Reporting
Women Are Dying in Turkey
By Sophia Jones and Nicole Tung
On a quiet November evening in 2014, Eda Okutgen left her apartment in the coastal Turkish city of Izmir and ran for her life. She didn’t get far.
Her ex-husband, Ugur Buynak, had already stabbed her in the leg with a kitchen knife. And as he chased her down a flight of stairs, the successful 38-year-old businesswoman and mother screamed for help. She screamed in vain-neighbors locked their doors as Buynak fatally plunged the knife into his ex-wife. She bled out in the stairwell, her murder caught on CCTV footage that would play over and over on Turkish television.
“She was too good for this world,” said her older sister Nazli Okutgen, wiping away tears.
Eda’s murder, although shocking, is hardly a rarity. In Turkey, headlines often tell grisly tales of violence against women-in the street, on public transportation, and in the home. There was the 20-year-old student who was bludgeoned, burned, and thrown into a river by a bus driver who tried to rape her. There was the Turkish newscaster who, shortly after giving birth, was beaten so badly by her husband that she is now paralyzed. There was the woman shot dead by her husband in a hair salon after he was released by police and defied a restraining order. And then there was Eda, stabbed to death by her ex-husband in a stairwell as her young son hid several floors above.
Eda is one of thousands of Turkish women who have been murdered or assaulted in recent years. At least 414 women were killed in Turkey in 2015-16-most by their significant others and family members-up from 294 in 2014 and 237 in 2013, as documented by We Will Stop Women Murders, a cross-country organization that documents the murders of women and aids victims of violence and their families. And activists, lawyers, and survivors of violence say that the situation is getting worse-rights and protections for women are being curbed at an alarming rate. Under the increasingly authoritarian rule