New Women Shelters to be Built in Turkey

Currently there are 38 shelters with a capacity of 550 women being operated by civil society organizations and municipalities, although the law requires that every municipality with a population of 50,000 or greater must have shelters for women; this means there should be at least 205 such shelters. Eight new women’s shelters to be established in Turkey, in a cooperative effort by the Ministry of the Interior, the European Union and the United Nations, eight new women’s shelters will be established in cities throughout Turkey. The shelters will be constructed in Ankara, Antalya, Bursa, Eskisehir, Gaziantep, Istanbul, Izmir and Samsun, and combined will have the capacity to house 500 women.

The shelter project aims to encourage the municipalities to fulfill their responsibility in this regard. It will cost 11.8 million euros and is scheduled for completion at the end of 2009. The Ministry of the Interior will finance 20 percent of the cost, while the rest will be funded by the EU. The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) will give technical support to the project.

Project coordinator Nazik Isık emphasized that their aim is to contribute to protecting the human rights of women and assist those who have faced domestic violence, adding that they want to encourage the municipalities to open more shelters. She said the eight cities were picked for their location, public transportation infrastructure, the willingness of the municipalities and in consideration of the advice of women’s associations.

UNFPA gender programs national coordinator Meltem Agduk said although the local administrations are willing to open shelters, they don’t have adequate knowledge or experience to do so. She noted that merely opening a shelter is not enough; saying that there must be certain standards and those personnel must be well trained. A sub-initiative of the shelter projects costing 1.36 million euros aims to fulfill the latter requirement. The personnel of the shelters will be trained as well as those running a telephone hotline for domestic violence.

According to a survey conducted by the Scientific and Technological Research Council
of Turkey (TUBİTAK) last year, although domestic violence is a widespread phenomenon in Turkey, half of the women subjected to it do not tell anyone. One out of six male university graduates are the perpetrators of domestic violence and 12 percent of female university graduates are subjected to domestic violence, revealing that the problem is not only one of the uneducated.