To Our Women Who Can’t Hold On To Life Peace be upon you…

It hurts me every day to see the scenes of women being victimized, oppressed and destroyed in my Turkey… I am ashamed of myself, my nation and my past… I say let this brutality end, let the inhumane patriarchal murders end… Should I talk about the murderer who killed his wife, who left him, in front of his children on the pretext of honor? Should I tell you about a young heart who was slashed and stabbed 28 times by her boyfriend in Adana, who passed away in the prime of her life?

I don’t know if I should remember the poor 15-year-old man who did not even see the first spring of his life, who was found buried in a field in the Kayapınar district of Diyarbakir. I wonder if I should talk about the mentally ill man who was detained in Izmir for beating his ex-girlfriend the day before and made him a bullet maniac after he was released a day later. Every corner is a different drama, a different painful story… The miserable woman of my Turkey is crying for her blind luck called fate… None of them deserve to be the 3rd page of the newspapers and to be forgotten a short time later as if nothing had happened…

They are our wives, mothers or daughters who will proudly carry the future on their shoulders… Their survival in such a patriarchal society depends on the survival of our masculine dignity. How?? Even if you can’t propose anything, you can accept that you have a different way than the way it has been so far. For example, by saying yes to positive discrimination… Who knows, maybe by setting quotas that make it easier for women in the political arena… But the solution is certain… To continue without going down the path that has been going on so far, by quenching the silent screams…

With love and respect… FIRAT OCAL