A Study of Femicide in Turkey From 2010 to 2017

Abstract

This paper presents a Turkey-wide analysis of 1,000 femicide cases, collected from 100 newspapers between 2010 and 2017. The study seeks to contribute to the international femicide literature by highlighting the background and reasons for these murders, as characterized by the newspapers. The methodology involved frequency and chi-square analysis of the data retrieved from 100 newspapers collected from the homepage of kadincinayetleri.org. The study reveals that a woman’s intimate partner is the perpetrator in the highest number of femicide cases. The most common motives for femicides in international micro-level studies are (1) possessiveness and jealousy and (2) loss, separation, or divorce. The present study found these to be the first- and third-highest motives for femicide in Turkey. The motives of femicides can be interpreted in the macro-level analysis as women’s resistance to men’s domination; their demand for control over women escalates to murdering the woman as a form of backlash.