JINHA

NEWS CENTER - Women's groups across Turkey have come out strongly against the new change to Turkish law that permits "religious marriages" without a civil marriage. Women speaking to JINHA say the decision opens the way to an epidemic of forced marriages of girls in the country.

Sevim Korkmaz Dinç, of the Izmir Women Writers' Association, called the decision "a bullet aimed at the women's movement." The ruling, made by Turkey's all-male Constitutional Court, removed a stipulation that imams who married couples without a civil marriage would be subject to jail time. Many families in Turkey use "religious marriages" to legitimize marriages made before the age of consent.

In the wake of the decision, the only response by Ayşenur İslam (Minister of Family and Social Policies)—ostensibly responsible for protecting the welfare of women and children—has been to say that there should be "other projects" related to the "marriage of girls at a young age." Ayşenur İslam has previously come under fire for her silence and inaction in the face of a wave of femicide in Turkey.

In fact, the legal change is already bearing fruit for perpetrators of violence against women. Yesterday in Van province, women protested outside the courthouse during the ongoing trial related to the death of Kader Erten, 14. Kader had been married in a "religious marriage" at the age of 12, bore a child at the age of 13 and was found dead at 14. While a number of members of the family are being tried for facilitating child sexual abuse and related crimes, lawyers expect that the charges against the imam who made the marriage will be dropped.

Izmir LGBTQI activist Gözde Demirbilek said her opposition to the law had nothing to do with supporting marriage as a legal institution and everything to do defending women and girls against sexual abuse. She said the law indirectly targeted LGBTQI people by reinforcing the existing abusive heterosexual order.

Selime Büyükgöze, lawyer for the women's shelter organization Purple Roof, said that the law would lead, in addition to increasing pressure for child marriages, to the increasing abuse of the legal rights of women who do have such marriages, as women without civil marriages have no guarantee of their rights in the case of divorce.

The decision comes in the wake of years of intense pressure by Turkey's ruling AKP for women to marry early and often, as Izmir Social Democratic Party women's activist Ceren Çökelek noted. The AKP has attempted to reduce the construction of one-bedroom apartment units because they are "not convenient for families." Current Turkish Recep Tayyip Erdoğan also denounced "boy-girl living" (mixed sex cohabitation), which led to some police raids against homes where women and men lived in the same house.

(mg/zd/fk/cm)