Following a double homicide in Istanbul, hundreds of women staged anti-feminist demonstrations in Turkish cities.
An AFP correspondent said that hundreds of people in Istanbul screamed anti-Islamic slogans against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his AKP party.
Gunes Fadime Aksahin, the rally organiser, addressed the assembly, saying, “You are a government that lets young girls get killed.”
Gulizar Sezer, the mother of a young woman who was murdered, said: “I want an end to the massacre of our girls.” Her daughter’s body was found in June after being thrown into the sea wrapped in a carpet.
Other protests took place in Ankara and Izmir, according to a women’s rights federation. There have been similar protests every day for a week across the country, notably on university campuses.
Following the deaths of two young ladies in Istanbul this week, within 30 minutes of one another, there have been widespread demonstrations. One of the suspects in the murders committed suicide.
Officials stated that the two women and the suspect were all 19 years old.
Erdogan, who at first attributed the problem to social media and drink, pledged on Wednesday to strengthen the legal system and combat crime.
Turkey has had difficulty reducing the number of women killed.
One monitoring group says there have been 299 women murdered this year in the country of 85 million people, with another 160 suspect killings officially classed as suicides or accidents.
In 2021, Turkey withdrew from the Council of Europe convention on preventing violence against women, known as the Istanbul convention.
It obliges national authorities to investigate and punish violence against women.
