Ayşe Gül Altınay
Published: 2009
Total Pages: 103
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To trace women's experience of and the feminist struggle against domestic violence by male spouses (the major form of gender-based violence addressed by second-wave feminism in Turkey) from the late 1980s till today, we conducted an 18-month research project titled "Domestic Violence and the Struggle against It," supported by TÜBİTAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey). The project had two legs. First, based on in-depth interviews and focus group discussions, our research aimed at analyzing the mechanisms of empowerment, support, and awareness-raising developed by women's organizations at both the national and the local level, and to discuss the factors that contribute to the success, as well as the challenges and limitations of this organizing. Between February 2006 and June 2007, we interviewed more than 150 feminist activists from close to 50 organizations in 27 cities. Second, we conducted a nationwide representative survey in spring 2007. Based on face-to-face interviews with 1,800 ever-married women from a total of 56 provinces, this survey was the second nationwide study on domestic violence (first being a 1993 survey). The questionnaire for the survey was developed after a year of in-depth interviews with activists in women's or-activists specializing in this field. Besides this participatory process of survey preparation, an indispensable component of the feminist methodology we tried to adopt was approaching the women to be interviewed for the survey as "subjects" in the debate on domestic violence. This required a move away from a focus on women's "experience" of violence towards a questionnaire design that would help bring out their views on the background, legitimacy, prevention, and penalization of spousal violence. As we discuss in greater detail in the coming pages, the survey ended up having three parts: 1) what women think about domestic violence by their spouses (background and legitimacy), 2) women's experience of domestic violence by their spouse, and 3) women's views on prevention and penalization (with a particular emphasis on the role of the state).