Marry me so that I can rape you again
Turkey’s ruling party has begun a second attempt at introducing a law to grant rapists amnesty as long as they marry their victim, four years after a similar bill sparked outrage at home and internationally.
Similarly, do they plan to introduce a law granting murderers amnesty as long as they dig up their victim and prop her/him up in a corner of the living room?
Also, is this “marriage” of which you speak at all consensual at all? Or is it just a matter of the man “marrying” his victim exactly the way he abused her in the first place? The second is much the more likely, don’t you think? How many people actually want to be married to the very person who abused them?
The legislation, which was first debated by parliament on 16 January, would give men suspended sentences for child sex offences if the two parties get married and the age difference between them is less than 10 years.
Opposition parties and women’s rights groups have been quick to point out that the bill in effect legitimises child marriage and statutory rape in a country where the legal age of consent is 18.
Almost as if that’s the point, isn’t it.
Fidan Ataselim, the general secretary of the activist group We Will Stop Femicide, said the new bill was an attempt by the government to erase evidence of Turkey’s growing epidemic of violence against girls and women.
The group, which has tracked gender-related violence and deaths since Turkish authorities stopped doing so in 2009, estimates that more than 2,600 women have been murdered in the last decade, and the number of killings has increased steadily each year.
Anything to do with the fact that Turkey has been steadily desecularizing during that time?
Writing in the Cumhuriyet newspaper, Dr Adem Sözüer, the head of Istanbul University’s criminal and criminal procedure law department, said the new bill was likely to increase rates of violence against women and children because it “legitimises the mentality that women are objects to possess or exist for sexual satisfaction”.
Just say no, women of Turkey.
I’ll bet they’re just on the cusp of introducing other laws that deal with other “property” the exact same way. Steal a car? Well, as long as you drive it and don’t let it get _TOO_ beat up, no problem. Steal money? Just promise to spend it (maybe a little to the local mosque), and all is forgiven…
A little over 30 years ago, when I was living and working in Ankara, I had a colleague who was dating a Turkish woman whose family lived in a village somewhere south of Ankara. The family seemed not to object, including her socialist brother who also lived in the city, but when they announced their plans to marry, the brother whisked her away to their village, where she was locked up in their house. Turns out her father had lived in England and, because of his experiences there, hated all English people and certainly wasn’t going to let his daughter marry one. My colleague though, with the help of a friend, was able to drive to the village one night and rescue her, and they drove to Istanbul where they stayed a night in a hotel before getting a marriage license. At that point the family relented, not because they had a change of heart or out of any romantic sensibilities, but because by spending the night with a man (even though, according to my colleague, they didn’t do anything) she was ruined.
So now if this law is passed, how will the family react when 22-year-old Mustafa rapes 13-year-old Hatice?
Does this go back to the Old Testament, where rape of an unmarried woman was considered a violation of her father’s property rights?
Maroon/Colin
‘Rape,’ in stone-age laws, was a property crime. So a mutually planned elopement was as much a ‘rape’ as an assault in a parking lot.