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Women in Turkey have taken up the legal field as a site of struggle. Between 2014 and 2016, I conducted ethnographic research, along with recent follow-ups, to understand how feminist lawyers find a balance between their professional and activist work.
Feminist lawyers in Turkey are professional attorneys who self-define as feminists. They instrumentalize their power as lawyers to support women and replace discourses that render women subordinate. Feminist lawyers select and litigate a number of pro bono gender-based violence cases based on their priorities and campaigns as activists. Many of the feminist lawyers I have met also actively work in grassroots organizations for LGBTIQ+, minority, refugee, workers, and environmental rights, addressing the intersectionality of multiple modes of discrimination.
My aim was to understand how feminist lawyers maintained their activism as professionals working within the rigid Turkish legal system. To my surprise, this rigidity was what feminist lawyers harnessed to denaturalize the hegemonic sexist norms reproduced in the written laws and courtrooms in Turkey. Below, I present a vignette from a trial in January 2020. I use pseudonyms and deliberately avoid location details for confidentiality purposes.
Seeking gender equality in the Turkish courtrooms
Unlike the common law systems based on precedents, the ideal primary sources of the Turkish civil law system are the codified, abstract, general, and written principles in fundamental codes and procedural rules. The feminist lawyers I worked with confirmed that the law education and courtroom expectations in this system discourage verbal arguments and dialogical in-court presentations.
Although seemingly codified and abstract, the legal system in Turkey often operates in the hands of heteronormative law enforcers, with patriarchal mindsets, who reinforce the idea that the protection of the Turkish family and manhood are the priorities. For example, a judge in Ankara rejected a pregnant woman’s demand to divorce her husband who used violence against her in 1987, reasoning that she should not have carried her husband’s baby if she wanted a divorce, and uttering “you should not let a woman’s back go without a beating and her womb without a baby” (a proverb in Turkey) (Şakir 2021). Dicle Koğacıoğlu (2004) shows how the framing of honor crimes as a traditional practice in the written laws and courtrooms generated the idea that women deserve to die for their family’s honor. Many judges abate the penalties of male killers of women by considering women’s–allegedly–sexually active pasts as reasons for unjust provocation (Sade 2021).
To fight against these unequal daily practices, feminist lawyers have been mobilizing the rigidity, authority, and consistency claims of the written laws in the Turkish legal system.
The courthouse
One can easily see this rigidity through the spatial features of the courthouses (Ellialtı-Köse 2018). From the outside, the courthouse we walked toward looked like a beige box with dozens of small square windows. There were three entrances: for staff; for judges, prosecutors, and lawyers; and for the public (genel). I took the entrance for the public, while the five feminist lawyers I accompanied walked inside with judges and other lawyers through the entrance designated for them. I initially lost sight of my lawyer friends as it was overwhelmingly labyrinth-like inside. On the left, by the door of the police room, a board read, “Everyone is the police of their conscience,” with the signature of K. Atatürk, the founder of the Republic of Turkey. Peaking at a courtroom, I saw that the judges’ seats were designed to be higher than the seats of lawyers and attendants.
When I finally met my lawyer friends again, they were sitting in the waiting area discussing what the defense attorneys would possibly say. The plaintiffs then came in, Nebahat and her daughter Ayla. They had filed a lawsuit against Ayla’s uncle from her father’s side, who had sexually assaulted her for over ten years. Immediately after sitting next to us, Nebahat tried to give an envelope filled with cash to the lawyers, who kindly rejected it: “Please donate this to the women’s organizations we told you about.” They, however, accepted Nebahat’s offer to be treated with Turkish tea and toast with kasseri cheese in the upstairs café of the courthouse. Feminist lawyers’ unpaid labor stood in stark contrast with the generously paid big shot defense attorneys, one of whom was the bar president of a city in Northwestern Turkey. Nebahat told us that the uncle’s family had sold a house to be able to afford the cost of hiring the defense attorneys.
The trial
Throughout the entire trial, I listened to the two male defense attorneys in terror. I felt my legs trembling and my heartbeat in my stomach, causing nausea. The defense attorneys were not concerned with demonstrating any evidence or citing any legal codes, implying that they thought their arguments were self-evident and above the written law. It was evident that they knew that if they could mobilize the normative gender ideologies sufficiently, their client could possibly get away with a decade of sexual assault.
Instead of producing evidence to defend their client, they kept accusing Nebahat of lying to extract money and blaming Ayla for engaging in “inappropriate” habits like smoking, drinking, and having a boyfriend. The defense attorneys also kept arguing that the feminist lawyers were biased due to their activist backgrounds. They said that the defendant was just a very compassionate person, and feminist lawyers were unable to distinguish compassion from sexual assault. Although forensic reports did exist on the uncle’s sexual assault, the defense attorneys accused the institution that produced the reports of being biased. They also tried to push the plaintiffs to go to the pediatrics department of a hospital they named to seek “physical” evidence. In short, the defense attorneys acted as if they were the plaintiffs or even the judges themselves, constantly questioning the moral character of the plaintiffs and the professional competence of the feminist lawyers.
