When Women Fight Back Against Autocracy

In late December, I sat in an Istanbul criminal-court building and witnessed a scene unfold that has become depressingly familiar throughout Turkey. A man was accused of entering his ex-girlfriend’s home, in violation of a preventive order, on four different dates in May 2023. He had threatened to kill her and destroyed her property. The victim was too scared to attend the proceedings.

After a brief hearing, I watched the defendant scurry out of the courtroom, clutching a single piece of paper with the judge’s ruling: He had been released without pretrial detention.

“Cases like those end in murder,” Evrim Kepenek, a Turkish journalist who follows domestic-violence cases, told me. “The man comes to court after violating the protective order and learns that nothing will happen, so he continues until he kills her.”

I lived in Istanbul from 2014 to 2016, a relative high point for Turkish organizers intent on bringing global attention to domestic violence and other issues affecting women. When I returned for two weeks this past winter, I was struck by how much the situation has worsened for women facing domestic abuse. The country issues tens of thousands of preventive orders each year, but enforcement is weak. The Women’s Rights Center of the Istanbul Bar Association examined hundreds of cases of preventive orders issued in 2022 and found that women have little recourse when orders are violated.

Turkish women’s rights overall are in a precarious state. As prime minister of Turkey from 2003 to 2014, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan promoted conservative Muslim traditions, such as the right to wear a headscarf in public institutions. Since being elected president, in 2014, he has been outright demeaning toward secular women, and he’s gotten harsher in the face of new threats to his political power. Indeed, Erdoğan’s attacks on women are an example of a well-established pattern of autocratic leaders diminishing women to enhance their own position.

[Read: How Erdogan made Turkey authoritarian again]

Authoritarian-leaning leaders “have a strategic reason to be sexist,” the Harvard political-science professors Erica Chenowith and Zoe Marks wrote in Foreign Affairs in 2022. “Understanding the relationship between sexism and democratic backsliding is vital for those who wish to fight back against both.”    

Turkey shows that when democracies falter, conditions for women worsen. Still, Turkish women are fighting back, shifting tactics in response to new challenges, and achieving real victories.

The women’s movement in Turkey is arguably the most successful and long-standing civil-society effort in the republic. Long before the Treaty of Lausanne recognized the state of Turkey in 1923, Ottoman-era women fought to end men’s rights to polygamy and unilateral divorce. Alongside the secular agenda of the early republic, women pushed for Sharia law to be replaced by Western civil and penal codes, making Turkey the only country in the region to do this. Influenced by feminism in the United States, in the 1980s, they took their fight to the domestic sphere. Through relentless campaigning, by the early 2000s, they’d won equal decision making in marriage, the criminalization of marital rape, an end to sentence reductions for “honor killings,” and some protections against domestic violence.

[From the May 1909 issue: Women in the Young Turks movement]

When I first traveled to Turkey, in 2014, women had developed significant organizing power. They took advantage of Western media’s interest in the region after the Arab Spring, and Erdoğan’s ongoing talks with the European Union, to organize massive protests. That year, I walked alongside one of the largest parades for trans rights in the region, one of many large protests that women helped lead. The route was so packed that I worried about a stampede. Although Erdoğan constantly insulted people who did not conform to traditional gender conventions, activists were winning the war of global public perception.

Conservative Muslim women, however, supported Erdoğan. Fifty-five percent of women voters, compared with 48 percent of men, voted for Erdoğan in the 2014 presidential elections. By lifting the headscarf ban, he had expanded some conservative women’s freedom of expression, and households had benefited from a strengthened economy.

Conditions for women across the political spectrum would erode significantly in the following years. On March 20, 2021, Turkey stunned the Council of Europe by withdrawing from the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence—also known as the Istanbul Convention, for the city in which it opened for signatures—which Turkey had been the first country to ratify. Erdoğan claimed that the convention undermined family values and had been “hijacked by a group of people attempting to normalize homosexuality,” though the document makes no major statements about gay rights.

Soon after, Erdoğan’s government made another attempt at undermining the women’s movement by charging the We Will Stop Femicide Platform, a volunteer group of lawyers and advocates who represent victims of domestic violence, with “acting against morality.” The prosecution recommended that the group be dismantled. In an unusual victory for a human-rights group, in September 2023, after 18 months and four hearings, the judge went against Erdoğan’s political agenda and dropped the case due to lack of evidence.

Erdoğan’s attacks on women grew as his political support weakened, after criticism about his response to the February 2023 earthquake and amid raging inflation. Two hard-line Islamist parties were ready and willing to fortify him: the New Welfare Party (YRP) and Hüda Par. YRP’s leader has likened Turkey’s domestic-violence law to fascism, and Hüda Par advocates for separate education for men and women and criminalizing sex outside marriage. In the May 2023 elections, both parties campaigned for the repeal of Law 6284, which includes provisions to protect women but stops short of criminalizing domestic violence. As a result, Erdoğan lost considerable support from conservative women voters.

Last month, Erdoğan announced his plans to amend and weaken Law 6284, and on July 3, his party submitted an omnibus bill to the Turkish Parliament that removes an important provision for protection. Currently, a domestic abuser who violates a preventive order is subject to temporary imprisonment. If the proposed reforms pass, the abuser can avoid this preventive confinement. Equally concerning to the women’s movement, the legal reform would require married women to take their husband’s name, emphasizing the family as the basis for society. Parliament is reviewing the bill.

On March 8, Turkish women participated in their annual “Feminist Night” march, despite a government ban on protests in the busy downtown district where they had gathered. Police hit women until the protective shields they carried were broken, and then detained and charged protesters.

“This is actually an expression of how afraid they are of women,” said Özgür Sevinç Şimşek, a film director who was released in 2021 after serving five and a half years in prison on terrorism charges. “The male state knows that no matter how much it intervenes, women will never give up.” Viewed with this lens, Erdoğan is a rational political actor seeking to neutralize threats and consolidate his power.

Despite all the setbacks, there are signs of hope. In the May 2023 elections, Turkish women won 11 out of 81 mayoral seats, including in five urban centers and some conservative areas, more than doubling their representation in Turkey’s government.

[Read: Arab women are tired of talking about just ‘women’s issues’]

“The election took place between two sharp lines,” said 31-year-old Gulistan Sonuk, who won a mayoral race in the eastern province of Batman by a large margin against Hüda Par. “One was the mentality that saw women as second-class, and the other defended women’s freedom. The public chose the latter.”

The Turkish women’s movement continues to fight back against Erdoğan even as he lashes out at civil society. The movement’s judicial and electoral wins in the face of illiberal leadership and brutal censorship are a beacon of hope to defenders of women and democracy everywhere, though their fight is far from over.

Today, women’s rights and liberal democracy are under attack in countries around the world, including the United States. The countries that are the biggest threat to the U.S.—Russia, China and Iran—are autocratic patriarchies in which women often form a last line of defense by fighting for their rights. While the democratic world wrings its hands in the face of seemingly unstoppable forces of illiberalism, women are still organizing.