Turkey: Konya women call for nat'l sex, housework strike - Turkey - ANSAMed.it
(ANSAmed) - ANKARA, APRIL 16 - A women's association on Tuesday issued a call for women to go on a 41-day sex and housework strike to protest endemic violence against women in Turkey, where reported sex crimes have multiplied by 400% since 2002.
Turkey has been shaken by recent reports of the gang-rape of a 13-year-old girl by 29 men in the city of Golcuk. A few weeks ago, a 12-year-old girl who had been gang-raped by 26 men in Mardin, in Eastern Anatolia, wrote to the minister of justice because all the defendants in her rape trial were released. ''Don't you have a little girl? What would you do if your own daughter had suffered what I did? The accused have all been freed. What is to be of my life?'' the child wrote to the minister. A Karikkale University survey found that 34% of Turkish men think beating one's wife ''is occasionally necessary'', while one in five men, or 18%, believe the man to be the boss and that ''he is free to use violence when necessary'', and another 11.8% said women must be punished ''when they go against their husbands''.