In her article in the HDP Women’s Council Member Hatice Ödemiş, argues that the combination of sexism and racism makes it impossible for refugee women to get out of the cycle of violence, as they become more vulnerable to sexual exploitation and violence inside or outside the family.
Hatice Ödemiş / Yeni Yaşam Kadın
Let’s take a look at how the difficult the life of refugee women has become an even more inextricable cycle of violence and exclusion with the rising racism, and how it affects individual lives…
Emani El Rahmun, a refugee woman who came to Turkey due to the war in Syria, was raped by two men on July 7, 2017 in Sakarya. Along with Emani, who was pregnant, her 10-month-old baby was found murdered.
Ugandan immigrant Jesca Nankabirwa was working in a textile factory in Sultangazi. She disappeared on September 6, 2014. She was found in a hospital morgue four days after She disappeared. Jesca was thrown out of the window by a man in Fatih.
Afghan Fatima was killed by her ex-husband, the man she rejected Afghan Zekiye’s “offer to be a second wife”. It is his relatives and lovers who killed Moroccan Samira and Russian Tatyana.
Emani, Jesca, Fatima, Zekiye… They have been the target of male violence in Turkey, where they live as refugees or economic migrants.
So, what are thousands of refugee migrant women going through in Turkey, where they came to start a new life? What mechanisms can they access in the face of systematic male violence? However, how are refugee women affected by the rising racist and nationalist wave, which we knew about (in many cases we were not even aware of) when they died?
Neo-racism, also called cultural racism, focuses on cultural differences between ethnic groups, unlike racism based on claims of biological difference, and these cultural differences are believed to be inherent and insurmountable to communities. However, discrimination on cultural grounds leads to discrimination, exploitation and violence, just like biological racism. Again, as in classical racism, it abstracts people from their individual identities and targets their humanity.
Cultural racism that does not refer to a biological attribute such as “race” is more insidious and therefore harder to spot. The sentences that we hear frequently lately, starting with “I am not racist, but…” and continuing with wholesale stereotypes without taking into account the differences among individuals belonging to an ethnic group, are precisely the expressions that correspond to this neo-racism. Such a view covers what people have been through concretely, for example, the experiences of violence that refugee women have been subjected to because they are women in their country of origin or on their migration routes, and it makes it difficult for them to get out of the cycle of violence. Let’s take a look at how the difficult life that refugee women currently live has turned into an even more inextricable cycle of violence and exclusion with the rising racism, and how it affects individual lives.
Women forced to migrate by poverty and war are harassed and raped on the way to migration; they are dealing with human traffickers. The dangers that await them in the countries they have arrived in never diminish. When they are subjected to male violence on the street or at home, whether they are from Turkey or not, or in the workplace where they work in cheap and insecure jobs, in very difficult conditions, they refrain from applying to any authority or complaining about sexual violence, harassment, discrimination, exploitation and ill-treatment. Women who are frightened by the threat of deportation either do not have information about the application mechanisms they can access in the face of injustice, or the discrimination they face due to rising racism prevents them from applying.
This article is translated by SES, Equality Justice, Women Platform
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