By Onur Sen*
The on-going debate on the violence against women in Turkey is heated again following the brutal killing of a young Turkish woman. This unfortunate event has triggered a nationwide social reaction in the form of massive public protests. Based on the accumulated knowledge about modernization, I would like to analyze the bigger picture on this social problem.
My analysis is mainly a socio-economic one. I explicitly exclude the rich elite (the so-called top 1%) from my analysis since their role is irrelevant in this problem although their role is explanatory in other social issues. I also exclude peasants since their interaction with city life is very limited. My focus here is mainly on two socio-economic groups sharing a common space in urbanized areas, which I shall call here “the commons” and “the moderns”.
To start with the latter, the moderns are those with an above-average income, relatively secure jobs, higher education and who travel to the modern world or at least read about the modern world. The commons are those who have below-average income, are ignorant and yet brave and confident in their uninformed decisions. The problems of violence against women (or violence in general), the sexual harassment and rape, and the “neighborhood pressure” can all be explained with the conflict between the commons and the moderns in Turkey.
This conflict is cross cutting other social cleavages. Division on ideological or partisan lines cannot explain the conflict since there are left or right wing people in both groups and people who voted for Party A or Party B. Religious conservativism also cannot explain it since there are people who practice their religion among the moderns just as there are people who are less religious or atheist among the commons. They cannot be divided based on gender either, since a woman in the commons can be as judgmental or prejudice against the moderns as her male counterpart. The core of the problem lies in the conflict between the moderns who internalize the norms of the modern city life and the commons who cannot keep up with the urban life.
When I look at the patterns in violence, harassment or other types of pressure on women in Turkey, I see them more often within the commons or a member of the commons against a member of the moderns. Rarely, such actions happen among the moderns, such as the Garipoglu case, which is an outlier that can be explained with individual mental problems or in other cases with drug addiction.
But the general pattern I mentioned above is happening repeatedly in one particular group that needs to be explained at the group level rather than the individual level. Ironically, although such actions typically take place among the commons, they are protested mostly by the moderns.
Many scholars of modernization base their arguments on class divisions and put emphasis on working middle class to bring about modernization and democratic values, which include promoting civil rights and respecting human rights, including women rights. If these values would triumph in society, it is the role of the modern middle class. Founding fathers, who tried to build democratic institutions in a time when the commons were majority in the society, had to base the foundation of the Republic on elites since a middle class with such values did not exist at the time. However, promoting such values with this top-down approach cannot be consolidated or sustained without the support of the masses. That is the reason why Mustafa Kemal, foreseeing the problems with the common class, declared the first mission of the Republic “to reach the level of the modern civilizations” or to summarize it with one word: modernization.
Based on my analysis, the solution to the violence against women or more generally women rights issues in Turkey lies on the triumph of the moderns over the commons. This can only be done through expansion of the moderns at the expense of the commons and by increasing their influence on social life in the cities. Only then, an urban Turkish woman can truly enjoy freedom in public areas. The increasing public awareness on the issue with public protests, triggered by the recent events against women, is a perfect example of how this social change can be brought about. They can be seen as a result of expanding and increasing influence of the moderns over the commons in modern life.
*Onur Sen is a Fulbright scholar at Department of Political Science, Georgia State University, Atlanta. His research interests include conflict management, international political economy, and democratization.
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