Protecting Women, Punishing "Perverts": When Feminist Demands for Legal Reforms Meet Conservative Gender Politics


Tuğçe Ellialtı-Köse, University of Guelph

Twenty-first century Turkey can be best identified by two virtually incompatible trends: a wave of transformative, if not altogether progressive, legislative reforms that remade many aspects of law, and the detrimental effects of the increasing authoritarianism of the government on the rule of law. It is within this context that I examine the making of the sexual assault law, including its drafting, which witnessed many controversies and disagreements, mainly between women’s groups and the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government. I argue that, despite bringing about important changes, the process of legal reforms operated through a series of inclusions and exclusions within which the demands of women’s groups were appropriated and reinterpreted by the government, resulting in a rather narrow understanding of violence against women and greater emphasis on punishment in sexual violence cases. Engaging with the insights of the recent feminist socio-legal scholarship on sexual violence and the law, I discuss the gendered effects of these reforms within the context of AKP’s reconfiguration of the state and their implications for women’s relationship with the state in Turkey. I show that, within the frame of the conservative politics of the AKP, the legal reforms contributed to the pathologization of sexual violence and framing of it as a moral issue that is to be almost exclusively dealt with by the punitive instruments of the state. I argue that this entire process reflects a new form of state feminism within which the Turkish state redefines itself as the protector of women (and children) vis-à-vis the pathologized perpetrators of sexual assault through its apparatus of punishment. I further argue that the effect of this has been the singularization, decontextualization, and depoliticization of sexual violence to the detriment of the agenda of the women’s and feminist movement. I conclude with a discussion of the current debates on medical castration and capital punishment that the AKP government has proposed as potentially prospective methods of punishment in cases of sexual violence.

This paper will be presented at the following session: