Analysis of Femicides in Turkey
As a female data scientist, I wanted to use data science to raise awareness with a special research for March 8, International Women’s Day. I will try to interpret the femicides, which we have seen frequently in the news in recent years, by looking at the data. Although the results I obtained in my research sometimes surprise me, they also highlight inevitable facts such as “the importance of education”.
If you ask, “Why are we talking about femicides, is it right to discriminate between sexes when talking about murder?” I will try to explain the difference with numbers. This is the biggest reason why I love data and numbers, in fact, they lead us to find answers to many questions. In this article, I will try to go into the details of the problem by visualizing the data I obtained from different sources in order to better understand and analyze the murders of women and to raise awareness about these murders.
In today’s world, where it is very difficult to access official data on femicides, my first source of data was Kadıncinayetleri.org, which processes the femicide data recorded by bianet.org and reflected in the media. As a result of long research, I came to the conclusion that this site is the only person-based database. This database is the core of my work.
Variables such as the victim’s name, age, perpetrator, excuse, date of the event were created by taking the news of the murder of women in the media between 2010 and 2017 on the site. I had the opportunity to access all the data available on the site by applying the data scraping (Web Scraping) process using the Selenium library. By applying the necessary data engineering processes, I transformed the data into a form that can be analyzed. Since we have to consider the female population when talking about femicides, I pulled the Turkey population data from the nufusu.com site, again using the Data Scraping method, with the BeautifulSoup library, and combined them with the actual data to create a single table. Since looking only at the number of female murders without taking the female population as a base would give us wrong results, I created a new variable by finding the murder rate per 100 thousand females for each province and each year. I can briefly describe the process I have done here as “(Number of murders by women * 100,000) / Female population”.
In our first graph, we can see the rates of perpetrators involved in femicide.
43% of the perpetrators are her husband, 11% her boyfriend, 0.002% her stepson. 97% of femicides are committed by male perpetrators.
When we divide the perpetrators into rings according to their degree of closeness, we obtain the following table.
1.relationship ring includes family members, husband, lover, son, relatives, 2.relationship ring includes men she knows, colleagues, and third relationship ring includes men and aggressors she does not know. We see that the 1st relationship ring covers the highest segment with 87.78%. In other words, women are mostly killed by their first degree male relatives.
If we examine the ages of the female victims, we see that the age range with the highest risk of murder is 28–36. Horribly, the youngest murdered victim is 0 years old, while the oldest is 88 years old.
When we look at the city-based femicides, we see that the highest number of femicides is in Istanbul. However, this information may create a misleading comparison between provinces. In order to make an accurate comparison, we need to take the femicide rate based on the population of 100 thousand women living in those provinces. After all, there is a big difference between the 10 murders that occur annually where one million women live and the 10 murders that occur annually where 50,000 women live. So here we need to look at the ratio rather than the number.
As a result, we see that the most risky city is Iğdır. The provinces following Iğdır are Karaman, Adana, Ardahan and Gaziantep, respectively. Although the number of femicide cases in Istanbul is the highest, we observe that it is in the middle of the list of murder rates per 100,000 since the female population is also very high.
When we collect the news of femicides reflected in the media with the Data Scraping process and create a word cloud with the news texts with the Natural Language Processing method, the following table appears. This table can help us to better understand how the news of murder of women is reflected in the media. In the order of maximum 4 words in the news; “killed”, “wife”, “suicide”, “wife”.
Since we created the word cloud based on the news in Turkey, word cloud image contains just Turkish words.
According to the data we obtained from our 2nd data source, https://dataunodc.un.org/, the femicide rates by years are as follows.
Of course, women exposed to male violence and femicide are not only a problem for our country, but also for the world.
https://dataunodc.un.org/ has created a database according to the murder rate of 100 thousand women by proportioning the number of femicides in the world to the total population. With the data I got from here, I examined the rates on the basis of regions, sub-regions and countries.
We see that the highest rate of femicide is seen in the Americas on a regional basis, in South Africa on a sub-region basis, and in El Salvador on a country basis. The lowest rate is region-based Oceania (Ocenia), sub-region-based North Africa (Northern Africa), and country-based Singapore (Singapore). Turkey ranks 67th among 151 countries in the world ranking.
According to the information I obtained from Police Academy Publications, our third data source, 74% of female victims are uneducated or primary school graduates, and 6% are university graduates or postgraduates.
77% of male perpetrators are uneducated or primary school graduates. It is not surprising that most of the perpetrators are uneducated, but the fact that this rate is so high draws attention to one of the root causes of the “femicide” problem in our country. The higher the education level in a country, the lower the murder, violence and corruption.
97% of femicides are committed by men. Therefore, the biggest perpetrators of violence against women are men, especially uneducated men. The data show that the more educated a man is, the lower his homicide rate. When we look at the data objectively, we see that there is an inverse proportion between education level and murder rates.
I believe that EDUCATION will save us in femicide as well as everywhere else. Only with education and science can we bring permanent and effective solutions to the problems in our society.
That’s why #EducationSaves.
Thanks for reading.
My linkedin profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/berfin-sarioglu/
