Women Protesters in Turkey Brave Sexual Harassment
The systematic sexual harassment of female Turkish protesters in custody is used as a weapon to deter them and marginalize the protest movement.
On Sept. 11, a story broke about a female student taken into custody at one of the most prestigious universities of Turkey, Middle East Technical University (METU). Ezgi Ozen and her friends were protesting a government road project that may destroy 3,000 trees on the METU campus and nearby neighborhoods. Another protester was able to shoot a video of Ozen being handcuffed and escorted to police vehicles. The video shows an officer yelling, “If she resists, her arm will be broken.” Unarmed and relatively small, could Ozen really have “resisted” the police?
After she was released, Ozen announced that 200 police officers verbally and sexually harassed her while in custody. She said, “They all took turns touching me.” During the Gezi protests, we read several stories of sexual, physical and verbal harassment of women, so much so that the women of Gezi had to organize under the banner “No to Sexual Harassment in Custody” ("Direniste Polis Tacizine Hayir"). Given that Turkish culture shuns the victim of sexual harassment, and the lack of hope among Turks for any kind of compensation from the police for abuses, it is safe to assume the number of incidents are higher than reported.
As other Al-Monitor contributors have explained, Turkey is witnessing a second wave of Gezi protests. METU is one of those sore spots. Students there failed to greet Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in an affectionate manner during his last visit in December 2012. Indeed, METU hosted one of the first rather unpleasant anti-Erdogan protests. Currently, 45 students are under investigation, with prosecutors asking for up to six years of imprisonment. In addition, nine students are facing charges for possible terror-group membership. Several mainstream media outlets refer to METU as a “hotbed of left-wing organizations,” and this is no compliment in Turkey.
With this second wave of protests, many pundits have observed that while the nature and extent of police suppression is different for each neighborhood, it has increased overall since May. Intriguingly, during the first days of the protests, Erdogan admitted that the police had used excessive force, and spoke of a possible investigation into those incidents, but the violence has continued to climb ever since. With six dead — including one police officer — since the end of May 2013, the Turkish government’s perspective is hard to decode. For example, on Sept. 13, Minister for EU Affairs and Chief Negotiator Egemen Bagis commented, “The deaths of Gezi are trivial incidents compared to Syria, right?” At the end of June, Erdogan said, “Our police have passed the test of democracy with flying colors during Gezi protests. Our police have written a legend, acting within the limits of law.” However, the increasing number of police-brutality videos and allegations from victims of abuse in custody force us to question Erdogan’s statement.
