Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim has withdrawn a bill that would pardon men convicted of sex with underage girls if they had married them.<\/p>\n
The government acted just before the controversial legislation went to a final vote in parliament, which is dominated by the ruling AK Party.<\/p>\n
The bill sparked protests and was met with international condemnation.<\/p>\n
Critics said it would legitimise statutory rape and encourage the practice of taking child brides.<\/p>\n
UN agencies had called on the government not to approve the bill, arguing that it would damage the country’s ability to combat sexual abuse and child marriage.<\/p>\n
The government says the main aim is to exonerate men imprisoned for marrying an underage girl apparently with her or her family’s consent.<\/p>\n
Turkey’s legal age of consent is 18 but underage marriage remains widespread.<\/p>\n
A rare consensus: analysis by Mark Lowen, BBC Turkey correspondent<\/strong><\/p>\n This bill sparked a rare thing here: cross-party opposition. The AKP MPs who proposed it insisted it would not pardon rapists or sexual abusers and was simply intended to exonerate men who marry underage girls apparently with consent.<\/p>\n However, critics said that in patriarchal Turkey, a young girl would feel unable to give consent and so the bill would have legitimised rape and encouraged child brides. When conservative, usually pro-government, women spoke out against it – including the president’s wife – the bill was doomed to failure.<\/p>\n Child marriage is a problem here. Former President Abdullah Gul famously married when he was 30 and his wife 15.<\/p>\n But women’s groups say the solution is not controversial legislation such as this but real opportunities for girls. And they say the Islamist AKP has encouraged female subservience, with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan calling childless women “deficient”.<\/p>\n It’s led to a huge rise in physical abuse of women, with the murder rate said to have increased by 1,400% between 2003 and 2010 – although some believe that number is partly due to more cases being reported than ever before.<\/p>\n Prime Minister Yildirim said the bill was being sent back in order to allow for “broad consensus” and to “give time for the opposition parties to develop their proposals”.<\/p>\n Opposition parties had heavily criticised the bill.<\/p>\n The bill was due to be voted upon on Tuesday after being approved in an initial parliamentary reading on Thursday.<\/p>\n Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag had defended the legislation, saying: “The bill will certainly not bring amnesty to rapists…. This is a step taken to solve a problem in some parts of our country.”<\/p>\n In July, Turkey’s constitutional court annulled part of the criminal code which classified all sexual acts with children under 15 as sexual abuse.<\/p>\n Elif Shafak, one of Turkey’s best-selling novelists, explained the concern over the bill.<\/p>\n “One of the main weaknesses of this draft is that word, consent,” she told the BBC.<\/p>\n “What does that mean? We’re talking about children here. So if the rapist negotiates with the family, if he bribes or threatens the family, the family can easily withdraw, you know, their complaint and they can say OK there was a consent and there was no force involved.”<\/p>\n Ravza Kavakci Kan, an AKP MP, said the bill had been misunderstood.<\/p>\n “It is about giving normality to young women who have been married underage due to cultural norms, other norms, and now find themselves with their children suffering because their husbands are in prison,” she told the BBC’s Newsday programme.<\/p>\n “One of the examples is when the woman is 15 and the man is 17, they get married, they’re both underage, a few years later after they’ve had children, or when they go to register their babies, or when they go to the doctor, the doctors or officials have to report this case if it is an underage marriage, so now they are 24, 25 and all of a sudden their husbands are in prison.”<\/p>\n –<\/p>\n Source: BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim has withdrawn a bill that would pardon men convicted of sex with underage girls if they had married them. The government acted just before the controversial legislation went to a final vote in parliament, which is dominated by the ruling AK Party. The bill sparked protests and was met with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":270568,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[107],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n
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