Anthropology at the Front Lines of Gender-Based Violence

5. "We Couldn't Just Throw Her in the Street": Gendered Violence and Women's Shelters in Turkey

71 5 “We Couldn’t Just Throw Her in the Street”: Gendered Violence and Women’s Shelters in Turkey Kim Shively In the past two decades, Turkey has made impressive efforts to deal with the problem of violence against women, by strengthening laws to criminalize batterers and developing public and private institutions to assist the victims of domestic violence. The new laws have largely been transplanted from international doctrines, and the institutions have been appropriated from and modeled on corresponding institutions in Europe and North America. This chapter investigates the process of what Sally Engle Merry (2006) has called the transplantation, appropriation, and translation of women’s shelter models from Europe into the Turkish state social service system. Based on research conducted into two women’s shelters in the western Turkish province of Izmir, this chapter examines the de facto role that these shelters play in dealing with violence against women. Where in Europe and North America, women’s shelters are set up specifically to provide refuge for victims of domestic violence (i.e., intimate partner violence), my research revealed that, even though the Izmir shelters were perpetually full, only a handful of the guests at the Izmir shelters were actually victims of domestic violence as defined in the United States and Europe. Indeed, the director of one of the shelters said that, quite frankly, among the women in the shelters only about 10 percent were there to escape domestic violence. Initially, I was shocked by this revelation, since these shelters were often exhibited by politicians and activists as a viable (if not ideal) state response to domestic violence. The shelter director, Ummuhan, said that 72   Anthropology at the Front Lines of Gender-Based Violence she had also been surprised that there were so few women there because of domestic violence. She had expected to be dealing entirely with battered women and their children but was now confronted with a wide range of issues that affect mostly poor and marginalized women. In this initial conversation with Ummuhan, I had to ask: “Why are there so few battered women in these shelters? Who are the women in these shelters?” Ummuhan seemed to be so overwhelmed by the day-to-day logistics of running a very dynamic women’s shelter that she had not really formulated a response to these questions, other than to say (to paraphrase), “What else can we do with the women who are here and need help, even though they are not battered? We can’t just throw them in the street!” As I made several visits to the shelters and spoke with the women and employees of these shelters, I came to realize that the process of institutional transplantation was not so clean and straightforward as the state might present or as some might presume. What I wish to show here is that a better way to think of these women’s shelters is not as a response to domestic violence as “intimate partner violence.” Rather, the domestic violence that women have to confront—and that the frontline workers have to deal with—can be characterized as structural violence that does not fit easily into the women’s rights activists’ discourse that dominates many human rights institutions with regard to domestic violence. Research Setting and Methods This investigation of the transplantation of the shelter system into the Turkish context is based on the status of two women’s shelters (kadın konukevleri —literally, “women’s guesthouses”) in Izmir province in western Turkey.1 I conducted research in the summers of 2004, 2006, and 2007 at these two shelters. One shelter, located in the northern Izmir munici­ pality of Çiğli, was established in 2001, replacing a smaller shelter that had existed in Izmir since 1988. I visited this shelter in all three summers of my research, though in 2006 it was closed for a much-needed expansion. (I toured the expansion project in 2006.) During construction, the guests and staff of that shelter were transferred to the second provincial shelter—a newly opened establishment in Aliağa municipality about fifty kilometers north of the city of Izmir. By the summer of 2007, both shelters—plus a third smaller one that I did not have a chance to visit—were open and filled to capacity. I conducted several long, open-ended interviews relating to women’s Gendered Violence and Women’s Shelters in Turkey   73 issues...