Turkish Women Who See Death as a Way Out

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

New York Times 3 November 2000

Turkish Women Who See Death as a Way Out

By DOUGLAS FRANTZ

BATMAN, Turkey, Nov. 1 - A 22- year-old woman threw herself from the
roof of a seven-story building across from her family's apartment
after being beaten by her parents for wearing a tight skirt.

A 20-year-old woman who felt trapped in an arranged marriage and
isolated from her family and village hanged herself, leaving behind a
5-month-old baby and mystified neighbors and relatives.

A mother of five, worn down by the age of 30 from caring for her
husband and his first wife and cut off from the outside world, hanged
herself in the family barn. Her 65-year- old husband later shrugged
and told a psychologist, "It was her time to go to God."

These women were casualties of a cultural conflict in a region in
transition and turmoil. Against the backdrop of 15 years of bloody
civil war between the Turkish Army and the separatist Kurds, they
were uprooted from their rural villages and brought to a city where
even new buildings look tired and tattered.

Instead of a new start,, thousands of women are finding despair,
loneliness and, for a startling number, death, medical experts and
sociologists said in interviews this week.

The suicide rate among women in southeastern Turkey is twice as high
as the rest of the country and, in a reversal of what happens
elsewhere in the world, women are twice as likely to kill themselves
as men.

In two decades, Turkey has gone from a rural nation to an urban one.
Millions of people packed their belongings onto trucks and buses in
search of a better life in Istanbul and Izmit and Ankara.

For many the transition has been smooth, but others have lacked the
skills and education to adapt to city life. To help them, the
government started a program this year to lure people back to the
villages, with little success so far.

Nowhere was the flight more pronounced than here in southeastern
Turkey, the nation's breadbasket and its most conservative region. As
villages were burned and towns were evacuated, hundreds of thousands
of people sought refuge in cities like Batman, Diyarbakir and
Sanliurfa. But jobs were scarce, decent housing unavailable and the
old social rules no longer applied.

"We speak very little about it in my region, but this forced
migration created traumatic stresses," said Aytekin Sir, a
psychiatrist at Dicle University in Diyarbakir, about 50 miles away.
"The traditional social structure was broken, and there was nothing
in its place."

The story of the 22-year-old woman who jumped to her death in July is
all too common. She was still living at home, forbidden to find a job
or go to school and trapped within unbending boundaries set by her
father. The night before her death, her parents and another relative
beat her for wearing a tight skirt, which her father took from her
and burned.

"It was as if I were in a nightmare," she wrote in the last entry in
her diary. "Three people were attacking me. I was screaming and
crying - my face was swollen and my nose was bleeding. I was so
angry, I was willing to kill myself."

A few hours later, she climbed to the roof of the seven-story
building across from her family's apartment, walked to the edge and
stepped off.

The young woman's dream of an education and choosing her own clothes
would have been unheard of in her village. Nearly half the women in
southeastern Turkey are illiterate, largely because their families
refused to send girls to school.

She also would have been unlikely to challenge her father because men
rule with the authority of a feudal lord. The women raise the
children and live in the shadows, usually behind a veil, and the
female children work at home until they are married.

Confronted by alien cities, villagers tried to recreate those
enclaves. They built cheap houses of mud and concrete along unpaved
roads on land nobody wanted at the edges of the cities and continued
to have large families.

Batman's population doubled to 250,000 in the last two decades and
the growth was concentrated in small neighborhoods of gecekondu, a
Turkish phrase for houses slapped together quickly on vacant land.

Though minutes from the city center, the neighborhoods feel like
rural villages. Chickens strut across courtyards enclosed by sticks,
and cows wander beside the road. Men squat in clusters of four or
five, smoking and chatting solemnly at midday. Women and children
gather separately outside the modest homes or in front of a makeshift
storefront. Few of the children go to school, and every woman under
30 seems to be either pregnant or carrying an infant or both.

Insular as they are, these neighborhoods cannot keep out the world.
Men who had always provided enough for their families as farmers or
herdsmen cannot find work, and they bristle with humiliation. Women
and children see a different life, one in which women work outside
the home, and young people wear stylish clothes and hang out on
street corners.

"They are bombarded with shiny lives," said Rahime Hacioglu, a
psychologist who works with troubled women. "But there is a huge gap
between their lives and those dreams."

Ms. Hacioglu discovered how wide that gap could be last week when she
visited the family of the 30-year-old mother of five who hanged
herself in the barn. No one wanted to talk about the suicide, since
it was considered a stain on the husband's honor, but gradually the
psychologist pulled some details from them.

The victim was 18 when she married a much older man who already had
one wife, not an uncommon practice in the rural areas. She had had
five children of her own, but cared for the entire family.

When the family was uprooted from their village and wound up in
Batman, the woman seemed to lose any will to live. She was listless
and quiet, and one day this summer, she went into the makeshift barn
and hanged herself from a rafter.

The question the experts are struggling to answer is why so many
women turn to suicide.

Dr. Sir first noticed a decade ago that many of his female patients
had attempted suicide. Most were migrants, and research is clear that
internal migration can cause an increase in suicide because it breaks
important bonds between the individual and the social system.

Government officials are trying to respond. A team from Ankara issued
a report last month citing low education levels for girls and the
feudal family structure, as well as widespread polygamy and girls
killing themselves to hide that they were not virgins.

Isa Parlak, the governor of Batman Province, said the overall suicide
rate remains below that of Western countries, including the United
States. But he also said the government was developing programs to
assist women, including a crisis-intervention hot line and reading
and writing classes in the gecekondu neighborhoods.

"We want to integrate women into society," he said.

With poverty widespread, and unemployment often surpassing 50
percent, women are relegated to the bottom of the socioeconomic
ladder. Even the scarce resources that poor families can muster are
invariably used to help the sons, leaving girls to watch brothers go
off to school or jobs, while they stay home. Girls who go to school
or have jobs face rigid rules and harsh punishment at home.

Aysegul Baykan, a sociologist at Koc University in Istanbul, said men
are often better at dealing with the upheaval of forced migration.
She said they have job opportunities, however slim, and enough
contact with the society to help with the transition and retain the
chance of a better future.

Gulcan Fidan came to Batman from a village near Adana at age 15 in an
arranged marriage with a man she had never met. She was 20 when she
hanged herself this summer.

Sitting on the steps of the house where Mrs. Fidan lived, her
sister-in-law, Turkan Fidan, and other neighbors seemed mystified at
what happened.

"She loved her 5-month-old baby so much," said Mrs. Fidan. "Her
husband could not find a job, and they had very little money. She
missed her home and her parents very much, but she loved her baby so
much."

Little by little, a different picture emerged. Gulcan's parents had
to send one of her brothers from the village to support their
daughter's family by picking pistachio nuts and cotton in the fields.
Gulcan was humiliated by her family's help and by her husband's
failure to find a job.

Women in Turkey have more freedom than their counterparts in other
Muslim countries, but in the southeast the culture remains more
conservative and women are passive observers. Too often, experts say,
they cannot control their lives, only their deaths.