential school enrollment is not properly implemented. Violence Prevention and Monitoring Centers (ŞÖNİM) do not provide support for our needs. We are removed from shelters and killed. They call it “she left voluntarily herself.” We do not accept this!
Judicial proceedings are conducted through male domination! Our struggle is for real justice against male-dominated justice that searches for provocation in murder and consent in rape!
We now know that the violence we experience from our husbands, fathers, brothers and lovers is not fate! We object to housework and care services continuing to be women’s duties! Despite the risk of death, we oppose this violence and do not obey men!
This year we added our struggle in the streets to the Gezi struggle. We resisted police violence. The anger created by the AKP’s policies poured us into the streets. Sexual harassment and rape, deployed by patriarchy as instruments of war, emerged during detention. We know well that the police systematically use this male weapon against political women in particular and try to silence women’s struggle this way. As also seen in the recent Gezi resistance, we women expand our struggle rather than surrender to this oppression and violence.
Over the past year in Turkey, we witnessed many things. Alongside the AKP government’s oppression, violence and anti-woman policies, its corruption also came to light. The policies of the AKP government, especially the Prime Minister, can be summed up as corruption within the AKP, poverty and violence against women.
Municipal elections lie ahead. We do not have a single vote to give to sexist candidates or parties that do not criticize sexist policies! Our vote is for women-friendly municipal administrations! Our vote is to change the place we live in, the city!
The guns that have spoken for thirty years have been silent for a year. We all hoped for a solution to the Kurdish question. Yet this resolution process is neither going well nor transparent! We want this process accelerated, made legal, and women to participate as a party to it! We repeat that demands for an urgent solution and of the resolution process, especially education in the mother tongue, are also feminist demands.
On the twelfth anniversary of our feminist night march, we are again in the same street where we have marched for twelve years. Against those who want to take our streets, squares and spaces from us! We will continue our struggle against patriarchy, heterosexism, capitalism and militarism, and continue the feminist struggle.
Feminist Revolt
Istanbul Feminist Collective
March 8, 2014