ISTANBUL – Turkish Daily News

Her father raped her and her mother learned of it when she was five-month pregnant. The verdict from the family: Death.

Her husband thought she was impregnated by another man. Verdict from the family: Death.

A husband cut his wife’s throat, but luckily, she survived.

She left her husband, whom she was forced to marry. She had fallen in love with another man. Verdict from the family: Death.

In the past four years, a total of 158 women from eastern and southeastern Anatolia applied to the Women’s Center (KA-MER) stating they are threatened with honor-killings, three of who could not be rescued and died. Twenty-three among these women were forced to commit suicide to execute the verdict, showing a relationship between the number of suicides and so-called honor killings, said KA-MER in a report titled "We Can Stop It".

KA-MER, founded in the eastern Anatolian city of Diyarbakır in 2003, has worked on the issues of violence and honor killings in the east and southeast Anatolian regions.

Twenty-three women faced verdicts of death simply because they met with or escaped with the men they love, according to the report. The number of raped or harassed who "had to die" was 19.

Of the cases of women sentenced to death, 27 were discovered to be "unfounded aspersions."

Various motives:

Though there are various reasons behind honor killings, disobedience was found to be the reason behind most cases with 37 women, or 23.4 percent. Disobedience was defined in numerous ways: refusing to marry the person the family had chosen, refusing to have sex with a brother-in-law or father, not accepting prostitution, not fulfilling the demands of the husbands, fathers, brothers or other elders or complaining about husbands raping their daughters or interrupting man-to-man conversations.

The death verdicts mainly come from the family of the victim, the report shows. In the cases of 56 women, their families decided that they should die. The father has the most clout in the verdict, and 37 of the fathers decided on death. The second decision-maker is the husband, 55 of who sentenced their wives to death.

A majority of the decision makers have no education, the report shows. While 65 of them are illiterate, 42 know how to read and write yet had no formal school education. It is observed that as the level of education increases, the rate of death verdicts decrease.

Light at the end of the tunnel:

The fact that honor killings still exist in Turkey makes it necessary for urgent measures to be taken. "The responsibility to solve the problem, which will disappear when the level of education increases along with economic development, rests with all citizens and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), as well as with public institutions and organizations," said Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in a circular issued last summer.

The report is the fourth and last study by KA-MER on the issue. It "is a clear evidence of a revolutionary stance on the problem," said Aysun Sayın, the secretary-general of the Association to Support Female Candidates (KA-DER), drawing attention to how the issue has become "visible" to the public.

KA-MER’s report "showed the right way for a solution," she continued. "If the government sincerely wants to solve the problem, it can broaden this work. Women, through various organizations, are doing everything they can. But the government has to help them."

With such reports, a permanent solution to the problem becomes easier, says Sayın. The government now should provide the budget, the human resource and "allow the mechanism to stop honor-killings start," she emphasized.

Sociologist Pınar Selek, added that the issue is becoming crucial "in a good way, in a way to solve it, to change the fate of women by women themselves."

The KA-MER report also included an optimistic end-note, announcing that "all women who applied for help from the organization in 2007" are still alive.