Şehriban Aslan / JINHA

WAN – Women in the city of Van, who are at the midway point of their month-long campaign against violence against women, say that the campaign is an answer to the Turkish state's inaction on violence against women in the Kurdish area.

Women in Van said they were receiving reports of violence against women nearly everyday. In this Kurdish city, which has long borne the brunt of the Turkish state's ongoing neglect and abandonment, the people had no expectation that the state would intervene against the wave of violence against women.

There have been 13 femicides in the province in the last month and a half. One week saw four suicides by women. Women said none of this death was a coincidence.

"There are reasons that women are driven to suicide," said Yekun Altun, "and when you research those reasons, it always turns out to be either a father or a husband." She said that the state needed to pass laws to protest women and that women need to develop self-defense mechanisms.

In the absence of action, women of Van have led a consciousness-raising campaign to last throughout the month of April.

With the AKP in power for the last 13 years, women have long complained of the impunity for perpetrators of violence against women. Politicians like AKP leader President Erdoğan have made remarks like "equality is against the disposition of men and women" that encourage violence. Kurdish women say that impunity rates are even higher in the Kurdish region, demonstrating a racialized element of the AKP's anti-woman policy.

The Congress of Free Women (KJA), which is leading the campaign, expressed this effort to autonomously organize against the AKP's patriarchal-racist system with the campaign slogan: "women are organizing life and building a moral-political society." Women in the region see organizing society against violence against women as a way of building autonomous mechanisms of self-defense.

"The system has nothing to offer us," said Derya Hayva, the HDP provincial co-chair, speaking at a meeting in the town of Gürpınar in the province.

The Van Women's Association (VAKAD) are holding twenty seminar sessions in schools across the province of Van, aiming to reach 2,000 students and their parents and guardians. The Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), known for its gender parity policy in political representation, has participated in the campaign.

Bahar Zağlı, a Van resident and student who says harassment is an everyday reality for women in Van, said that it was time for either the state or local grassroots women's organizations needed to have some kind of consciousness-raising program in the city.

Women have called for a march tomorrow, April 13, with the slogan "speak up for your own life."

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