blindfolded during interrogations, are held incom-
municado. They are harshly beaten, stripped naked,
and deprived of sleep, food, drink, and toilet facili-
ties. Their torturers administer electric shocks, hang
them by their arms, spray them with cold pressur-
ized water, and sexually abuse them. The perpetra-
tors are rarely tried in court, while victims are often
charged with insulting members of the security
forces. This discourages victims from seeking jus-
tice. In particular, victims rarely report sexual
assaults because of the grave limitations on impar-
tial and comprehensive independent investigation.
In the case of women, the violation of human
rights is exacerbated by gender discrimination.
Female detainees are strip-searched and raped by
male officers when they are in police custody or in
prison, often in the sight of their husbands or fam-
ily members, to force them to confess (Human
Rights Watch World Report 2002). In addition to
the physical and psychological effects of such sex-
ual assaults, the female survivors risk death, further
violence, forced marriage, and ostracism by their
families as a result of the state’s cynical utilization
of “honor” to demean them before the community.
Revealing that they have been exposed to sexual
violence encourages a discriminatory culture that
threatens all women. Moreover, the forced virgin-
ity test in custody is a form of abusing women’s sex-
uality and physical integrity; to refuse to submit to
this test is assumed to be a sign of stained honor.
The woman who survives sexual abuse and humil-
iation suffers further serious consequences, because
the intact hymen of an unmarried woman is
regarded as material proof of virginity. It is not only
a matter of individual choice, but also a sociocultu-
ral construct within the protection of the family
(Cindo(lu 2000, 215–16). Such sexual violence
has led women detainees to commit suicide, espe-
cially in southeastern Turkey, or to flee their homes,
with or without their families. There is, however,
nowhere to go; the number of shelters for such
women is limited in Turkey. Further, male relatives
are known to practice the “honor murders” of sex-
ually “impure” women to cleanse family honor: this
is justified by the Turkish Penal Code, which pro-
nounces the victim’s behavior as grave provocation.
Since the 1980s the number of female students
with baçörtüsü(headscarf) has mushroomed in
the universities, “the castles of modernity” (Göle
1996). Their demands for higher education per-
vade the Turkish daily agenda. There were debates
in the early 1980s in the Council of Higher
Education (YÖK) to prohibit the headscarf but282 human rights
allow the türban, a kind of scarf that covers the
head but not shoulders. In 1982 a law abrogated
the wearing of the türban, but was resolved in 1988
by the Constitutional Courts by leaving the issue to
the individual decision of universities in 1989 (Öz-
dalga 1998, 41–6).
On 28 February 1997 the military generals in the
National Security Council promulgated an extraju-
dicial decree that prohibited the headscarf in order
to buttress secularism. This demonstrated the vul-
nerability of Turkish democracy to interference by
the military, which decided that the headscarf is the
“ideological uniform” of fundamentalism. But the
decision led to the greatest massive civil disobedi-
ence for freedom of education in Turkish history
when three million people formed a human chain
throughout Turkey on 11 October 1998 demand-
ing women’s right to wear the headscarf. At the
time of writing, the government of the Islamic
Justice and Development Party (AKP), with its
overwhelming parliamentary majority and zeal to
develop human rights, backed by the EU for its pos-
sible membership, has frozen the headscarf prob-
lem, the frontline between Islamists and the military.
The terrifying experiences of Kurdish women and
the protests of headscarved women as a form of
political activity deepened women’s awareness of
human rights. They question state oppression and
also their traditional gender status. It is to be hoped
that such violations of human rights will cease as
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