Mon, Jul 17, 2006 page6

• `Shamed' girls told to kill themselves in rural Turkey

  DEATH SENTENCE Girls deemed to have brought dishonor to their families used to be killed, but stricter laws mean they are now being told to do the deed themselves

  • NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  For Derya, a waiflike girl of 17, the order to kill herself came from an uncle and was delivered in a text message to her cellphone.

  "You have blackened our name," it read. "Kill yourself and clean our shame or we will kill you first."

  Derya said that her crime was to become involved with a boy she had met at school. She knew the risks: Her aunt had been killed by her grandfather for seeing a boy. But after having been cloistered and veiled for most of her life, she said, she felt free for the first time and wanted to express her independence.

  When news of the love affair spread to her family, she said, her mother warned her that her father would kill her. But she refused to listen. Then came the threatening text messages, sent by her brothers and uncles, sometimes 15 a day. Derya said they were the equivalent of a death sentence.

  Consumed by shame and fearing for her life, she said, she decided to carry out her family's wishes. First, she said, she jumped into the Tigris River, but she survived. Next she tried hanging herself, but an uncle cut her down. Then she slashed her wrists with a kitchen knife.

  "My family attacked my personality, and I felt I had committed the biggest sin in the world," she said from a women's shelter where she had traded in her veil for a T-shirt and jeans.

  She declined to give her last name for fear that her family was still hunting her.

  "I felt I had no right to dishonor my family, that I have no right to be alive. So I decided to respect my family's desire and to die," she said.

  Every few weeks in Batman and the surrounding area in southeast Anatolia, which is poor, rural and deeply influenced by conservative Islam, a young woman tries to take her life. Others have been stoned to death, strangled, shot or buried alive. Their offenses ranged from stealing a glance at a boy to wearing a short skirt, wanting to go to the movies, being raped by a stranger or relative or having consensual sex.

  Hoping to join the EU, Turkey has tightened the punishment for attacks on women and girls who have committed such offenses. But the violence has continued, if by different means: Parents are trying to spare their sons from the harsh punishments associated with killing their sisters by pressing the daughters to take their own lives instead.

  "Families of disgraced girls are choosing between sacrificing a son to a life in prison by designating him to kill his sister or forcing their daughters to kill themselves," said Yilmaz Akinci, who works for a rural development group. "Rather than losing two children, most opt for the latter option."

  Women's groups here say the evidence suggests that a growing number of girls considered to be dishonored are being locked in a room for days with rat poison, a pistol or a rope, and told by their families that the only thing resting between their disgrace and redemption is death.

  Batman (pronounced bot-MON) is a grim and dusty city of 250,000 people where religion is clashing with Turkey's official secularism. The city was the setting for the latest novel by the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, Snow, which chronicled a journalist's investigation of a suicide epidemic among teenage girls.

  In the past six years, there have been 165 suicides or suicide attempts in Batman, 102 of them by women. As many as 36 women have killed themselves since the start of this year, according to the UN. The organization estimates that 5,000 women are killed each year around the world by relatives who accuse them of bringing dishonor on their families; the majority of the killings are in the Middle East.

  Psychologists here say social upheavals in a region rocked by terrorism have played a role in the suicides. Many of the victims come from families in rural villages who have been displaced from the mountains to the cities because of warfare between Turkey and a Kurdish guerrilla group that wants to create an independent state for Kurds in southeastern Turkey.

  Young women like Derya, who have previously led protected lives under the rigid moral strictures of their families and Islam, are suddenly finding themselves in the modern Turkey of Internet dating and MTV. The shift can create dangerous tensions, sometimes lethal ones, between their families and the secular values of the republic.

  When a woman is suspected of engaging in sexual relations out of wedlock, her male relatives convene a family council to decide her sentence. Once news of the family's shame has spread to the community, the family typically rules that only through death can its honor be restored.

  Derya said that the underlying problem was inequality between the sexes, even though the prophet Mohammed argued in favor of empowering women.

  "In my village and in my father's tribe, boys are in the sky while girls are treated as if they are under the earth," she said. "As long as families do not trust their daughters, bad things will continue to happen."
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