What is happening in Turkey right now:
On Oct. 5, 19 year old Semih Çelik brutally murdered two women (İkbal Uzuner and Ayşenur Halil) and committed suicide in Fatih, Istanbul. The news of this case can only be collected from multiple sources in social media and news outlets, to be understood. Due to censorship, most news outlets can only share small parts of what happened. However, I collected as many details as I could to share.
Semih Çelik first murdered his girlfriend Ayşenur Halil by slitting her throat. He took her corpse with him to the Edirnekapı Walls. He then met with İkbal Uzuner, took her up to the wall, cut her head off, then threw himself off the wall. Further investigations revealed that 1 year before this event, he recorded a video, describing everything he wanted to do in detail. It is said that he had been stalking İkbal for five years. In this video he says “On the day you saw me, I came to kill you. I want to take a life when I am going away from this life and it is really precious for me that that person to be you.”
The question is, how was his situation so clear from the start, yet nobody did anything. How can he stalk İkbal for five years and nothing gets done? It is clear that we need more coverage on this topic.
What usually happens (when femicides like this happen) in Turkey is that people grieve for a few days or weeks, thousands of post are sent on all platforms, but then it gets forgotten. It gets put into the dusty archives of all the other femicides that came before it. This is because the public got desensitized to it. These events do not stay under the spotlight long enough and are not talked about enough. If there are enough people responding to such instances, maybe then people would think again before committing such a crime.
Luckily these instances have started to be seen by people outside of Turkey, mainly due to social media. There are hashtags like #KadınaVeÇocuğaDokunma (do not touch women and children), #TurkishWomenNeedHelp and #TurkishWomenAreInDanger. These hashtags are used in various platforms like Instagram, Twitter and TikTok. Media coverage and reactions from as many people as possible are important because it leads to justice in a place where it otherwise would not be. For example, on Oct. 2, two suspects (Semir T. and Ömer K.) assaulted İremşan A. in Beyoğlu, Hüseyinağa neighborhood. The event was recorded on a CCTV camera. Even though the suspects have previous criminal records stating that they had four other assault charges in total, they were set free at first. When people started speaking up on social media, they were arrested and taken into custody.
There are many cases like these that are happening everyday in Turkey. I invite anyone who has five minutes to spare to engage with the posts in the hashtags as much as they can, so that the news can spread faster.