For months now, Turkey has made regular front page headlines. Military coups, high level arrests, and today - the news that WhatsApp, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are all down in the country.
But while all this has been widely reported, one story has been notably swallowed up; and that’s of JINHA, the world’s first international feminist news agency - and how it’s become one the Turkish establishment’s most recent victims.
According to reports, their doors were forcibly opened and the locks changed to their headquarters in Diyarbakir, a city in the southeast of the country. There were amongst a gropu of other major Kurdish media organisations to be shut down.
It's remarkable, when you think about it, that the first international feminist news agency in the world exists in an area where freedom of speech is fought for daily and women are treated as lesser than their male counterparts; by their own president. A man who has said, in public:‘You cannot put women and men on an equal footing. It is against nature.’ Coincidentally, human rights groups have reported dramatic increases in violence against women since Recep Tayyip Erdogan came into power.
'Jinha was born out of a conversation between six women journalists' one of the founders Fatima told Vice earlier this year.'We were covering a story in Mardin province. Twenty girls had been raped by group of soldiers, bureaucrats and police officers. At the time we didn't know the best way to report it. We wanted to stay far away from the pornographic fetishisation often thrown on violence against women in our mainstream media. While we were discussing what to do, a headline dropped: "Little Whore Tries to Blacken Police Rep". One of the girls was only 14. I knew then we had to do something.'
The agency had continued to work
as a means for getting their news out, although with the reports today that most popular social media sites are no longer working in the country, that may not be the case for much longer.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.