Feminism in pictures: illustrated stories of women’s rights around the world
By ZEYNEP BILGINSOY for The Guardian
Dec. 5, 2023
Turkey: ‘Violence against women is so widespread, we are all exposed to it’
Selen Sarikaya Eren did not know much about the landmark Istanbul convention on preventing violence against women, until a presidential decree announced Turkey’s withdrawal in March 2021. The agreement, which Turkey signed a decade before, wasn’t in the news much until the controversial exit.
The decision to pull out of the treaty was widely condemned by global human rights groups, and sparked protests across the country.
As women gathered to protest, Sarikaya Eren, who lives in Italy, learned through online campaigns that the treaty was crucial for women in a country where femicide and domestic violence continue unabated.
For her contribution to Feminism in Pictures, Sarikaya Eren initially planned to focus on femicide but realised that her illustrations could make the agreement more accessible to others.
“Illustrations can open up new horizons for people and they can take people by surprise through beauty,” she says.
A female lawyer featured in the story says “leaving the convention would only embolden men to turn to violence”, as feminist organisations mobilise and protesters face police.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has for years prioritised traditional family values, casting women as mothers above all else. Conservative groups lobbied against the convention by claiming that the treaty promoted homosexuality and threatened Turkish families. Two years on, this attitude was central during Erdogan’s election campaign when he targeted LGBTQ+ people.
“Violence against women is so widespread and we are all exposed to it,” Sarikaya Eren says.
According to the We Will Stop Femicide Platform, 1,190 women have been killed since 2021, including suspicious deaths. Women also experience other forms of violence, physical and psychological, at home and outside.
Sarikaya Eren struggled with how to depict murdered women. She considered drawing a victim or a family receiving the horrible news but opted instead for abstraction. In one box, she placed a young woman wearing a graduation cap, who then ended up on a protest sign as a victim of femicide.
“Sometimes directly showing a painful fact doesn’t create the right effect. So I tried balance: showing how painful and unjust it is but without triggering anyone,” she says.
Selen Sarikaya Eren’s work depicting Turkey’s attitude to the Istanbul convention on preventing violence against women, and the feminist backlash against withdrawal. Photograph: Selen Sarikaya Eren
Sarikaya Eren wanted to raise awareness beyond Turkey about how the treaty protects women. She cited the murder of an Italian woman in November to point at a global issue with conservative groups in various countries moving against the treaty.
Sarikaya Eren, 30, discovered her love of art as a child, “obsessively” drawing characters from the Japanese anime series Sailor Moon. She contributes drawings to Lazy Women, an online platform where her illustrations accompany essays on Turkish elections, urban planning, and the choice to be child-free.
As an artist and a doctoral student of political science focusing on art in social movements, she is interested in the “instinct to create” while bearing witness to social issues.
“You will never walk alone,” says Sarikaya Eren’s characters, a slogan of Turkey’s “brave, tenacious, resilient” feminist movement and also the title of her illustration.
“I wanted to end in a hopeful place”, she says, “where women stand together to protect and empower each other.”
Feminism in Pictures is published by the Global Unit for Feminism and Gender Democracy, a division of the Heinrich Böll Foundation
This article was originally published by The Guardian here, along with Caroline Kimeu and Constance Malleret’s articles on illustrators from Kenya and Brazil.