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IV. Silence and Violence: The Situations of Lesbian and Bisexual Women and Girls

A. Cuci and Gia’s Story

Cuci and Gia were both 21 when we spoke to them in 2003; they identified as lesbians, and they were in love. Gia grew up in Izmir; she met Cuci, who is from Istanbul, over the internet when both were 20. Gia left her family home and went to a town near Izmir to stay with Cuci for a few days.  However, they accidentally met Gia’s parents on the street there. “They asked why I had left. My mother said, ‘Did you run off to live like pigs, like perverts?’ She started to hit me on the street.”

Gia returned home that night. Her family had searched her room: “They found love letters that I had written to Cuci, and pictures we’d exchanged. They kept me up till 7 a.m. talking to me. My mother said she didn’t believe something like this could happen. She said you can never write something like that to a woman. And she said, ‘You must never meet again.’”

Secretly, Cuci came to Izmir and rented an apartment so the two could be together for a few hours each day. At home, Gia said, “They followed me, spied on me. I felt if they knew she was in town they would do me violence. I had to be very careful.” Her mother finally found out that she was meeting Cuci. “So she started swearing, threatening me. I told Cuci I couldn’t go home: we had to leave town. We went to Bursa where I had friends, and stayed in a friend’s house for a month.”

Gia continued,

I had to change my appearance there—my mother put pictures of me in some newspapers as “lost.” So I looked very skinhead. People in Bursa would shout “lesbian” at us in the street. The owner of the room figured out that we were lesbians: she didn’t want Cuci there because she was looking mannish. She said I could stay, but Cuci had to go. One day we came home and the keys had been changed. So we had to go to Istanbul to stay with Cuci’s family. They were okay with us; my family was the problem.

Gia’s family located Cuci’s parents in Istanbul. “My mother kept calling Cuci’s family and threatening them. ‘Because of you, my daughter became lesbian—if I were you, I’d break my daughter’s legs so she couldn’t go outside.’”

Finally, my stepfather came to Istanbul, to Cuci’s house, and insisted that I return with him. I refused but he used force. He said he’d told all the police in Istanbul, and they would arrest Cuci for perversion if I didn’t come. I held Cuci and cried. But my father said, “Stop the shower.”

He put me physically in a car. Cuci was sitting on the ground and crying. My father locked the door, and shouted at her, “If you ever come to Izmir again I will break all your bones and kill you.”

Gia escaped the car and fled with Cuci. “We hid with Cuci’s sister. My father was calling her family and threatening them. He went to the police and said someone had kidnapped his daughter.”

Gia and Cuci “tried to open a claim, that we were threatened by my family.” On May 12, 2003, they went to a public prosecutor’s office in the Üsküdar district and submitted documents in which Gia stated that “for six months, although we were adults, we were harassed … I want to live freely and it is my right: I will face violence if I return to my family. ... I want my father and mother to leave me and let me go. I trust Turkish law. Please stop my family from blackmailing me.”

The prosecutor could have offered several remedies to the threatened women. For instance, provisions of the TCK call for increased penalties in cases where violence is committed by family members.⁷² He did not.  “The prosecutor understood that we were lesbians,” explained Cuci, “and he said, ‘You are doing something wrong. Don’t you think of having children in the future?’ He asked us how we have sex. And I said, ‘Enough.’ He didn’t say anything about our fears. So we went away.”⁷³

B. The Power of the Family

Human rights violations against lesbian and bisexual women and girls in Turkey are inextricable from the abuses that women in Turkish society face in general. Human Rights Watch interviewed 24 lesbian or bisexual women and girls in 2003 and 2007. The most overwhelming factor that they cited to Human Rights Watch is the subjection of women and their sexualities to the family and its values—including “honor” or “custom.”  As women and girls whose sexualities move beyond the norms and expectations of heterosexuality, lesbians and bisexual women and girls feel these pressures in especially acute ways, and feel and fear the steady possibility of family violence.   

In recent years, the Turkish government has made advances in protecting women and girls from ill-treatment. The Law on the Protection of the Family, passed in 1998, allows any member of a family subject to domestic violence to file in court for a “protection order” against the perpetrator.⁷⁴ It was at first generally interpreted to include only violence between spouses, because the section on sanctions referred only to a spouse. In May 2007 a reform extended the definition of “victim of domestic violence” to include all members of the family, whether living or not in the same household.⁷⁵ Meanwhile, a 2004 law requires all municipalities with more than 50,000 inhabitants to provide a shelter for women and children victims of violence.⁷⁶

However, concerns remain about whether these laws work for most women and girls. In its 2005 report on Turkey, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Disc rimination against Women (CEDAW), that oversees states compliance with the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, underlined “the need to fully implement and carefully monitor the effectiveness of the Law on the Protection of the Family, and of related policies in order to prevent violence against women, provide protection and support services to the victims, and punish and rehabilitate offenders.”⁷⁷ Some problems have to do with the police and judiciary’s role. Sevinç Eryılmaz, professor at Bilgi University explained, “In practice the law is not working very well. The decision [to grant a protection order] is supposed to be made immediately but they [the judges] don’t. Prosecutors are asking for medical reports as the golden proof of violence. We have had cases of women who have gone to the police station and they got sent back to their house; after, the police tell the husband the wife started a case against them.”⁷⁸

Neither in the Law on the Protection of the Family nor elsewhere in Turkish law is there specific reference to violence against women or girls due to their perceived sexual orientation. CEDAW asked Turkey in 2005 to “provide in its next report information, sex-disaggregated statistics and data relating to women in the judiciary, trafficked women and girls, as well as Kurdish women and other groups of women subject to multiple forms of discrimination and their access to health, employment and education, as well as various forms of violence committed against them.”⁷⁹ However, reports on gender-based violence that Turkey has presented to UN mechanisms thereafter leave issues of violence against lesbian and bisexual women unaddressed.⁸⁰

The indifference may be inadvertent, but it is not benign. Turkish organizations working with women victims of violence—including lesbian and bisexual women— said that they thought lesbian and bisexual women would be afraid to seek recourse when facing family violence out of fear that they might be forced to reveal their sexuality and in turn face even more discrimination or violence. Secin, who has worked with women victims of violence, told Human Rights Watch, “Lesbians are all required to keep quiet and not say anything [when victims of violence].”⁸¹ The General Coordinator for the Istanbul Research Centre on Women told Human Rights Watch, “I can’t think of a lesbian woman that could easily go to the authorities or seek other type of protection admitting her sexuality.”⁸²    

The new Turkish Criminal Code (TCK) that entered into force on June 1, 2005, after a successful campaign by women’s movements, brought positive changes towards the recognition of women’s sexual and bodily rights.⁸³ Sexual crimes now carry higher sentences and it is harder for perpetrators of honor killings to win sentence reductions. However, according to women’s rights organizations, the reforms have fallen short.⁸⁴

Article 82/k, specifying the aggravating circumstances of a crime, states that killings in the name of töre (custom)constitute aggravated homicide and the perpetrator must be sentenced to life imprisonment. However, there is no mention of killings justified in the name of namus (honor)—which may be exempted from the higher sentences for töre (custom) killings. Concern over this large loophole was expressed by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Disc rimination Against Women: reviewing Turkey in 2005, it found that “the use of the term ‘custom killing’ instead of ‘honour killing’ in the Penal Code may result in less vigorous prosecution of, and less severe sentences for, the perpetrators of such crimes against women.”⁸⁵ Yakın Ertürk, the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, agrees: “With the law worded as töre, there is still room for interpretation.”⁸⁶

Since namus is not specifically included as one of the aggravating circumstances of a crime, other provisions within the Criminal Code can still be used to reduce the sentences of those who have committed crimes in the name of namus. Article 29 establishes sentence reductions for provocation: “If an individual commits a crime while in a state of anger or mental anguish induced by an unjust action, their heavy life sentence penalty can be reduced to 18 to 24 years, or their life sentence penalty can be reduced to 12 to 18 years. In other instances, the sentence can be reduced by  [an amount ranging from] one quarter to three quarters.”⁸⁷ Women’s rights groups in Turkey have said that this article implicitly “offers license to perpetrators of honor killings and legitimizes this violent tradition under the pretext of penal law.”⁸⁸

 “Honor killings” entail the murder of a woman or girl suspected of transgressing the limits of sexual behavior imposed by tradition. Homosexual conduct between women and girls transgresses insofar as their behavior moves beyond the norms and expectations of traditional heterosexual conduct. Indeed, lesbian and bisexual women and girls repeatedly told Human Rights Watch researchers that their families saw their sexual orientation as a source of shame.⁸⁹

One case points to the legal consequences of this perception. On January 4, 2005, an Istanbul court convicted a man of stabbing to death a woman whom he believed to be his wife’s girlfriend. Finding that the alleged lesbian relationship had “provoked” him, the court lowered his prison sentence from 24 years to six years and eight months.⁹⁰ The court did not even consider aggravating the penalty under Article 82—that is, finding the crime one of “custom.”

The case illuminates with terrible intensity the same travails Gia and Cuci experienced: the difficulties women and girls can endure in asserting an autonomous sexuality outside their families’ control. Like Gia and Cuci’s story, it also shows a state unwilling to defend them effectively—its officers sometimes more interested in prurient fantasy than in the facts of the harassment and violence they faced. These stories confirm the specific protection lesbian and bisexual women and girls need, despite the changes in legislation.

Okyanus, a bisexual and a feminist activist, told Human Rights Watch that women and girls are still considered the repository of honor, legal changes aside. “Women having autonomous sexual desires threaten the conception of them as property. And it threatens the namus—the honor of a family, a group, a clan. If a man is walking with his sister on the street and another man looks at her, namus is hurt and may give the brother reason to kill him.” Turkey’s rapid twentieth-century modernization has not changed this conception of honor and control over women’s sexuality. “It’s a Potemkin modernity in Turkey,” Yeşim, a 30-year-old lesbian activist, said, “[t]he old patterns persist”:

Women are very bonded to men. And this is changing, but still there is no safe space between being a father’s daughter and a husband’s wife. We have sayings such as, “A daughter can escape her father’s will either in her husband’s house or in the grave.”⁹¹

This is one of the reasons Ayşe, 26, has not come out to her family. “I’m not planning to say anything ever. This is something that can result in killings in my family. My dad says, ‘I can forgive if my children are prostitutes, thieves, but I cannot forgive one thing, being homosexual.’”⁹²

As a result of such pressures, Okyanus said, life for lesbian and bisexual women and girls in Turkey is “hard, almost impossible.” She told Human Rights Watch, “Many people in Turkey keep silent because of family. My family would not want to see me if they knew.” She has a 15-year-old son. “He doesn’t know. But he once said, ‘If I ever find out you are a lesbian, I’ll never look in your face again.’”⁹³ And isolation, she emphasized, is the basic fact:

Women don’t have evidence of other women like themselves. There is a saying among gay men, “At least there’s Zeki Müren [a famous, flamboyantly effeminate singer] and me.” For women, there is no Zeki Müren. There is no open lesbian in Turkish society.⁹⁴

These problems intensify in the arena of marriage. The difficulties of heterosexual women in Turkey in establishing free choice in marriage are familiar to lesbian and bisexual women. Okyanus explains, “Pressure comes because fundamentally this is a feudal, patriarchal society. I have visited many places in Anatolia where women [and girls] are forced to get married. It is already difficult to be a woman [or girls] in Turkey. But if you are a lesbian—you can’t imagine.”⁹⁵

The UN CEDAW and the ICCPR spell out the obligation of States to ensure equality in all matters related to marriage.⁹⁶ Pursuant to these standards, articles 126 and 127 of the New Turkish Civil Code, which came into force on January 1, 2002, provide that full and free consent of the couple getting married is a basic condition for marriage for both children and adults.⁹⁷ Article 124 sets 18 as the minimum age of marriage for men and women.

Yet reality does not reflect the norm, and for women whose sexuality leads them to refuse heterosexual marriage, pressure can become harassment. Zeynep, 30, a writer from an intellectual background, told Human Rights Watch, “Women’s sexuality is seen as tied to men. The pressure to marry is intense. Most people, if you’re a woman in your thirties, expect you to be married and have kids; there is no other option.”⁹⁸ Yasemin told Human Rights Watch, “At 17 I tried to commit suicide. I thought that I would have to get married.”⁹⁹

In some situations suggestion becomes coercion. Toprak, 31, is originally from Malatya, a province in the south-east of Turkey. Though he now sees himself as a transgender man, at 16, when he left his parents, he identified as a lesbian woman. Toprak did not leave his parents lightly.

I was forced to get married to a 52-year-old man. They made me marry because they caught me with my girlfriend having sex. When they found out I was kept in the garage and was beaten over several days.

Then I married. Life with him was really bad. It was so horrible. When I rem ember those kinds of things I just go crazy. I was freed when the guy died. I was almost 22.¹⁰⁰

Even without the threat of marriage, parents apply financial as well as social pressures to lesbian and bisexual women and girls. Esra, a 21-year-old lesbian, said

My family is a very big pressure on me.  If I tell them, I think I’ll be thrown out of the house. Because of the way my mother reacted when I first hinted at it to her—she said if that happened, I couldn’t be part of the family.  And she says it’s a big sin, it’s morally very bad. And she hates all homosexuals.¹⁰¹

Nehir told Human Rights Watch, “There is a difference depending on whether you are economically independent or dependent on your family. When they know you can work, can rent a place, you face less violence. But when you are dependent on them, the pressure grows. And beyond that some families are very conservative, beat their children, dominate them cruelly.”¹⁰²

Lesbian women repeatedly pointed to women and girls’ lack of financial independence as a wellspring of family power. Ecem, 19, told her parents she was a lesbian at 17. “My mom kicked me out of the house several times,” she said. “The last time was last year in the beginning of spring. Then I decided I would go to my father’s house. My mom said: ‘If you go I will cut your money too.’”  Worried she would have to drop out of school, Ecem decided to stay—still feeling that “inside the family you can’t do anything.”¹⁰³

Independence, however, is sometimes not enough to stop abuses. Human Rights Watch spoke to Tansu, 23, who pointed the violent power of family constraints even after she left home. Tansu realized she was a lesbian in secondary school, but told no one. “My father is a very harsh man. I was 13 when he hit me for the first time. It was because I was playing football with boys,” she explained. Tansu said that her family is very conservative and would never accept her sexual orientation. The pressure came not only from her parents, but from her sister. “[She] always suspected. She never asked me exact questions—but she had suspicions. She questioned the music I listened to—she said a woman who didn’t have perverted feelings wouldn’t listen to stuff like that.”

After refusing to marry manta her parents’ behest, Tansu left home. The pressure did not cease.

Tansu explains:

One month ago I left home, and moved in with a woman friend of mine.

Then one of my friends who knew that I was lesbian phoned my family and told them where I was living. My father came. He couldn’t enter, but he shouted and made threats. So I couldn’t stay there any more. I moved to another friend.

My father telephones me all the time on my mobile, but I never answer. … I feel threatened, very much. I don’t want him to come near me, even by chance. One of my cousins escaped her parents and it was my father who found her, with great brutality, and her family forced her to marry someone she didn’t want. I wouldn’t return to my family unless I heard of his death or disappearance. I’m afraid of him.¹⁰⁴

C. Overcoming Solitude: Public Harassment and the Dangers of Solidarity

Freedom of expression and association are rights recognized in the Turkish Constitution.¹⁰⁵ However, social, economic, and in some cases legal strictures interfere with lesbian and bisexual women’s full enjoyment of those rights. Most basically, Didem told Human Rights Watch, “There is no lesbian community” in Turkey: “just some groups of friends.”¹⁰⁶ Yeşim said,

Gays have a social base where they can nourish themselves. Lesbians have a tiny one—not even a circle, a few shadows.  … It is very difficult to break this invisibility. It is a vicious circle. From my observations over the years this is the biggest problem we face. If we solve this problem, we can solve others. But now we are separated from each other.¹⁰⁷

Economic powerlessness makes it difficult for women to claim public space and public identities. “Women don’t have money,” Yeşim stated simply. “And they are afraid to do independent things because all their lives they are kept in a constricted area by men.”¹⁰⁸

Nehir, who runs a small café with a largely lesbian clientele, told us, “It has to stay quiet. If the police knew it was a lesbian café, they would try to close us. Another café where lesbians went was closed—because of the police: they came and saw there were only women. They demanded bribes. ‘Where are the men?’ They came more and more often, would just come in and walk around, made all the people feel uncomfortable.”¹⁰⁹

At the same time, Yeşim said, “[w]e are beginning to build our own social environment now. It must come out of our efforts and is more difficult than for men—you can’t just look for lesbians, find them, and join.”¹¹⁰ When they do try to join existing groups largely composed of men, some face difficulties from their own families. “My mom found out I was going to Lambda [Istanbul]. She said: “you can’t go, you’re under eighteen and the police will take you. They will close it because of you!” said Ecem.¹¹¹

Lesbians have haltingly become more visible in Turkish society, yet images of them in public circulation are often dangerously distorted. Zeynep noted that the press shows lesbians “as killers, kidnapping other women, sexual predators. … In general lesbians are shown when a crime is involved, or a tragedy, or a rumor or scandal involving a celebrity, which gives her the opportunity to show off her beautiful body. Nothing positive is printed about lesbians in Turkey.”¹¹²  She added that even at the progressive newspaper where she works, “I found the archive on lesbians was filed under ‘sexual problems.’”¹¹³

The result is growing awareness but also prurient curiosity about lesbians in Turkey—which increasingly translates into harassment on the streets as well as in the home. Didem told explained that she and her girlfriend

don’t usually get harassed physically in society, or face violence—but there is verbal harassment. Last night, we were together, walking down a side street—and while we were just walking and talking, not even hand in hand, two guys shouted behind us, “You lesbians, you!” Not loud at first, but louder as they saw we didn’t react. I said “Fuck off” and they stopped. And three of us in the street several days ago, a guy started shouting “Dirty dykes.” So they know we’re there.¹¹⁴

Secin, who works as a waitress in a predominantly gay club in Ankara, recounted one night in March 2006 when a friend of hers was there with another lesbian:

They were dancing. Two men insisted on dancing with them. They said “no” and told the club’s bodyguards. The guys were kicked out of the club. After a few hours they [the two women] left. While walking to the parking lot a car went past them. Three or four men stepped out of the car and kicked them and punched them. Two of them were the men trying to dance with them at the nightclub. The girls told the manager. He took them to the hospital. But they didn’t complain to the police because they weren’t openly lesbian [and feared the consequences of being identified as such].¹¹⁵

Ferda, a lesbian businesswoman, said that rumors about her sexual orientation have increasingly interfered with her work. “Sometimes a businessman comes to me and says, ‘We’ll do business if you have sex with me.’ Not despite my being a lesbian, but because of it. They keep insisting, because they think they can ‘cure’ me. They harass me. Some say, ‘Have sex with your girlfriend and me too.’”¹¹⁶

Devrim, a 19-year-old lesbian, told Human Rights Watch that in 2007 her choral professor at a music conservatory gave her a failing grade. “I knew she had seen me distributing bills about MorEl [a student LGBT organization meaning Purple Hand].” The teacher later “admitted to my mom that she had failed me because I was a lesbian.”¹¹⁷ Esme, 17, told Human Rights Watch how stereotype and suspicion led to her expulsion from a reputable private school—and to family violence as well.

Last year I was 16, and I said, I am a lesbian and I will come out. So I told my friends at school. There was only one week left until the end of the first term. Then the whole school heard it. And all the parents in the school knew it. People in our street and their families heard it.

And the director’s assistant called my sister and they said they wanted to kick me out of school. They said, “She’s making the kids uncomfortable.” They said that I was sexually assaulting the girls! And that I wanted to sell them to men! I hadn’t had any problems with my friends. It was a lie!

I saw, most of the time, the people who wanted me out of school were the children’s families. Not the girls themselves. I was expelled from school. They gave me a paper. It said I had to take a forced leave of absence [tasdikname].

I didn’t even know that I’d been forced to leave. But my parents showed the paper to me and said I was making the girls scared in school. My family hit me. They searched my room. They said, we think you did the things that the director accused you of. They didn’t believe me. They kept me in the house without leaving for two weeks. Then they sent me to a psychologist to cure me. I didn’t go to school for a year.

After a year’s halt in her education, “Now I am in a different school. The students are good and our relations are good.” Esme also told Human Rights Watch that “I have alright relations with my family now. They’ve gotten used to it. But my sister calls all homosexuals ‘devils.’” Esme added, “I just wanted to be honest. I don’t have a community, I don’t have lesbian friends. I am alone. Unfortunately, I don’t have luck.”¹¹⁸

In this case Esme’s right to education under the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) was violated, but as already noted, police and other state authorities have also been accused of general neglect toward abuses against women and girls in other spheres.¹¹⁹

Ferda’s story, however, suggests that authorities still have not addressed the problem; confrontations with police continue and can be fraught. Outed in the 1990s by a journalist, Ferda faced steady harassment from neighbors: “They would call police and say that because I was a lesbian I was a terrorist, or I was pimping other women.” She complained to the police. The policeman in charge of the investigation, she says, was the officer implicated in the death under torture of the journalist Metin Göktepe.¹²⁰

He came to my house. He didn’t find anything—he was actually very understanding about the case. But then he created a sexual threat over me for years. He said, “If you ever have a lover, I will come and make love to both of you.” That was his fantasy. He tortured me in this way for years. He came once a week; and because I never had a lover he took money—hundreds of millions of [Turkish] lira; all because I was a lesbian.¹²¹

D. Organizing: Politics and Women’s Sexualities

Lesbian and bisexual women have had difficulty finding political space within both the feminist and gay movements. Okyanus, a feminist activist, told Human Rights Watch that among women’s organizations, “The majority still have a negative atmosphere” toward homosexuality.

Some of them are now starting to question heterosexism.  But there was a women’s conference over a year ago—and when people spoke about issues like disability or homosexuality, some said we were dividing the women’s movement. It seemed a majority of the women there felt that way. To say that you are dividing the movement is an attack. Not a physical attack: but a humiliation.¹²² 

In 2003, women’s groups organized a meeting to prepare a shadow report to the CEDAW. Burcu, 27, and active in the LGBT movement in Turkey since 1999 “was there as an open lesbian from KAOS-GL. … One of the women said ‘you are a very nice girl, you don’t have to be a lesbian.’ … I felt they were just thinking about my sexual orientation. Some of them never looked at my face. It was really disturbing.”¹²³

Didem believes that “The feminism of the 1970s in the West is still predominant here in Turkey; and that is uncomfortable with sexuality. It says that women have to struggle against their sexualities, to repress them. And the result is that we—lesbians—are repressed.”¹²⁴

However, Hasbiye suggests growing acceptance in the feminist movement.

Women organizations didn’t know about us. LGBT people go there, they send representatives, they participate. We have come to their meetings and have come out. In time they [women movements] have realized that it is not a distant image, but something near them. We have caused them to overcome their homophobia and to cooperate with us. First we went to them and then in time they started to come to us. In Turkey women and LGBT people will go side by side.¹²⁵

Lesbian and bisexual women also complain of sexism within gay and (nominally) lesbian organizations. Okyanus told Human Rights Watch, “Gay men are fed from the patriarchal values of Turkish society. They absorb values of discrimination against women.  They are intolerant of letting women have their own space for their own needs.”¹²⁶

Yet Yeşim said that before joining KAOS-GL, Ankara’s mixed organization,

I felt I was alone, I felt I was not lesbian but just someone completely different. The most important thing was, I couldn’t imagine that we could be a society, that these voices could form a community. I just felt my sexuality was a purely personal thing within me—because that was all I heard.

Two years ago, Lambda Istanbul and KAOS-GL had a joint meeting—and at the women’s session, there were 24 women. I have never forgotten because it was the biggest number of lesbians in one place I’d ever seen till then!

After meetings in the day, we went to one of our houses to talk. For me that night was very difficult even to imagine. So many women, talking about our lives! … We opened up and discussed and laughed. These were incredible things.

She added,

For lesbians the small deeds of activism—going to public demonstrations with our own banners and slogans, putting up posters— are not just a means, but an end in itself. They say, “I have the right to do this. To take my life in my hands.” At the same time, we must be much more visible, in streets, universities, everywhere. We have to continue to explore our emotions but also establish and make our principles stronger. And make our own law. There is a law which is written but we must make our own law. We need a law for liberation.¹²⁷