Ekal, Berna. “Women’s Shelters as State Institutions”, in Marc Aymes, Benjamin Gourisse, Elise...

For use by the Author only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV

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Order and Compromise: Government Practices in Turkey

from the Late Ottoman Empire to the Early 21st Century

Edited by

Marc AymesBenjamin Gourisse

Élise Massicard

LEIDEN | BOSTON


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Contents

List of Tables and Figures viiList of Abbreviations viiiList of Contributors xiIntroductory Note xiii

1 Order and CompromiseThe Concrete Realities of Public Action in Turkey and the Ottoman Empire 1

Benjamin Gourisse

2 Defective Agency 25Marc Aymes

3 Is It Time to Stop Speaking about Ottoman Modernisation? 45Olivier Bouquet

4 The Linguist and the PoliticianThe Türk Dil Kurumu and the Field of Power in the 1930–40s 68

Emmanuel Szurek

5 An Imposed or a Negotiated Laiklik?The Administration of the Teaching of Islam in Single-Party Turkey 97

Nathalie Clayer

6 “The Military Seize the Law”The Drafting of the 1961 Constitution 121

Nicolas Camelio

7 Institutional Cooperation and SubstitutionThe Ottoman Police and Justice System at the Turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries 146

Noémi Lévy Aksu

8 The State without the PublicSome Conjectures about the Administration for Collective Housing (toki)̇ 169

Jean-François Pérouse


vi

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CONTENTS

9 Heritage as a Category of Public Policy in the Southeastern Anatolia Region 192

Muriel Girard and Clémence Scalbert Yücel

10 European Policies to Support “Civil Society”Embodying a Form of Public Action 219

Claire Visier

11 The Incomplete Civil Servant?The Figure of the Neighbourhood Headman (Muhtar) 256

Élise Massicard

12 Military Domination by Donations 291Anouck Gabriela Côrte-Real Pinto

13 Women’s Shelters as State Institutions 317Berna Ekal

14 The Socialisation of Those Called up for “Training in the Love of the Motherland” as Part of Military Service in Turkey 333

Sümbül Kaya

15 Officialdom and the Woman Who was “Meant to be Dead”The Ethnography of an Exfoliation 362

Benoît Fliche

16 Deceptive Agency 376Marc Aymes

Bibliography 389 Index 427

For use by the Author only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004289857_014

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1 According to “Violence against Women Prevalence Data” compiled by the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (un Women) released in April 2011, 39.3% of women in Turkey have experienced physical violence at least once in their lifetime. This matches data from a 2007 survey by Ayşe Gül Altınay and Yeşim Arat, which found that 34% of women reported having experienced physical violence at least once in their lifetime. See Türkiye’de Kadına Yönelik Şiddet [Violence against women in Turkey], Istanbul, Metis Yayınları, 2008, p. 78.

2 Two main laws have been passed: (1) The law no. 4320 on the protection of the family (pro-tection order), passed in 1998, provides for banning a perpetrator of domestic violence from contacting his victim and from approaching the joint residence for a period of time as decided by the Court. It was revised in 2012 under a new title and number, law no. 6284 on the protection of family and on the prevention of violence against women; and (2) The municipal law no. 5393 passed on 3 July 2005 states in its article 19 that it is the duty and the responsibility of municipalities with a population of over 50,000 people to open “pro-tection houses” for women and children. But there are two problems with regard to its recognition of violence against women: firstly, the wording avoids using the term “women’s shelters,” and secondly, no provisions are made to punish municipalities who fail to set up shelters.

3 Their views were taken up by academic circles too. A recent study has examined problems in the implementation of Law no. 4320: namely the failure of authorities to issue protec-tion orders for women who are divorced or not legally married, and several other problems stemming from the mentality of those in charge of applying the law. Gökçeçiçek Ayata, Sevinç Eryılmaz, Seda Kalem, Ailenin Korunmasına Dair Kanun Kimi ve Neyi Koruyor? Hakim, Savcı, Avukat Anlatıları [Who and What Does the Family Protection Law Protect? Explanations by Judges, Prosecutors and Lawyers], Istanbul, Bilgi Üniversitesi Yayınları, 2011.

chapter 13

Women’s Shelters as State Institutions

Berna Ekal

Violence against women1 is largely recognised as a problem by society and public institutions in Turkey today, as is the case in many other countries. Evidence for this is afforded by the laws to address the issue which have come into effect since the 1990s, mainly as a result of campaigns by several feminist groups and by women’s rights activists.2 Feminists, however, have criticised the wording of both laws,3 arguing that the state’s recognition of the phenomenon basically seeks to protect women in the name of protecting


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4 For a more detailed discussion of family policies in Turkey, see Umut Korkut, Hande Eslen-Ziya, “The Impact of Conservative Discourses in Family Policies, Population Politics, and Gender Rights in Poland and Turkey,” Social Politics, vol. 18, no. 3, 2011, pp. 387–418. Korkut and Eslen-Ziya argue that the low participation of women in the work-force is due to insufficient public childcare facilities, reflecting the reproduction of gen-der inequalities by the state, whereby the primary role of women is seen to be housework and childcare.

5 Joseph R. Gusfield, “Constructing the Ownership of Social Problems: Fun and Profit in the Welfare State,” Social Problems, vol. 36, no. 5, 1989, p. 435.

the family. They therefore deem that the laws only amount to a partial recog-nition of the problem of violence. They had originally brought up the issue of violence against women as part of a broader goal of combating gender inequality, but the way in which the problem has been reformulated by the state means that the issue is at risk of being eviscerated of its critical content. The question of whether violence against women is to be treated as a family issue4 or as a women’s rights issue is ultimately based on the underlying question of whether violence against women was to be defined as a social problem or as a political one.

In addition to this, the way a problem is defined—and hence the language used when talking about an issue—is further significant in that it governs the way in which its ‘subjects’ are envisaged. As Gusfield rightly states with regard to Edelman’s analyses of the language of social problems: “we use words like ‘welfare’ and ‘helping’ and ‘social problem’ to emphasise the tem-porary and uncommitted nature of benevolence or control, rather than using the language of rights, which creates a different meaning. To use the lan-guage of ‘social problem’ is to portray its subjects as ‘sick’ or ‘troublesome’.”5 And so it may be argued that the way legal regulations and services address the needs of women who have experienced male violence is in fact a crucial issue in the way violence against women is placed on the public agenda: are they seen as right-bearing individuals, as feminists would wish, or as trouble-some subjects, as Gusfield puts it? In this chapter I shall argue that neither is fully the case with regard to the two women’s shelters in Turkey where I con-ducted my research. On the one hand, the fact that women’s shelters are state institutions, (unlike many other countries where shelters are mainly run by non-governmental organisations), could act as a hindrance to women’s autonomy, since such a perception resides largely on the sort of social problem perspective described by Gusfield. But on the other hand, the


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6 Akhil Gupta, “Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State,” American Ethnologist, vol. 22, no. 2, 1995, p. 376 (italics added).

7 Ibid., p. 378.

intimacy between staff and residents, expressed in terms of “family ties,” means that the women’s shelters cannot be viewed solely as impersonal, bureaucratic mechanisms in the Weberian sense.

In other words, this chapter aims to characterise the ways public services perceive women who have experienced male violence. It will argue that the fact that women’s shelters are predominantly state institutions in Turkey fundamentally affects this perception. Given that only 3 of the existing 81 shelters in Turkey today are run by non-governmental organisations (ngos), whereas 53 are run by the central state and 25 by municipalities, it argues that we need to move beyond the questions of whether the number of shel-ters is sufficient or not, or whether they are effective, and look for ways to understand “what local level officials actually do in the name of the state.”6 And so this chapter, which makes no claim to being a comprehensive account of public policies on violence against women, takes as its starting point the everyday encounters between staff and residents at the municipal shelters. It seeks to show how staff at municipal shelters act in the name of the state, alternating their actions between a certain formalism (as illustrated by the claim that the shelter is a state institution) and intimacy (as illustrated by the claim that the staff and the residents in the shelter are like “a family”). As Gupta puts it, “because they give a concrete shape and form to what would otherwise be an abstraction (‘the state’), these everyday encounters provide one of the critical components through which the state comes to be constructed.”7

And so by looking at how women who experience male violence are envisaged by public services, this chapter additionally seeks to shed light on the practices of street-level bureaucrats and their encounters with citizens (with regard to the specific case of violence against women). This chapter therefore starts with a brief discussion of why the representation of women’s shelters in Turkey as state institutions is significant in its own right, given the history of women’s shelters in other countries. It then moves on to what the implications of being a state institution actually are for the women’s shelters, both from the point of view of their staff and that of their residents.


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8 Broadly speaking, there are three waves or periods of feminist theory. The first wave cor-responds approximately to the period 1880–1920, with the second wave being 1960–80. The third wave is after the 1980s. Each wave has its own characteristics. As Visweswaran puts it: “[w]e might see the shift from first to second wave feminism as embodying the transition from an understanding of gender as a largely empirical category designating women, to an emerging form of social critique linked both to theorization of a ‘sex/gen-der’ system and the development of gender ‘standpoint theory’, the notion that women share a point of view despite cultural or class differences. […] The shift from second wave feminism to third wave feminism can be seen in the emerging critique of the sex/gender system, and a shift away from a unified subject of consciousness in gender standpoint theory, to what has been called theories of multiple consciousness or positioning.” See “Histories of Feminist Ethnography,” Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 26, 1997, p. 595.

9 Even though it is now appreciated that wife beating and rape was a concern for the public authorities in the United States and Great Britain as early as the 17th century when several decrees were issued with regard to these issues, it should be underlined that it was the efforts of the post-1970 women’s movement that led to it being widely recognised today that this is a form of violence women undergo because of their gender, and that it is a substantial violation of their right to life. Cf. Elizabeth Pleck, Domestic Tyranny: The Making of American Social Policy against Familial Violence from Colonial Times to the Present, Urbana and Chicago, il, University of Illinois Press, 2004; Anna Clark, Women’s Silence, Men’s Violence: Sexual Assault in England, 1770–1845, London, Pandora, 1987.

10 “The second wave of feminism in Turkey was a latecomer when compared with its coun-terpart in the West. Instead of the 1960s, the 1980s in Turkey were the years during which the feminist movement brought up issues common to second wave feminism in the West, such as the elimination of violence against women bringing to light the oppression that women experienced in the family, the use of sexuality as a medium for male dominance, the misrepresentation of women in the media and the challenge against virginity

Violence against Women and Women’s Shelters

Violence against women became a public issue with the political activities of second wave feminism8 in the 1970s.9 With their slogan “the personal is political,” second wave feminists sought to alter male domination in all spheres of life, starting with the home which is allegedly the place that is most devoid of politics. They put forward the idea that the existence of domestic violence deconstructed the myth that the domestic sphere was the place of affectionate relationships. Starting from the first women’s shelter founded in Chiswick, England in 1972, shelters have illustrated this viewpoint by showing the great need of women to take refuge in shelters. Shelters, at the same time, were envisaged to combat violence against women.

Feminism in Turkey10 started to emerge as an organised movement in the 1980s, and its protagonists adopted similar views to those of second wave femi-nists in other countries, questioning the position of women in society, though



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tests—a common practice for women who are about to get married or who have been subject to sexual assault. The motto ‘personal is political’ started to be recalled only with the second wave,” Çağla Diner, Şule Toktaş, “Waves of Feminism in Turkey: Kemalist, Islamist and Kurdish Women’s Movements in an Era of Globalization,” Journal of Balkan and Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 12, no. 1, 2010, p. 41.

11 Recent research has also helped dismantle the mainstream Kemalist argument that the rights of women “were given by the Republic,” by showing the important role women’s movements played at the end of the Ottoman period and at the beginning of the Republican period in bringing the issue of women’s rights to the fore. Cf. Yaprak Zihnioğlu, Kadınsız İnkılap [A revolution without women], Istanbul, Metis, 2003; Lerna Ekmekçioğlu, Melissa Bilal (eds.), Bir Adalet Feryadı: Osmanlı’dan Türkiye’ye Beş Ermeni Feminist Yazar (1862–1933) [A call for justice: Five feminist writers from the Ottoman Empire to Turkey (1862–1933)], Istanbul, Aras, 2006.

12 Sevgi Uçan Çubukçu, “Post-1980s Women’s Movement in Turkey: A Challenge to Patriarchy,” in Fatmagül Berktay et al. (eds.), The Position of Women in Turkey and in the European Union: Achievements, Problems, Prospects, İstanbul, KA-DER Press, 2004, p. 55.

13 Nükhet Sirman, “Feminism in Turkey: A Short History,” New Perspectives on Turkey, vol. 3, no. 1, 1989, pp. 1–34; id., “Türkiye’de Feministlerin Şiddetle İlişkisi” [The relationship between feminists and violence in Turkey], Amargi, vol. 4, 2007, pp. 15–17.

with the added specificity that in Turkey the period after 1980 witnessed a process of ‘demystification’ with regards to Republican reforms11 to women’s rights:

Despite the ‘new roles’ and ‘new opportunities’ provided to women in the 1920s and ‘30s by the republican reforms in Turkey, during the ‘80s, women still lived in a patriarchal system scourged by gender inequalities in the legal system. An example in point is that the new Civil Code of 1926 which brought the secularization of the family and improved women’s social status also had its own patriarchal biases legally designating the husband the ‘head’ of the family and relegating the wife to being his ‘helpmate’. Explicitly patriarchal clauses of the Civil Code would only be amended in 2002 after a long struggle by women.12

Violence against women has been a major issue for feminism in Turkey since the resurgence of the movement in the 1980s.13 Since then activists have acted to pro-vide support to women who have faced violence, whilst demanding that the authorities implement sanctions and provide services as provided by the law. Following on from a demonstration in 1987 as part of a feminist campaign against battering (Dayağa Karşı Dayanışma Kampanyası), it became widely accepted among feminists that shelters needed to be set up to support women who faced violence. In a booklet produced by the anti-battery campaign, feminists


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14 Bağır Herkes Duysun [Shout so Everyone Can Hear], Istanbul, Kadın Çevresi Yayınları, 1988.15 Yeşim Arat, “Feminist Institutions and Democratic Aspirations: The Case of the Purple

Roof Women’s Shelter Foundation,” Journal of Economic and Administrative Studies, vol. 8, no. 1–2, 1994, pp. 295–309.

16 The publication by Purple Roof in 2004 of the Turkish translation of the book by wave (Women against Violence Europe Network), called “Away from Violence: Guidelines for Setting up and Running a Women’s Shelter,” is a case in point. The book openly states that women’s shelters are the product of the feminist movement, and argues that they should work to advance the movement’s goals of the empowerment and autonomy of women. It also lists the principles for shelters, the most significant of which are: that shelters are established and run by private, non-profit, non-party organisations (so that women are more inclined to contact them and their anonymity is better protected), that they are organised along non-hierarchical lines, that they lend credence to women and support and empower women to take control of their lives, and that they pledge not to disclose confidential information.

17 Berna Ekal, “Giriş” [Introduction], Sığınaksız Bir Dünya [A World without Shelter], Istanbul, Mor Çatı Yayınları, 2012.

examined various examples of shelters in other countries.14 In line with these examples, they first tried to obtain funding from local authorities to establish shelters to be run by the feminists themselves. Yet the reluctance of the central and local authorities to allocate funding to women’s organisations, which further-more fluctuated in accordance with the electoral results (the four shelters opened under municipal management were soon closed down after the elections15), led the feminists to search for other ways to run their shelters, and they turned to the limited source of funding afforded by donations. The shelters of the Purple Roof Women’s Shelter Foundation in Istanbul and the Women’s Solidarity Foundation in Ankara are two such examples founded in the 1990s. In addition to these autonomous shelters, the Administration of Social Services and Child Protection (Sosyal Hizmetler ve Çocuk Esirgeme Kurumu, shçek), part of the central state, set up shelters in the 1990s, as did a limited number of municipalities, leading to a tripartite system in the organisation of women’s shelters in Turkey.

As can be seen in the declarations of the general assembly of the Women’s Shelters and Counselling/Solidarity Centres (Kadın Sığınakları ve Danışma/Dayanışma Merkezleri), numerous groups of feminists and women’s organisations defended the view that women’s shelters should be run autonomously by women’s organisations whilst receiving public funding.16 However, as I have observed else-where,17 over the years they came round to arguing that women’s shelters should be opened and run principally by central state social service institutions and municipalities. Two factors lay behind this shift: firstly the participants at the con-gress interpreted public funding for shelters to be opened by women’s groups as part of a neoliberal dismantling of the state, and secondly they rejected the idea of being turned into social workers. As things stood in 2012, 53 shelters were run by



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18 Numbers based on the website of the Administration of Social Services and Child Protection. url: http://www.kadininstatusu.gov.tr/tr/html/204/Kadin+Konukevleri#10 (accessed 26 January 2012).

19 Number based on the Final Declaration of the 2nd Conference of Women’s Shelters, according to which 2 of these shelters were run by ngos, 2 by municipalities, and 7 by the Administration of Social Services and Child Protection.

20 In parallel to feminist campaigns against women’s murders since 2010, there has been a more general and wide-ranging questioning of the state’s responsibility and of its legal and social services systems. Åsa Eldén, Berna Ekal, “Murders of Women as an Issue of Public Discussion in Turkey,” unpublished paper presented at the conference Media and Power: Critical Perspectives on Turkey, Istanbul, Swedish Research Institute, 2011. The term ‘women’s murders’ is the English translation for the term kadın cinayetleri in Turkish, though in the general literature the terms femicide and feminicide are more common. Feminicide is a term used more in the Latin American context, aiming to draw attention to “the role of governments and societies in places where women are allowed to die because of misogynist attitudes, sexist laws or social institutions.” Silvia Brugger, From Mexico to Lima. Feminicide: A Global Phenomenon? Brussels, Heinrich Böll Stiftung, 2009, p. 5.

21 Şefika Etik, who was killed by her husband who found her in a women’s shelter (whose place, in principle, should never be revealed to a perpetrator), was a case in point. For further infor-mation, see a related Habertürk news article (10 October 2011), url: http://www.haberturk .com/yasam/haber/677376-ciceklerle-kandirdi-bicakla-oldurdu (accessed 10 October 2011).

22 For a study conducted in 2010, see Songül Sallan-Gül, Türkiye’de Kadın Sığınmaevleri: Erkek Şiddetinden Uzak Yaşama Açılan Kapılar Mı? [Women’s Shelters in Turkey: Gateways to Lives without Male Violence ?], Istanbul, Bağlam Yayınları, 2011.

Social Services, 25 by municipalities, and only 3 by ngos.18 These numbers alone suggest that women’s shelters in Turkey have never operated within a totally femi-nist framework and they function mainly within the bureaucratic mechanisms of local or central government, and are staffed by public sector employees. So for the residents of the shelters, seeking refuge there does not only mean leaving an abu-sive partner but also entails running their lives within a bureaucratic mechanism.

But the main subject of discussion with regard to women’s shelters in Turkey has not been their bureaucratic status, but whether there are enough of them and whether they are effective. As a result of feminist campaigns, municipality law no. 5393 with its article 19 was issued on 3 July 2005, stating that municipalities with populations of over 50,000 have the duty and the responsibility to open “protec-tion houses” for women and children. Before 1999 there were only 11 shelters,19 even though their number has been increasing ever since (standing at 81 shelters in 2012). In recent discussions20 however feminists and the general public have further argued with regard to certain murder cases21 that the insufficient number and ineffectiveness of shelters are urgent problems needing to be solved. Recent research has thus focused mainly on the how effective women’s shelters are.22

This chapter, however, is based on research that does not see women’s shelters as inefficient mechanisms, but instead as bureaucratic institutions that operate

http://www.kadininstatusu.gov.tr/tr/html/204/Kadin+Konukevleri#10

http://www.haberturk.com/yasam/haber/677376-ciceklerle-kandirdi-bicakla-oldurdu

http://www.haberturk.com/yasam/haber/677376-ciceklerle-kandirdi-bicakla-oldurdu


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23 I also conducted fieldwork in two other shelters for shorter periods, a municipal shelter outside Istanbul and the Purple Roof Woman’s Shelter Foundation’s shelter. These two shelters do not fall within the scope of this paper.

24 In November 2008 I requested research permission but was informed that I would in no case be permitted to enter the shelters, and that I could only interview shelter residents in the administration’s main building.

according to their own logic which differs from that of the shelters as initially envis-aged by feminists throughout the world since the 1970s. The starting point for this chapter is the viewpoints of the workers and the residents at two of the women’s shelters where I carried out fieldwork for my PhD thesis in 2008–2009.23 These two shelters are run by two different municipalities in Istanbul. Since the methodology of participant observation proved unacceptable to the Social Services,24 I had to limit my study to the shelters run by municipalities. Of the six municipal shelters in Istanbul at the time, I conducted my fieldwork in two that accepted my presence in the shelter as a researcher. In order to preserve the anonymity of the residents and staff, I shall throughout the text refer to these shelters as shelter A (opened before law no. 5393) and shelter B (opened after law no. 5393), and I will not disclose which political parties were in charge of the municipalities in question.

At the beginning, the staff in the shelters tended to encourage me to communi-cate on a one-to-one basis (i.e. interviews) instead of sitting around with residents, since other researchers (mostly students from psychology departments) preferred this type of research and so the staff were used to that approach. Yet a study based only on interviews would have been insufficient to understand the mechanisms at work in everyday life in the shelters. At first I did not turn down the offer of inter-viewing the women with whom the staff told me to speak (5 out of the 33 inter-views are of this kind), but it was clear that the women did not trust me and simply kept on saying “God bless the staff!” After a while, however, I came to be taken as a guest who frequently came and went, and I only conducted interviews with women who got to know and trust me. So the following account is based on both participant observation and interviews carried out in the two shelters.

The Family and the State as Seen through the Prism of Municipal Shelters

We may observe two simultaneous logics at work in the way shelters are man-aged, based on the notions of the ‘state’ and the ‘family’. In one of the women’s shelters (shelter B), there were instructions posted on the kitchen wall that women staying in the shelter had to obey. They read as follows:



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The rooms in the shelter were decorated in such a way that they gave the feel-ing of a homely atmosphere, with couches around a television set, carpets on the floor, and slippers placed next to the front door. The instructions posted on the kitchen wall, on the other hand, set the shelter apart from an ordinary home, as did the bunk beds that filled the six rooms on the upper floors of the building, and the small office for workers on the ground floor where files and other legal documents were kept.

Hence the interior of the shelter combined living facilities (for the resi-dents) with an office area (for the staff) in the same building, as well as having certain reminders (such as the rules on the wall) of the hierarchy that existed between the staff and the residents, underlining the shelter’s institutional character.25 The staff was made up of a director, a psychologist, two cleaning

To the Attention of the Lady Guests:

(1) Please look after your children. Our institution cannot be held responsible for any problems your children may encounter.

(2) Whoever causes any material damage to the State’s institution shall be asked to pay for it.

(3) Between 1 pm and 3.30 pm every day is the time for your children to rest and sleep. During this time you are required to stay in your rooms with your children.

(4) Please get on well with each other. Any ladies who cause any problems shall be required to leave the institution after two warnings, regardless of whether they have good cause or not for quarrelling.

(5) Any food or drink brought from outside the institution is to be consumed in your rooms.

(6) The personnel of the institution are neither your friends nor your neighbours. Please use their names together with the proper courtesy titles, such as Ayşe hanım (Ms. Ayşe).

(7) You are required to keep your rooms, the bathroom, and the toilets clean.(8) Should you encounter any psychological distress, do not hesitate to talk about

it with our psychologist.

The Administration.

25 This paper does not provide the scope to address the question of whether shelters can be described as “total institutions,” or of whether these rules on the wall could be seen as ‘house rules’, even though both points merit careful attention. Erving Goffman, Asylums:


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Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates, Garden City, ny, Anchor Books, 1961.

26 Navaro-Yashin contends that “a proper ethnography of the state must study the state beyond its tangible manifestations in the garb of institution and its production of discourses and representations.” I would argue however that her approach still makes room for everyday encounters between citizens with bureaucrats and the ways in which the state comes to be ‘personified’ in certain officials, as in the Saniye case she refers to. Yael Navaro-Yashin, Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey, Princeton, nj/Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2002, pp. 181, 166–171.

27 The concept of the double body is used by Vincent Dubois in his account of agents work-ing at the counters of the Caisse d’allocations familiales (family allowance fund) in France. The Bureaucrat and the Poor. Encounters in French Welfare Offices, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2010.

28 This shelter was also decorated and used in a very similar fashion. The staff comprised a manager, two psychologists, two nursery teachers, a nurse, and a night attendant who was a former resident and spent the day in the shelter as well. Other residents were entrusted by the staff with daily chores and managing the upper floor, where the women met to eat, drink tea, and watch television.

personnel (who worked in shifts), and two security personnel (who also worked in shifts). They sought to maintain order by referring the shelter as a “state institution,” inviting the women to act in a more disciplined way and to pay attention to the hierarchical order that the staff wished to establish in the shelter. By presenting themselves as the officers of the state (and not of the municipality) they were referring to a higher source of legitimacy, and their behaviour could be interpreted as underlining that they were there not only as individuals but also as representatives (or incarnations) of the state.26 In this sense they were endowed with a “double corps” (double body), personalising the state to the extent that they were themselves depersonalised.27

However, it was not uniquely through formal relations that order was main-tained in the shelter. As one of the cleaning personnel in frequent contact with the residents explained, if they only built formal relations with the residents they would not be able to learn anything about them. Informal relations with the residents thus provided a way of preventing ‘misuse’ of the shelter and ensuring that only truly needy women stayed there. It was also observed that such ‘results-oriented’ relations could create emotional bonding (both intentionally and unintentionally). As one of the residents indicated (Beril—Shelter B), whenever she had bad dreams she would go and see Ayşe abla (abla means older sister in Turkish) who would comfort her as they drank tea together in a corner of the kitchen. This kind of an intimacy was also found in the shelter A.28 In the words of its manager:



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29 Alan Duben, “The Significance of Family and Kinship in Urban Turkey,” in Çiğdem Kağıtçıbaşı (ed.), Sex Roles, Family, and Community in Turkey, Bloomington, in, Indiana University Turkish Studies, 1982, p. 92.

Let me tell you this, we have different emotions here. We open our hearts to the women who stay here. We treat them as members of our family, like we treat our daughters or sisters. We create a family environment as we work here. We support them as we would if our daughter’s husband came back from military service and couldn’t find a job.

The two seemingly contradictory ways of maintaining order (one impersonal and one personal) were knit together in the everyday practices of the staff. And so it can be further argued that in the eyes of the residents, the state took on concrete form in the practices of its agents, and the staff became the embodi-ment of a state that offered the same level of care as a family should. For instance, while I was interviewing this manager in Shelter A, a woman who came to say goodbye as she was leaving the shelter said “the manager is like a mother to me, she helped me in a way that no other person did, I ate her bread.”

It should be emphasised here that the use of family terms—or more specifi-cally kinship terminology—may be viewed in relation to Duben’s ideas about their use in realms outside kinship: “such terminology is used for the purpose of evoking […] a kinship morality or simulating it as much as possible in the situation at hand, for there are often no other social rules upon which to estab-lish such relationships.”29 Yet in the two municipal women’s shelters it was not merely a matter of referring to a common morality. The shelter (and hence the state) were in fact seen as replacing the family, and many women explained that they had been obliged to seek refuge in the women’s shelters, and hence in the state, because their natal families had not supported them (sahip çıkmak) after they broke up from their abusive partners.

(Açelya—Shelter A) My family, they didn’t even know that such a place exists. They asked me “How did you learn about these places, who are they, where did you take refuge?” I said, “Where could I take refuge? In the state, of course. My family does not support me, but the state does.”

For the women, the shelter catered for their needs when their families failed to do so or rejected them. Here, it can be argued that from the point of view of both the staff and the residents the shelter was not an ordinary place, but the embodiment of the state itself in the role of a (natal) family to which a


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30 This point was also emphasised by Sirman in an earlier unpublished research report. The research was conducted as part of the “Combating Domestic Violence against Women Project” (2007), implemented by the Directorate General on the Status of Women (ksgm), with the technical support of United Nations Population Fund (unfpa) and the financial support of European Union.

31 The practice of keeping the address of the shelter secret has also being criticised, espe-cially by coloured women in the us: “Many women of color associate the process of enter-ing shelter with ‘going into hiding’, and with the loss of more primarily cultural alliances. …The isolation of the shelters from the communities in which women live and the secrecy surrounding the shelters also may intensify the burdensomeness of crisis work. This may take the form of power struggles over the monitoring of women and the maintenance of the confidential location, or it may take the form of staff, as well as residents, feeling dis-connected from the community.” Janice Haaken, Nan Yragui, “Going Underground: Conflicting Perspectives on Domestic Violence Shelter Practices,” Feminism & Psychology, vol. 13, no. 1, 2003, p. 65.

daughter may return after an unhappy marriage.30 In this sense it might be argued that the State transpired via the practices of its officials as a substitute for the (natal) family, and the fact that it placed women in an inferior position was never questioned. This situation sometimes transpired as a feeling of secu-rity and sometimes as a feeling of despair that residents expressed when dis-cussing life in the shelter.

Shelter: Security and Despair

While talking to residents, it was possible to see that they likened the shelters to the family not only in an intimate sense, but also in the attitude there towards controlling the women’s behaviour. These attitudes related to security measures, with the main purpose being to keep the address secret and to keep women away from perpetrators, something found in most shelters around the world.31 On the other hand it differed from shelters run by feminists (from the Purple Roof shelter in the case of Turkey) in that they implemented a curfew and obliged the women to hand in their mobile phones. Of course the women who had found jobs were less subject to these rules, but the women who did not work (with whom I spent most of my time during the day) usually experi-enced a feeling of distress. Especially in Shelter B, the women were expected to stay in the shelter all the time during the first month of their stay, and if they had legal procedures to complete they were asked to go to court or other institutions in the car provided by the municipality and accompanied by a member of staff.



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First of all it needs to be emphasised that some residents stated that these measures did indeed help them to feel secure. For instance, in one of the first interviews I conducted, a woman who had formerly stayed in a shelter run by the Social Services (which she had left so as to rent an apartment with a co-resident, but when this failed had had to apply to the municipal shelter) explained that she was content with the practices in the current shelter (in comparison to the former shelter she had stayed in):

(Beril—Shelter B) In the other place, you could do anything you wanted, you could go out any time day or night. It wasn’t a disciplined place like it is here. […] I don’t know, here it is really comfortable. Above all, the ban on using mobile phones is great. The restriction on going out is very good. There, there were women who used to use mobile phones. There were women who went out after midnight. No one said anything to them, as there were no security personnel after 5 pm. […] I don’t know, this shelter is very comfortable.

In this account there is a clear sense of security due to the practices of the shelter. On the other hand it was also possible to see both in Afife’s and Aslıhan’s accounts that the ways the residents dressed and their relation-ships to men were also under control, and this was a source of distress for women:

(Afife—Shelter A) In your home life you have to get permission from your husband, you can’t go out without permission. It is as if you are tied to him. Actually it’s a very bad situation. It’s more or less the same thing here as well. You can’t go out. For instance, I want to wear short-sleeved t-shirts, they don’t let me, they want to protect me but still… I want to wear short-sleeved t-shirts, I want to go out…

(Berna, about a remark made by Aslıhan)—Why do you say it is diffi-cult to get permission to go out during the day?

(Aslıhan—Shelter A)—It is difficult. Some women go out and flirt with men. Once there was an incident involving me. I used to go out of the shelter to look for a job. I ran into the boyfriend of a friend of mine and he told me that he wanted to talk to me about something. […] I went and we just had a cup of tea, it didn’t take any more than five minutes. […] But someone saw me, and they asked me to leave the shelter. […] Thanks to Fidan abla [a former resident who worked in the shelter as a night attendant], who talked to the manager, I was allowed to go on stay-ing in the shelter.


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32 Sosyal Hizmetler ve Çocuk Esirgeme Kurumu’na Bağlı Kadın Konukevleri Yönetmeliği [Regulation of Women’s Guest Houses Under the Administration of Social Services and Child Protection], no. 23400, 12 July 1998.

33 V. Dubois, The Bureaucrat and the Poor.

Here it might be argued that these stories cannot be treated as isolated cases, but reflect a wider perspective. Indeed, the government agencies are also care-ful not to detract from the shelters ‘honourable’ image. Article 9 of the Regulation32 passed in 1998 with regard to shelters run by the Social Services (to which municipalities are also subject) states that women involved in pros-titution will not be accepted in the women’s shelters. Article 14 of the same Regulation also states that women staying in the shelters should get permis-sion before going out.

As Dubois33 has argued with regard to the Caisse d’allocations familiales in France, the street-level bureaucrats do not have any set of written rules on how to implement the regulations, and they usually refer to their own personal expe-rience in their dealings with clients. As can be seen in the examples above, the staff in the shelter drew on their own experiences when deciding how to imple-ment formal rules. Some of the staff acted in a formalistic way, asking residents to sign a paper each time they left the shelter (once they had got permission from the manager) so as to ensure that they would not be held responsible were the residents not to return or if there were any other problems. Equally, the for-mal rule of not accepting prostitutes in the shelters resulted in constant screen-ing of the women’s behaviour and the way they dressed. But this was also done in more informal ways, with the staff usually telling the resident that the man-ager asked them to dress more carefully. To the extent that the residents per-ceived this approach as the sort of control they had experienced in their families, it is possible to argue that the staff used this aspect to maintain order in the shelter in accordance with the formal rules.

From another perspective, one could also see that both the residents and the staff were worried the shelter might be perceived by society as a ‘brothel’, or as a ‘non-honourable space’. In Shelter B, one of the staff complained to me that she felt insecure on her way to the shelter, saying: “You know how the neighbours and the men sitting in the coffee shop see this place.” This concern explains why Asya (from Shelter A) explained almost as soon as she met me that she had had to pass the night on the street before coming to the shelter, so had taken refuge in the bus terminal, where she had rejected offers by men for tea and food before arriving ‘safely’ in the shelter. Concerns over the fact that others in society could see the shelter as a ‘non-honourable space’ could even have an impact on the decision to leave an abusive relationship:



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(Aslıhan—Shelter A) My elder brother did not support my decision at first. He had friends who were policemen […] and they talked badly about shelters. […] Then I had no other choice, I said to myself “If I know how to protect myself, no one can do anything to me”, so I got some money from my sister and I left home.

On the other hand it was observed that the residents’ partly overcame their worry that others see the shelter as a non-honourable space by presenting themselves as “under the protection of the state” (devlet koruması altında). Over the course of my fieldwork I witnessed several cases where the residents asked the directors of the shelter to phone their families and tell them that their daughter/sister/wife was under the protection of the state. And so the fact of residing under the roof of the state helped to alleviate some of the prej-udice against their decision to stay in the shelters. The decision to leave an abusive relationship was, therefore, not only about making a decision, but also about making others accept that decision as righteous.

We can therefore say that even though both shelters were municipal ones, the (central) state served as a legitimizing reference point for both the staff and residents. Whereas for the staff it helped to maintain order in the shelter, for the residents it provided a legitimate place to be. Yet to the extent that women saw the purpose of being in the shelter as a change towards an autono-mous life, free from the burdens of familial control, the rules in the shelters were a source of despair:

(Ayşe—Shelter A) I don’t know, I thought the shelter was a place where there would be frequent talks, where we would do handicrafts, where we would not be bored. […] I thought we would not have the same stressful life we had at home, that there would no more be restrictions on going out as was the case at home. I thought we would be happy, no longer suffer. […] But it’s not so, it’s different from what I had expected.

Conclusion

Dobash and Dobash, who have conducted extensive research into women’s shelters in the United States and Great Britain,34 talk about four types of shelters: philanthropic, bureaucratic, therapeutic, and activist. While the

34 R. Emerson Dobash, Russell P. Dobash, Women, Violence, and Social Change, London/New York, Routledge, 1996.


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shelters they studied were all run by non-governmental organisations, one characteristic they associate with “non-activist” shelters can be useful when assessing the position of residents in the municipal shelters in Turkey. Whether they are run by non-governmental organisations as in the United States and Great Britain, or by municipalities/central state mechanisms as in Turkey, the original plan of the feminists who founded the shelters in the 1970s—to provide autonomy to women, to dismantle hierarchies between staff and residents, and thus change the patriarchal values in society—gave way to structures that treat women as objects, not subjects. It can be argued that the services provided in these institutions largely follow a ‘social prob-lems’ oriented approach.

What makes the case of Turkey (and hence these municipal shelters) significant, then, is that the shelters are not bureaucratically organised non-governmental organisations; but instead are part of the bureaucratic mecha-nism of the central and local governments. Hence, as this chapter has sought to show, they provide invaluable information about the intersection between a social movement (feminists), the state, municipalities, street-level bureaucrats (the staff), and citizens. This chapter has focused on one aspect of this intersec-tion, namely how the state is embodied through the daily encounters between residents and staff. It has argued that the state is perceived as a (natal) family; and that the (central) state serves as a legitimizing reference point for the staff and residents alike—for whom the state was not associated with the akp, the political party in power, but represented some kind of transcendental entity.

Overall it may be seen that, following on from heightened public debate since 2010, the higher echelons of state are showing their willingness to put an end to domestic violence. It is no coincidence that Turkey was one of the first signatories in 2011 of a ‘Council of Europe Convention on preventing and com-bating violence against women and domestic violence’. Yet attempts by the former Minister for Family and Social Policies, Fatma Şahin, to reconcile an emphasis on the family with women’s rights35 means it is not as yet possible to ascertain whether violence against women will in the future be treated as a ‘social problem’ or as a rights issue.

35 It is within this framework that Fatma Şahin took up the issue: the law was hence revised and passed on 8 March 2012 under a new title. Feminists have taken issue with the word-ing, arguing that the interests of women and the family may conflict, but thus has been of no avail. Conservative circles on the contrary have argued that the law will weaken family ties. See also the report of Fatma Şahin’s speech to the Medyasofa conference in Istanbul, url: http://www.zaman.com.tr/haber.do?haberno=1257260 (accessed 15 March 2012).

http://www.zaman.com.tr/haber.do?haberno=1257260

Ekal, Berna. “Women’s Shelters as State Institutions”, in Marc Aymes, Benjamin Gourisse, Elise...

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