“The properties and women of the putschists belong to the nation now,” read a tweet from Veysel Taşkın, one of the administrators of Trabzonspor, a football club in the Black Sea city, a stronghold of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), the party of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Turkish president. In Turkey, the secular values inspired by the founding father of the nation, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, appear to be in decline, along with gender equality. Since Erdoğan’s rise to power in the early 2000s, often referred to as “Sultan,” he reintroduced the headscarf in schools and public offices—reversing Atatürk’s 1924 ban. Following the attempted coup in 2016, Turkey saw a rise in violence against women.
This has coincided with the disappearance of women from the public sphere and the advancement of radical Islam, leading to a widespread curtailing of women’s rights. Numerous secular Turkish women have reported an increasing sense of insecurity and a tendency towards self-censorship in their behavior, habits, or clothing. Appearing in public with bare arms or legs subjects them to growing verbal or physical harassment from conservative groups. In November 2016, a proposal from Erdoğan’s party to amend the laws concerning so-called “child brides” was discussed in Parliament. The controversial proposal would have allowed marriages in cases of statutory rape involving girls under the age of 16, the current legal minimum for marriage.