Protests in Turkey over violence against women

ISTANBUL: Hundreds of women protested in Turkish cities against the murder of women in the latest rallies following a double slaying in Istanbul.

Hundreds in Istanbul chanted slogans denouncing President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Islamic-rooted AKP party, an AFP correspondent reported.

“You are a government that lets young girls get killed,” a rally organiser, Gunes Fadime Aksahin, told the crowd.

Gulizar Sezer, the mother of a young woman who was murdered, said: “I want an end to the massacre of our girls”. Her daughter’s body was found in June after being thrown into the sea wrapped in a carpet.

Other protests took place in Ankara and Izmir, according to a women’s rights federation. There have been similar protests every day for a week across the country, notably on university campuses.

The protests have erupted since the killing of two young women within 30 minutes of each other in Istanbul last week. A man suspected of carrying out the murders took his own life.

The suspect and the two women were all aged 19, said officials.

Erdogan, having initially blamed alcohol and social media, on Wednesday promised to toughen the justice system and crack down on crime.

Turkey has struggled to contain killings of women.

One monitoring group says there have been 299 women murdered this year in the country of 85 million people, with another 160 suspect killings officially classed as suicides or accidents.

In 2021, Turkey withdrew from the Council of Europe convention on preventing violence against women, known as the Istanbul convention. It obliges national authorities to investigate and punish violence against women.