ISTANBUL – Melek Ipek, handcuffed and naked, endures a night of beatings, sexual assault and death threats from her husband who battered and traumatized her and their two daughters. By morning, after he had gone out and returned to the house, she had picked up a gun and killed him in a struggle.
Me. Ipek, 31, was detained after she called police to the scene in January in the southern Turkish city of Antalya. On Monday, she stood trial, charged with murder and sentenced to life in a politically controversial case for women’s rights in the country.
Women’s rights organizations jumped in to support her, saying she acted in self-defense and suffered years of abuse by her husband before a long night of torture. If she had received health care and a psychiatric evaluation after the assault, she would not even stand trial, the Feminist Collective of Antalya said in a statement.
For President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the leader of a conservative Islamic movement that advocated the traditional family as the Turkish ideal, episodes such as the Ipek affair have become an increasingly explosive affair. His opponents accuse him of increasing violence against women during his tenure, and support women in his own party, if more cautiously, for better protection for women.
Legal groups for women have pointed to a sharp increase in deaths among women over the past two decades – almost three times a day occur somewhere in Turkey – and the impunity of men accused of domestic abuse.
According to Home Affairs Minister Suleyman Soylu, 266 women died last year as a result of domestic violence. Women’s rights groups say the real toll is much higher, citing their own figures of 370 men recorded last year – women killed by men because they were women – and 171 cases of women losing their lives in suspicious circumstances. On top of that, there are suicides on women that are rarely investigated, they say.
They point to a steep increase in murders of women since 2002, when Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party was elected to office. Murders of women increased from 66 in 2002 to 953 in the first seven months of 2009, according to Sadullah Ergin, then Mr. Erdogan’s Minister of Justice. The government stopped publishing data on gender-based murders after 2009.
“In Turkey, at least three women are killed every day,” said Berrin Sonmez, an activist and commentator on women’s issues. “More importantly, we see that murders of women have become more violent.”
Some of the brutality of recent cases amounts to systematic torture, she said.
Me. Ipek appeared in court on Monday with a video link from prison. She said she was sad about what happened and sympathized with her husband’s family. Weeping, she added, “But I want to tell you everything I went through without being more shy and scared.”
She said she was a successful student and dreamed of becoming a maths teacher, but that her husband, Ramazan Ipek, sexually assaulted her when she was still in high school to force her to marry him.
On the night of January 6, Mr. Ipek, 36, who worked as a driver, hit her with a rifle but threatened to kill her and their 9- and 7-year-old daughters. They shot the gun and smashed the window next to them. according to her version in the indictment.
He left the house that morning and said he would return to kill the two children and then her. When he shouted back an hour later, a still handcuffed me. Ipek picked up his gun and the gun went off in a struggle, she said. He was killed at close range by a single round.
Lawyers and activists in Antalya are upset that Ms Ipek has been detained. They are also concerned that the charge sheet described Ipek as a family man and charged that Ms. Ipek preferred to shoot her husband rather than seek help from police or neighbors.
“Everyone is judging Melek at the moment: ‘Why did she not call the police? Why had she not accused him before? Why was she not divorced before? ” Says Gurbet Kabadayi, a teacher and activist at the Antalya Women’s Counseling Center and Solidarity Association, who provides support to me. Ipek and her family.
The charge sheet mentions the fact that me. Ipek did not apply to the state for help or protection, or asked it of her neighbors before or during the attack as proof of her intention to kill him. She was ordered to remain in jail until the next trial, on April 2.
But activists and lawyers say that the police and the judiciary in Turkey often fail women in need. Police officers often persuade battered women to return to their husbands. Content orders are rarely enforced and the courts often give reduced sentences for good behavior, which encourages a sense of impunity among violent criminals, Ms. Kabadayi said. In one case, a Turkish court in 2017 acquitted two men accused of killing their sister because of her Western lifestyle.
Political opponents and women’s rights fighters called Mr. Erdogan is accused of encouraging feelings of impunity and the ensuing increase in violence by expressing conservative views on the role of women in society and his increasingly authoritarian grip on the judiciary and law enforcement.
In principle, Turkey recognizes women’s rights in legislation and in the Constitution, mainly because women activists have participated in them, said Hulya Gulbahar, a lawyer who is a member of the Equality Monitoring Platform.
“The issue is,” she said, “as we have seen in the Melek Ipek case, none of the provisions in the laws and the Constitution that are in favor of women have been applied.”
In his first decade in power, Mr. Erdogan applauded for introducing democratic reforms as part of Turkey’s effort to gain membership of the European Union. He also hosted and became the first signatory to the Istanbul Convention, the first international agreement on domestic violence, in 2011.
Another decade later, women’s rights activists say they are pushing for Islamist efforts to withdraw from the Istanbul Convention, return legislation such as articles on alimony and inheritance rights, and lower the age of consent from 18 to 12.
“Unfortunately, we are trying to protect what we have already acquired,” Sonmez said.
When the issue of withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention came to an end last year, Mr. Erdogan encountered resistance from women in his own camp, including in his family.
The Women and Democracy Association, a non-profit organization for women’s rights founded in 2013, of which the daughter of mr. Erdogan, Vice President Sumeyye Bayraktar, has stepped in favor of the Istanbul Convention. Mr. Erdogan apparently suspended the idea of withdrawal.
The women’s association now joins the party of Justice and Development of mr. Erdogan and supports the Islamic ideals, emphasizing the importance of women in the family and raising children. But its female members also support justice for women in marriage and in the workforce.
Nurten Ertugrul, a former party member who resigned after being transferred to a post as deputy mayor in favor of a man, said it was the reason for supporting women’s rights in the Islamic Movement that the withdrawal from the Istanbul convention prevented. Conservative women may not always speak out, but they encourage others to do so, she said.
If the Justice and Development Party “was not afraid of their own women’s anger and of the women who voted for it,” she would have said, “they would have easily withdrawn from the Istanbul Convention.”