Women are being silenced in Turkey's crackdown
In the days after a failed military coup shook Turkey, women say they are being silenced.
From the start of the coup attempt by military officials on Friday through to the government’s crackdown in response, women’s voices have been almost entirely absent.
Images of protesters on the streets are mostly men. The military leadership is entirely male. The government is 85 percent men, with only one female minister. Currently, 43 cities don’t have any female representatives at all.
Publicly, the fact that mostly conservatives are holding vigils at the squares might be a factor in women’s absence, too. At least one religious group, namely the Ismailaga movement, issued a decree stating that they've decided the women will stay at home and pray while the men will go out to the streets to support the government.
Some women’s groups say they are being specifically targeted. On Twitter, many women talking about the coup attempt are reporting an increase in harassment on the streets. Others are railing against misogynist language used by all sides, reducing women to pawns, or spoils of war.
“The coup, the war, AKP’s backwardness or jihadist mobs … they all target women,” said University Women’s Collective, a popular feminist group, in a recent statement. (AKP is the Turkish acronym for the ruling Justice and Development Party.) “They use sexual harassment against women’s [quest to] exist freely. They are enforcing their manhood by threatening to rape the wives or daughters of the declared enemy. Women must defend themselves.”
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/women-are-being-silenced-in-turkeys-crackdown/ar-BBuwzbm?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=edgsp
= new reply since forum marked as read
