Last week, we brought you the dismal news of a 20-year-old Turkish woman, Özgecan Aslan, who was raped by the man driving her minibus in the south-east province of Mersin, Turkey. After trying to resist his attack, she was beaten with an iron rod then stabbed to death.
It’s tragic and gruesome and horrible, but some Turkish newspapers saw fit to say that, no, it’s not vicious, entitled creeps who cause rape, but the miniskirts that women wear. To protest against this fucked up victim-blamey way of analysing rape (which perhaps has more to do with machismo than female dress), a whole bunch of good men have started wearing miniskirts.
At first uploading photos of themselves in miniskirts to social media, Turkish men have now protested on the streets. On Saturday, they marched through Istanbul in all sorts of miniskirts, and activists have welcomed it. The logic being that it’s definitely not skirts that cause rape.
‘The women’s movement is trying to tell society, “My dress is not an excuse for your rape or sexual harassment,”’ Hülya Gülbahar, a Turkish lawyer and activist, told CNN. ‘But society didn’t want to hear these voices.
‘People try to find excuses for rapes and killings. But they didn’t find any in this case, because Aslan was very innocent, purely innocent. The protest shows that a short skirt is not an excuse for rape.’
Hopefully, this will move on the conversation for women’s rights in Turkey. Last year, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that men and women are not equal‘because their nature is different’, and just last week, the UN Women and United Nations Population Fund (UNPFA) said that two out of five Turkish women are exposed to sexual and physical violence.
Maybe the Turkish establishment and creeps alike need to take a bit of courage from the men in skirts…
You might also be interested in:
Protests In Turkey Over Young Woman Who Was Killed For Resisting Rape
Lolling Turkish Women Respond To Minister’s Morality Crusade Via Selfies
Meet The Female MP Who Won Turkish Women The Right To Wear Trousers And Won’t Be Stopping There
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.