Between Saviors and Savages: the Effect of Turkey's Revised Penal Code on the Transformation of Honor Killings Into Honor Suicides and Why Community Discourse Is Necessary for Honor Crime Education

• Citation: Vol. 29 No. 2
• Publication year: 2014
• topic: Family Law,Criminal Law

Between Saviors and Savages: The Effect of Turkey's Revised Penal Code on the Transformation of Honor Killings into Honor Suicides and Why Community Discourse Is Necessary for Honor Crime Education

Bethany A. Corbin

BETWEEN SAVIORS AND SAVAGES: THE EFFECT OF TURKEY'S REVISED PENAL CODE ON THE TRANSFORMATION OF HONOR KILLINGS INTO HONOR SUICIDES AND WHY COMMUNITY DISCOURSE IS NECESSARY FOR HONOR CRIME ERADICATION

Bethany A. Corbin^*

Introduction

Ka thought it strangely depressing that the suicide girls had to struggle to find a private moment to kill themselves. Even after swallowing their pills, even as they lay quietly dying, they'd had to share their rooms with others.¹

The savage phrase contained in a simple text message haunted Derya's mind.² Her moment of freedom and independence sparked by unpermitted love shattered instantly, replaced with all-consuming shame and fear. Derya knew the risks that accompanied her forbidden acts—her own aunt had been murdered by her grandfather for seeing a boy.³ Yet, Derya defied her family's orders and refused to heed her mother's death warnings. As she flirted with danger, news of her love affair spread, and at age seventeen she received a devastating order from her uncle: "You have blackened our name," the text message read.⁴ "Kill yourself and clean our shame, or we will kill you first."⁵

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This severe and inhumane sanction from her family arose from one simple action—Derya had fallen in love with Recep, a high school classmate.⁶ Having never experienced love, Derya clung tightly to her new romance, talking with Recep daily on the phone. When Derya's uncle learned of the communication, he confiscated her phone and alerted her family. But Derya couldn't stop. She borrowed a friend's phone and continued the relationship, angry about her family's strict requirements.⁷ As the romance progressed, Derya faced increasing violence at home, until one day she received a message instructing her to never return home again and to kill herself.

These threatening messages arrived fifteen times per day and served as a death sentence.⁸ "My family attacked my personality, and I felt I had committed the biggest sin in the world," Derya confided.⁹ "I felt I had no right to dishonor my family, that I have no right to be alive. So I decided to respect my family's desire and to die."¹⁰ The overpowering shame and guilt forced Derya to jump into the Tigris River in an effort to commit suicide.¹¹ But the attempt failed and she survived. Determined to fulfill her family's wishes, Derya next tried to hang herself; an uncle saved her life.¹² Finally, Derya slashed her wrists with a kitchen knife.¹³

Although Derya ultimately survived her three suicide attempts, her story illuminates a developing and frightening trend in Turkey—the emergence of honor suicides as an alternative to honor killings.¹⁴ Described broadly as "honor crimes," both honor killings and honor suicides are rooted in patriarchal orders based on the authority of men.¹⁵ Perceived as unquestionably horrific forms of violence, honor crimes occur when a family member has

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violated a social or moral norm that brings shame and dishonor to the family.¹⁶ Frequently, the norm violated is sexual in nature and the scope of acts that can trigger an honor killing or suicide is vast.¹⁷ Because women are seen as "symbolic bearers of the honor of the clan or tribe," this sexual contamination is typically punished by murder in order to regain social status.¹⁸

Recently, however, scholars and journalists have identified a shift away from honor killings—in which a male family member murders his own kin—to honor suicides—in which the female transgressor is forced to take her own life.¹⁹ This alleged transformation has been widely attributed to the adoption of Turkey's revised Penal Code in late 2004, which mandated harsh criminal sentences for both the honor killing perpetrator and family members who encouraged the killing.²⁰ Faced with this new prospect of imprisonment, scholars have argued that honor killings have undergone a metamorphosis into honor suicides to prevent the clan from losing two family members.²¹ This causal connection between honor suicides and the revised Turkish Penal Code was widely espoused in Turkish media and honor killing scholarship.

This Article, however, disputes the causal linkage of honor suicides with Turkey's new Penal Code, and argues that the existence of honor suicides has simply garnered increased media attention since 2004. In particular, this Article asserts that the statistical data is insufficient to support an association between harsher criminal punishments and honor suicides. Rather, scholars have used the revised Penal Code as a scapegoat to avoid addressing the problematic aspects of Turkey's underlying honor culture. As one of the first articles to provide an in-depth analysis and critique of this causal connection, this Article challenges the conclusory statements of scholars and the press, and advances the position that honor suicides existed within Turkey prior to the adoption of the revised Penal Code.

In support of this argument, this Article is divided into six parts. Part I offers an overview and description of honor killings, defines the concept of

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honor within Turkish society, and answers the pressing question of whether Islam condones these crimes. Part II narrows the focus of this Article solely to honor killings within Turkey's borders, and analyzes honor killing perception within Turkey. Specifically, Part II highlights the ethnicization of honor killings as a Kurdish phenomenon and discusses the motivations behind this depiction. The section then transitions into an exploration of how Turkey's bid for European Union ("EU") accession forced Turkey to adopt harsher criminal sanctions against honor killing perpetrators. Part III advances this analysis by identifying the key honor killing legislation in both the unrevised and revised Penal Codes. With the stage appropriately set, Part IV provides a critique of the linkage between honor suicides and the revised Turkish Penal Code, and argues that the emergence of honor suicides is not causally related to Turkey's legal reformation. In fact, Part V details why legal revision has been ineffective in appreciably reducing honor crimes, and why a dialogue of cultural discourse is fundamental to the eradication of both honor killings and honor suicides. Finally, Part VI concludes the Article.

I. DEFINING HONOR KILLINGS

The term "honor killing" refers to the organized murder of a family member—typically female—for bringing perceived shame and dishonor to her family or community.²² Committed by fathers against daughters and brothers against sisters, honor killings are the result of carefully debated plans by a family council in which the youngest male is elected to perform the murder.²³ Lacking spontaneity, these crimes adhere to a rigid organizational structure that differentiates honor killings from the larger worldwide phenomenon of femicide.²⁴ Specifically, honor killings are a form of "internal, societal violence that goes beyond families"²⁵ and arises from the prerogative to avoid social ostracism.²⁶ These murders transcend the bounds of the family home and

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represent an extreme form of revenge that becomes mandatory when no alternative exists for restoring family honor. In this manner, honor killings can be perceived as the failure of a family to adequately control the sexual behavior of its female members.²⁷ This section provides a pertinent explanation of honor and the characteristics of honor killings, serving as the foundation for the discussion of Turkish honor killings and the revised Turkish Penal Code.

A. What is Honor?

The elusive and dynamic term "honor" represents virtue, on the one hand, and hierarchical dominance on the other.²⁸ Operating worldwide as a form of social currency, honor functions informally as property²⁹ and serves as a "cornerstone in the construction of gender identity."³⁰ Although the precise definition of honor differs from region to region and culture to culture, honor has remained a fundamental property of human beings for centuries. Typically viewed as a measure of social prestige within the community, honor is an acquired and earned trait subject to constant defense and loss.³¹

The "Western" notion of honor is customarily defined in terms of integrity and virtuous behavior.³² It is an achieved status, increasing or decreasing with the owner's accomplishments and actions.³³ In Turkey, this form of honor is specifically denoted seref, and is possessed and controlled exclusively by men as a marker of social worth and reputation.³⁴ Remaining independent from the actions of females, seref is not implicated in the honor killing analysis, but rather stands in stark contrast to its counterpart, namus.

Namus, which creates the foundation for Turkish honor killings, represents a form of sexual honor "that presupposes physical and moral qualities that

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women ought to have."³⁵ Reflecting on the whole family, namus refers directly to the sexual purity of females and stresses traditional gender roles in which women are expected to assume and accept subordinate social positions.³⁶ Structured as a gender-specific code of honor, namus requires females to maintain their family's social reputation through sexual purity and creates a preoccupation with women's chastity.³⁷ In this sense, honor is located solely within the female body and controlled through the female's actions.³⁸ Men possess no namus of their own, and women carry the heavy "burden of safeguarding group identity and group honor."³⁹

While men cannot directly claim namus, they are fundamentally impacted by any loss of female virtue.⁴⁰ A wrong decision related to female honor inevitably humiliates the entire family on a communal level and disgraces the male kin. Because honor serves as the barometer of familial...