The Secret Nesvan Committee, in conversation with Mor Dayanışma, a socialist-feminist organization in Turkey, explores systemic gender-based violence and institutional patriarchy in Turkey. Mor Dayanışma’s grassroots organizing against gender violence and its mobilization of working-class women highlight how gender oppression is deeply intertwined with class struggle. Their experience offers valuable lessons for feminists across the Middle East who are committed to collective organizing as a strategy for liberation.
Turkey’s shift toward Islamist neoliberal authoritarianism under Erdoğan’s “Neo-Ottomanism” vision has profound implications for women and queer movements across the region. From Turkey’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention to the expansion of state repression, proxy interventions in the Middle East, and military campaigns against the Kurds, this political project has imposed a colonial-patriarchal order on bodies and territories.
However, authoritarian patriarchal regimes are no longer confined to the Middle East and the Global South. With the rise of fascist movements in the U.S. and Europe, we are witnessing an intensification of state control over women’s and queer bodies worldwide. The criminalization of abortion, anti-trans legislation, and attacks on reproductive rights in the West demonstrate that the fight against patriarchal oppression is now a global struggle. Across different political contexts, governments use gender and sexuality as battlegrounds for broader class warfare, suppressing bodily autonomy to reinforce social hierarchies. This growing alignment between neoliberalism, nationalism, fascism, and patriarchal control makes international feminist solidarity more urgent than ever.
This discussion reflects on the challenges faced by women in Turkey but also offers strategies and insights for resisting institutionalized gender violence that can inspire feminist movements across the region. The Secret Nesvan Committee seeks to foster stronger cross-border collaboration between leftist feminists. If we believe that borders are arbitrary barriers to revolutionary solidarity, we must actively build connections beyond them.
Authoritarian regimes across the Middle East learn from each other’s methods of oppression, adapting strategies to suppress dissent and maintain power. To resist, we must strengthen our movements through shared knowledge, collective organizing, and transnational solidarity.
This interview highlights Mor Dayanışma’s approach to feminist resistance while emphasizing the urgency of regional collaboration against imperialism and patriarchy. Only through international solidarity can we challenge the structures of oppression that shape our lives.
Nesvan: On women’s rights in Turkey, especially violence against women (such as femicide and marital rape) How would you describe the current situation? Is the Turkish legal system effectively solving these problems, or are there gaps?
Mor Dayanışma: In 2011, Turkey ratified the Istanbul Convention, which protects women and LGBT+ persons against male violence. We know from the data we have that violence against women has increased with the impunity policies of the AKP government after the withdrawal. The AKP-MHP ruling coalition’s prioritization of the family over women, seeing the LGBTI+ movement as a disease and perversion, and trying to establish domination over women are some of the reasons why violence against women has increased at the hands of the state.
In the Turkish legal system, as mentioned above, especially after the withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention, women have been left more powerless in the face of male violence than before. Law No. 6284, passed into domestic law within the scope of the Istanbul Convention and still in force, still has many gaps as many state institutions and employees do not effectively implement it. Examples of such practices include the lack of attention given by law enforcement agencies to the protection cautionary decisions we receive under this law, the short-term issuance of these decisions, and the attrition of women in bureaucratic affairs.
Nesvan: What is the relationship between factors contributing to violence against women and power structures in society?
Mor Dayanışma: The current state and regime crisis in Turkey has long revealed that there are different power structures. Religious formations, sects, and fascist right-wing militarist groups, which are at the top of these, are engaged in practices that normalize violence against women. And of course, they draw strength from the lack of law in the country. What we see in many cases of femicide or harassment is that the male perpetrator is somehow connected to the state-public forces. This is what we saw most recently in the case of the murder of Narin Güran, who was murdered at the age of 7. We do not accept the months-long trial being reduced to a simple domestic incident. Right after Narin’s murder, an AKP-MHP said, “Sometimes there are things we don’t know, sometimes there are things we should know but not say. Because the family are our friends.” The discovery of an arsenal of weapons in the village after the murder, the fact that the village was linked to Hezbollah-contra gives many clues that it was not a simple murder.
And unfortunately, Narin is not the only example. Especially in recent years, there has been an increase in young university students being dragged into prostitution, and in the emergence of links with state and law enforcement agencies.
Nesvan: What factors limit women’s access to abortion (or the option to terminate a pregnancy) and what do they mean for becoming a mother? How does it affect women who do not want pregnancy?
Mor Dayanışma: Legal abortion is still a problem in Turkey and there are serious problems for women to access healthy abortion. Especially abortion for women who want to terminate pregnancies that did not occur within the marriage union; healthy and accessible way is far from being. Although abortion is legal in Turkey, it must be performed in public hospitals with the husband’s permission and the fact that many doctors working in public hospitals refrain from performing abortions pushes women to refer to backstreet abortions.
Currently, abortion is available in only 10 out of approximately 200 public hospitals in Turkey. In other words, in most provinces, women are forced to seek care at private hospitals or undergo the procedure in unsafe and unsanitary conditions.
As of now, the cost of self-managed abortion starts at 20,000 lira (approximatelly $557), which is roughly equivalent to the minimum wage. This creates a stark class divide: those who can afford it may navigate the barriers and access private care, while those who cannot are left with two devastating choices, forced childbirth or resorting to unsafe, life-threatening procedures.
The AKP government is forcing women to have abortions at the cost of their lives in unhealthy, precarious, and very costly ways. But of course, until we come to abortion as a means of contraception, we need to talk about the fact that methods such as birth control pills, condoms, and spirals are no longer accessible. One of the most important consequences of the AKP government’s familistic and conservative policies has been the lack of access to these control methods. These methods, which used to be provided free of charge at Family Health Centers in every neighborhood, are no longer available to women in many centers. The family policies that go hand in hand with the economic crisis and high inflation seriously threaten women’s health.
Nesvan: To what extent is the responsibility for childcare and caregiving seen as a collective task? About childcare for families in Turkey, how widespread are care facilities and support systems?
Mor Dayanışma: Although childcare in Turkey is more collective than in the past, women are still largely responsible for childcare.
In cases where both parents are working, again according to scientific data, it is more common for women to take time away from work, leave their jobs, or even if they do not leave their jobs, they are still responsible for childcare.
Women have much more responsibility for childcare than men. Again, in most families, almost all of the people who receive childcare support are women. Although these women are often older women who are related to their parents, it is important to note that this opportunity.
In cases where this is not the case, paid support is provided by female caregivers. In Turkey, the social structure of the family has placed the main responsibility for childcare and care on the shoulders of women. As for childcare facilities, there are very few public daycare centers and private daycare centers are quite common. In cases where it is necessary, baby care is provided privately in public day-care centers and nursing homes. A certain part of this support is also provided to parents by municipalities, sometimes cheaper and sometimes free of charge. When we look at the 2025 budget of the Ministry of Family and Social Policies, we see that the number of disabled care centers was 106 in 2023, and while the target was to increase it to 109 in 2024, this did not happen. In the 2025 budget draft, it is stated that no new centers will be opened. The number of kindergartens and daycare centers, which should be in every neighborhood, is very insufficient. There are more than 32,000 neighborhoods in Turkey and the number of nurseries and daycare centers affiliated with the Ministry of Family and Social Services is 2,298. These data show that the care of children, the disabled and the elderly falls on the shoulders of women.
Nesvan: What are the most important social, political, and economic challenges women face in Turkey today? (How do these challenges intersect with class and labor issues?)
Mor Dayanışma: The two most important agendas of women in Turkey right now are violence against women/femicides and women’s poverty. Women are the first to be affected by the recent increase in unemployment, war, and crisis in Turkey, and women are facing serious unemployment and poverty. After the 1980 military coup, the left and the class movement weakened even more in the face of the anti-worker policies implemented by the AKP government. We are in a period when workers’ unionization, one of the most basic rights, is marginalized and bosses are protected more. What we see in the strikes against unemployment and job losses, which have increased especially after the pandemic, is that women workers are at the forefront. Workers who are wanted to be imprisoned in slavery in terms of wage increases, meal/WC breaks, shuttle service, extra shifts, and days off for decent living conditions are organizing resistances that last for days. The Polenez resistance, which has been going on for weeks, is one of them.
But women’s poverty does not only occur in the field of wage labor. According to the DİSK-AR report, only 3 out of every 10 women in the country are in working life, while the laborization continues to increase. It is known that the number of broadly defined female unemployed is around 4.5 million and that nearly 12 million women are unable to participate in working life due to family, personal reasons, and household chores. While 30.8 percent of women work informally, 3 million 248 thousand women lack social security. In these days of minimum wage and ministerial budget negotiations, we know that women’s invisible, unpaid labor is not on the agenda and that women-positive budgeting is not done.
Women, who are seen as the “relievers” of the economic crisis, are expected to comfort men and keep the family together. Poverty is one of the reasons why family and domestic violence has increased in this period. Left politics and organizations have to include the specific exploitation of women in crisis situations in their political work and fight against it. They must do this both within their organizations and in street politics.
On the other hand, the government’s attempt to accustom women to a culture of charity imprisons women in the home and in the care of the sick and disabled. The state sees care labor as labor, but says: “There is no insurance for you, you will work precariously and cheaply”. With the increase last year, this labor is now paid 9000 TL. That is half of the 2024 minimum wage. To sum up; As capital needs more cheap labor power, patriarchal violence has paved the way for patriarchal violence (lawlessness, impunity, familist-conservative policies) and the areas of exploitation of capitalism have diversified (hybrid, flexible, remote work, piecework)
Nesvan: How has the rise of authoritarianism and Islamism in Turkey affected the women’s rights movement, especially for working-class women?
Mor Dayanışma: Especially in recent years, the authoritarianization moves taken by the AKP-MHP government have affected women in a very negative way. The example we gave above about the dismissal of workers who are union members is one of them. We think that authoritarianism remains a mild concept, and fascist practices are in effect. Especially attacks against the Kurdish Women’s Movement and attacks against socialist groups like us have diversified. Although the government can not stop the women’s movement in general, it constantly tries to criminalize it and makes it vulnerable to lynching with bot accounts known to belong to the government on social media. Conservatization follows. The Ministry of National Education and the Directorate of Religious Affairs are at the forefront of this. And of course, for those who cannot access basic citizenship rights, conservatization is another cost of the economic crisis. “If you can’t send your child to a state kindergarten/nursery school/course, have him/her enroll in religious sects’ courses ”. “If socializing outside is expensive, come to the activities of religious structures”. In this respect, we appreciate the groups that have been trying to grow the feminist struggle among Muslim women in recent years, even if they have little contact with the class movement or have not yet organized widely.
Nesvan: What similarities and differences do you see in the approaches and strategies adopted by feminist activists and movements in Turkey and other countries in the particular region, such as Iran, and how can regional feminist collaborations be encouraged?
Mor Dayanışma: We would like to be self-critical and say that we don’t know much about the organizational work of feminist activists in Iran in recent years. What we noticed in the international symposium we organized last year was this: Many women’s organizations in Iran have to be linked to the state to continue their work, and this has caused women who call themselves feminists to carry out feminist struggle as an individual lifestyle. We know that there are women’s platforms where women’s policies are carried out, and spontaneous street mobilization has been very active for a long time. We saw this in the White Wednesday protests and the Mahsa Amini protests.
Women’s platforms are still active in many provinces in Turkey and these platforms are made up of representatives of women’s organizations. Some places have separate platforms for November 25th and March 8th. We would like to say that we have detected a weakening in women’s organizations in the past period and that our reflex actions are mainly on the issues of femicides and male violence.
We think that the women’s movement needs a long-term strategic plan, especially in the context of the war environment, deep poverty, and the reality of migration experienced by the peoples of the Middle East. We need to create our own agendas, knowing that our goal is women’s liberation, testing this belief day by day both theoretically and practically, but not getting stuck in the agendas imposed on us by patriarchal capitalist governments. The women’s movements in the Middle East, whose revolutionary character has been more prominent for a long time, are paving the stones of a historical process in this respect.
This reality, which manifests itself in the slogan “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi”, is an important example of what regional collaborations correspond to tactically, starting from the ground of women’s solidarity. We need to observe the damages of the post-modern, post-Marxist ideology in our structures and women’s approaches to organizing and take measures accordingly. The normalization of spontaneous, individual, fragmented, day-to-day organizing practices is precisely what serves the patriarchal capitalist order through these ideologies. But for us women, whose consciousness and body come under attack every day, it is necessary to expose this in our female consciousness, not to give up systematic juxtaposition and the street. We should not forget what feminist consciousness-raising activities have brought to the women’s movement, and in these times we need to diversify them with other tools appropriate to our times. We need to prepare our cadres every day for the phrase “this century will be the century of women” that women often used after the Sudanese revolution. It is important to remember that in a time of increasing speed and unpredictability in a time of war, this will also create opportunities for the feminist movement.
Nesvan: How do you encourage working-class women to get involved in feminist organizing, especially those who face economic or political struggles? Do trade unions and worker-led organizations play a role in this organizing?
Mor Dayanışma: We carry out the organization of women workers through discussion topics such as flexible working conditions, invisible labor, paid labor, equal pay for equal work, and working conditions. We try to support women workers in different mechanisms (legal commission, psychosocial commission, etc.) against the negative situations they experience within the patriarchal capitalist system. We try to organize the necessary workshops and gatherings for women workers to know and protect their legal rights. Strike visits and pursuit of lawsuits are examples of these.
Before protests, we organize panels to inform people about their rights in case of arrest and create visual content for social media. We are also expanding our network of feminist lawyers, holding sessions on legal rights, and working to shape public opinion through feminist representatives and women in parliament.
Unfortunately, the inclusion of working-class women in feminist organizing is only the work of a few leftist organizations with a feminist perspective. In Turkey, it is possible to talk about a separation between the women’s movement and the feminist movement. Therefore, it is necessary to say that working-class women express themselves more in an organized way in the women’s movement, but they are not very much involved in feminist organizing/movement with the consciousness of organizing and defending feminist ideology. This can cause working-class women to distance themselves from the feminist movement due to the traditions of socialist women who are organizers and the anti-feminist, non-feminist nature of the leftist organizations they are members of. Here, we are mainly bending the stick to organized socialist subjects because feminist organizing in Turkey is rather spontaneous and fragmented.
This is a manifestation of the post-Marxist perspective mentioned above. However, it must be said that there are both theoretical and practical differences in the organizing experiences of the feminist movement. For example, an organization that calls itself a socialist feminist like us attaches importance to massification and does not leave the process of more women subjects becoming feminists to spontaneous consciousness. But only in collective, autonomous feminist structures, you don’t see such a concern for expansion/massification. Or, to the question of how more women can become feminists, they might answer something like: “when they want to and when they put effort”. In other words, while it is our raison d’être to attract a working-class woman to feminism through a revolutionary intervention, this is not the case for those kinds of structures. Because they do not build their structures on revolutionary, materialist grounds in the classical sense we know. This leads to a weakening of feminist intervention in the lives of working-class women, a delay in transformation, and a narrowing of the feminist movement.
Trade unions are far behind in organizing working-class women into the feminist movement. Although DİSK and KESK are the two union federations that are the best in this regard, the union bureaucracy has been causing many problems for a long time. After the 2015 FETO coup attempt, revolutionary unions, which were damaged and purged, have not yet been able to open up a new organizing outlet for the feminist movement. It is in this period that it is most possible to expose the deep-rooted connection of capitalism, economic crisis, and poverty with patriarchy and organize many women. Of course, this requires more feminists to organize and make politics in those unions. In this respect, we can say that worker-led organizations that include feminist ideology in their paradigm, albeit in small numbers, are more promising.
Nesvan: How do you describe the successful tactics to challenge patriarchal policies and labor laws that unequally affect working women?
Mor Dayanışma: The women’s struggle is multi-faceted. Femicide, women’s poverty, women’s employment, women in the labor force.
The issues such as flexible working hours and invisible women’s labor are among the important issues we discuss. In the face of the specific exploitation of women’s labor, Mor Dayanışma increases women’s solidarity, supports strikes, follows women’s cases, and uses methods that expose the capital and bosses. Our actions in support of 2019 Flormar and 2024 Özak Textile workers are among the most prominent actions in this respect.
Nesvan: How do you deal with state pressure or legal restrictions that may limit women’s efforts to organize in Turkey and how do you ensure the safety of activists, especially working-class women?
Mor Dayanışma: As the women’s movement in Turkey, we are frequently confronted with increasing state violence. Especially after the withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention, women’s protests in almost every province, protests against the trustees appointed to the will of the people after the local elections, child abuse, and murders.
We have seen the most naked form of police and state violence during the protests organized for the Kurdish revolutionary movement. On the other hand, the detentions and arrests, especially of Kurdish and revolutionary women, and the psychological and physical violence we are subjected to during these processes are the most obvious examples of this.
It would not be wrong to say that there is state pressure on every woman who speaks out because of what they are exposed to, what they see, and what they know in their daily lives, not only on women involved in organized struggle. Attempts to intimidate women at police stations and courthouses are among the examples of this. On the other hand, marches, statements, and events we want to hold on important days for the women’s movement such as 8 March and 25 November are also prevented by state violence in every province. In the face of all these, we are trying to ensure the security of women and women’s organizations by strengthening our legal bases and raising our voices, and standing side by side against every prevention. We say ‘If there is male violence, male-state violence, our resistance is de facto legitimate’ by not giving in to any obstruction, pressure, detention, or arrest. We cannot expect every woman to come to every action or for all women to react with the same strength in every action. But this is exactly where women’s solidarity comes into play. If we are in a blockade, it is one of our important criteria to get our friends out of there, and to be responsible for each other. Some of the methods include following the detentions and trials and showing everyone that women are not alone, publicizing this, and spreading it on social media.
Nesvan: Given the growing regional tensions and imperialist wars in Gaza and Lebanon, what measures should women’s organizations take to contribute to anti-war and anti-capitalist struggles?
Mor Dayanışma: The Assad regime has fallen in Syria, genocide continues in Gaza and the Israeli-US imperialists want to expand their capital accumulation by exploiting peoples, nature, and women. We are in a new war over territory and capital accumulation, where after 13 years, jihadist, and paramilitary structures like ISIS have begun to operate as de facto states in the region. Women’s anti-war struggle is more essential than ever. We must expose that this war is waged by the capitalists against the working class, against the people, against the brotherhood of peoples, against women, against nature. If the reproduction of a group of rich men and male states is based on the destruction of women’s bodies and minds, then we need more radical actions. The 4B movement spreading from Korea can be shown as a good example of this recently. But we need to organize locally, in neighborhoods, house by house. ISIS is still in our memories like yesterday, Gaza is in front of our eyes. Asking for peace will be declared a crime, and absurd laws such as ‘influence agency’ will be tried to be passed in Turkey. But we must organize everywhere, from the assemblies to the streets, and we must come to power where we are.
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