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Ozgecan Aslan: Outrage in Turkey after killing. Al Jazeera on Feb 17, 2015 Turkey's government says it will do more to address violence against women.The statement comes after the attempted rape and …More
Ozgecan Aslan: Outrage in Turkey after killing.

Al Jazeera on Feb 17, 2015 Turkey's government says it will do more to address violence against women.The statement comes after the attempted rape and then murder of a twenty-year-old student by a bus driver.The killing led to protests over the weekend and a viral social media campaign.www.nytimes.com/…/ozgecan-aslan-a…

ISTANBUL — Ozgecan Aslan, a 20-year-old college student, was the last person on the minibus traveling across the city of Mersin in southern Turkey on Feb. 11. Instead of taking her home, the driver is accused of veering into the woods and trying to rape her.

When she resisted, he allegedly beat her with an iron bar and stabbed her. Afterward, her hands were cut off in an apparent attempt to hide DNA evidence under her fingernails. The chief suspect’s father and a friend are accused of helping him burn her body.

Ms. Ozgecan’s death rallied crowds of protesters in cities across the country earlier this month. The hashtag #OzgecanAslan was tweeted more than three million times, and an online petition calling for harsh punishment against her attackers gathered almost a million signatures. Even Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has vowed to ensure that the killers receive “the heaviest penalty.”

If that happens, it will be an exception rather than the norm. Turkey saw nearly 300 women murdered last year, and 27 more just this past January, a 20 percent increase over the same period last year. Few of those killings received much news media and political attention.

Since the 1990s, activists have scored several legislative victories aimed at ending violence against women, and this Muslim country certainly leads the Middle East on the issue. But the laws have been undermined by loopholes that allow judges — mostly male — to reduce sentences at their discretion. In hundreds of cases, men who murdered were able to argue that a woman provoked them, or that their dignity was impugned, and they received a reduced sentence, some to just a few years in prison.

Over the last five months, I have worked alongside Turkish women’s rights activists researching dozens of domestic violence cases in which men have received little or no punishment for their crimes. In 2014, a man in eastern Turkey who stabbed his wife multiple times was given a reduced sentence after he argued she was wearing “provocative” leggings and speaking with another man. Also last year, a 62-year-old man who appeared on a TV dating show bragged about how he had killed two women, the first his wife, and later a lover. For those murders, he served a total of 14 years in prison.