Turkey – Kurdish Female Migrants Find Isolation in Istanbul
Author: Womens UN Report Network
Date: October 6, 2015
WUNRN
TURKEY – KURDISH FEMALE MIGRANTS
FIND ISOLATION IN ISTANBUL
Life isn’t easy for the female migrants continually flowing into
from
Kurdish region. Those who are illiterate or unable to speak Turkish can face
particularly intense isolation from basic services.
(WOMENSENEWS)–Sosin and her family moved from rural
to
city, and for four years she did not leave the house, not even to buy food for
her children.
“I
was afraid to be lost. I never saw any place outside the house. We would be
starving with the children until evening when my husband would come home,”
she told researchers with the Istanbul-based Basak Culture and Art
Foundation. Its findings were published last year in the book, “What
Has Changed? Kurdish Women’s Experiences with Forced Migration.”
“Women
are generally more active in their villages, where they work in fields, walk
around and have a social life,” Nese Erdilek, administrative director of
the Center for Migration Research at
Istanbul’s Bilgi University, told Women’s eNews. “In the city, the
whole family is under pressure and fearful of the outside world. Social
pressure [on women] is a kind of defense for the family.”
Erdilek
said women are often not part of the decision to move and have less experience
in surroundings other than their rural or small-town homes.
Agricultural
upheavals, lack of economic opportunity and, more recently, violence and
political pressure in Turkey’s largely Kurdish eastern and southeastern regions
— where Sosin comes from — have driven repeated waves of internal migration
since the late 1940s. Many families find their way to
home to a fifth of the country’s population and accounting for nearly half of
its wealth. In the process,
has been completely transformed, from 25 percent urban in 1950 to 75 percent
urban today.
For women
caught up in this migration, the uprooting can be particularly harsh.
A
Greater Dependency
Some women from the Kurdish ethnic minority group, such as Sosin, don’t
speak Turkish when they arrive. This leaves them more dependent on male family
members, since state policies prohibit the official use of the Kurdish
language.
“Since
they do not know the language, they are imprisoned in a way in their
houses,” Erdilek said. “Their only contact with the outside world is
through their husbands and children.”
Rural
women are often particularly ill-equipped for city life due to conservative cultural
norms that can limit their access to education and employment. Illiteracy rates
throughout the country’s eastern regions are double the national average of 11
percent, hitting 29 percent in southeast
according to a 2010 report by the Center for Economic and Social Research
(BETAM) at
vast majority, around 80 percent, of illiterate people in nearly all regions of
noted.
“Many
women say they wanted to work outside the home but their families wouldn’t
allow them to go to school, so they have no occupational skills,” Zozan
Ozgokce of the Van Women’s Association, a nongovernmental organization working
in eastern Turkey, told Women’s eNews at the 12th International Forum on
Women’s Rights and Development, held here in late April.
“Women
are seen as supposed to be good wives and mothers, not lawyers or
engineers,” Ozgokce added. “And many men won’t marry a woman who has
worked outside the home — she is seen as having lost her honor.”
More Opportunities, Freedom
Some women
do find greater opportunities and freedom in the urban setting, despite
overall low level of female employment. But often those women who are able to
join the work force are limited by their lack of marketable skills — and,
sometimes, by anti-Kurdish prejudice — and commonly work in dangerous and
easily exploitable occupations in domestic work, seasonal labor, textile and
food-processing factories in addition to the informal economy.
In 2010,
51 women died, more than 400 were raped or assaulted and more than 1,000 were
occupationally injured while employed as domestic workers, according to Muazzez
Onuk Ozder, the deputy head of the Social Services Department in the
southeastern city of
Language
barriers and an alien environment often leave women, in particular, unable to
seek recourse when they suffer abuses, or even receive basic health care and
other social services. As a result, many migrant women say “they had
better conditions when living on their farms with their livestock,” Ayten
Tekes, from the
said at the
“Women
had agricultural know-how in their villages that is lost,” Tekes said,
when they move to cities. “Gender discrimination against them increases
due to their loss of skills, confidence and community ties.”
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