Born in southeastern Turkey, Selvi was twenty-two years old and pregnant with her fifth child when I met her in June 2010, while conducting research for a report on domestic violence. Her husband started his attacks when she was pregnant with their first child. “That first time, he hit me, he kicked the baby in my belly, and he threw me off the roof,” she said. “The baby survived but I think [the child] has a mental illness.” The violence increased in frequency and severity, and by the time I met Selvi, even included their children.
Selvi’s husband controlled every aspect of her life and was extremely jealous. She told me: “He rapes me all the time, and he checks my fluids ‘down there’ to check I didn’t have sex [with another man].” In 2008 Selvi finally built up the courage to go to the police, after her husband had “broken her skull and arm.” The police brought her husband to the station, gave the couple some food, and sent them home, telling her, “There’s no problem, we spoke to him, you’re back together.” This happened three more times, the violence worsening after every attempt to escape.
The abuse was continuing when I spoke to Selvi in June 2010, during a heart-wrenching interview in a small community center. Her husband gambles, rarely works, and frequently abuses her and the children. She was too afraid to send the children to a government dormitory. Indeed, she had simply given up on escaping the life-threatening violence. “I just cannot go to the police anymore,” she said.
Selvi’s story represents everything that can go horribly wrong when domestic violence is not taken seriously.
Selvi is not the only woman suffering this abuse, and Turkey is not the only country battling it. Domestic violence is a worldwide epidemic, and the European continent is no exception. This violence affects people of both genders, but the vast majority of domestic violence is still endured by women. Children also suffer horrible violence and the effects of children having to witness violence between parents or other trusted grownups are long lasting.
Women throughout Europe are slapped, kicked, beaten, locked up, sexually and psychologically abused, genitally mutilated, raped, forced to work, and killed by men in their immediate social environment. According to the limited statistics available, at least one woman in every five in Europe has been subjected to physical violence at least once in her lifetime, and it is safe to assume this is merely the tip of the iceberg.
Across the continent of Europe, such violations of fundamental human rights affect millions of women. The inescapable conclusion is that violence within the family or household is the most widespread and serious human rights abuse women face in the region. And these women usually suffer in silence, as the majority of women never speak about their experiences.
What sets countries apart is not the occurrence of violence, but what the government does—or does not do—to protect women against it.
It is exceedingly difficult for women to reach out for help when their husbands or partners beat them. Obstacles range from the internal psychological battles of guilt and fear to external roadblocks along the way to protection. It starts with the family, and the pressure to keep things as they are. This may be explicit, to keep the family’s honor intact, as I saw in some places in Turkey. But it is often more subtle with a similar effect. Pressure takes the form of statements like “It’s better for the children,” or “He takes care of you,” or “We all went through it; you have to be humble.”
There can also be economic pressure. In The Netherlands, a woman explained how hard it is to leave an abusive spouse, especially when you have children. Bianca told me, “Even though we might be able to get support from the state eventually, I didn’t make enough money to get a house for us.… Things had to get very bad before I dared to uproot the family.” In the Turkish capital Ankara, Deniz told me, “There was no way I could support myself and the baby. When I told my family that [my husband] was crazy, that he beat me and had even used a stun gun on me, they refused to support me and said, ‘You have a baby, just bury it [the suffering], he’s your husband.’ I had no place to go and no way to get work. I was trapped.”
When a woman does decide to escape, she often runs into disbelief, a lack of protection by the police, a lack of shelter, and a lack of access to justice. Even though eliminating domestic violence has been an international legal obligation for decades, government authorities still do not take this problem seriously in many countries.
What happens when a woman goes to the police to ask for help? Does she have anywhere to live if she leaves her abusive spouse? Will a prosecutor open a case against her abuser, if so she will have access to justice? Incredibly, after decades of incremental progress, the answer to those questions is still no in many countries. The refusal to deal with domestic violence cases seriously, or in other words, without due diligence, is a human rights violation. The person who commits violence against a woman has committed a crime. A government that does not adopt, fund and implement all necessary laws and actions to prevent and to punish this violence violates international human rights law.
In Turkey, a prosecutor stressed to me the importance of the family unit: “It’s better not to get involved. We might save a woman, but destroy a family.” In Belgium, social workers told us of reluctant police officers who cannot arrest perpetrators of domestic violence who still form a real threat, because “the prisons are full.” When a colleague and I spoke with Aisha, a woman living in Belgium, she spoke of her fear and desperation because of this lack of action by the police. She suffered twenty-six long years of daily abuse and violence resulting in broken bones, burns, and awful panic attacks. When her husband almost killed their daughter after beating her and running after her with a knife, she decided she had to take action. She went to the police three times in total. Even though the police did take her complaint seriously, the husband was not removed from the house (there are no emergency protection orders in Belgium) and the police did not arrest him because of “lack of prison cells.” “I don’t know who to trust anymore,” Aisha told us. “Maybe my nightmares will go away, but I am still frightened of him. Aren’t twenty-six years enough?”
The attitude of officials is sometimes even worse if a woman fleeing domestic violence escapes not only from her house, but from her country as well, or has moved to another country to live with her husband.
I met Masha in Istanbul when she was still visibly suffering the physical consequences of her husband’s beatings. Masha was born in the Ukraine, and she had a visa because she married a Turkish husband. He threatened to divorce her if she complained to officials, as divorce would mean she would have to leave the country. Masha is an educated nurse and she was brave enough to go to the police in a hospital despite the risks. She was met with hostility and a cold “Please bother the police in Ukraine with this, we have nothing to do with you.”
One woman, Fatma, who moved to Belgium to join her husband, was beaten and forced to beg by him, a dangerous drug addict. She told us: “Every day, he beat, kicked, and threatened me. I was scared to go to the police.… When I finally went the police just said they contacted him but couldn’t reach him. Now I don’t know where he is and I am terrified.” On top of that, Fatma might be removed from the country because her residence permit is linked to her husband and she no longer lives with him.
Besides the obvious fear of police that many women without official documentation have, other services available to citizens or official residents of a country may be out of reach for non-citizens. My colleagues and I saw shelters in countries throughout the region, including in The Netherlands, Belgium, and Turkey, turn battered women away because they did not have a residence permit. So at their most vulnerable moment, non-citizen women are refused, even by some nongovernmental shelters, if they do not have documentation.
At least at the regional level, there have been some important developments and countries have come to the realization that the epidemic of domestic violence can and should be stopped, and that countries can learn from each other’s best practices. Both the European Court of Human Rights and the Council of Europe, the forty-seven-country regional human rights body of which it is part, have given informed, detailed, and practical guidance to governments on what their duties are and how they could fulfill these.
In 2009, the European Court of Human Rights gave judgment in a landmark case, Opuz v. Turkey, which directly addressed the failure of the Turkish state to take reasonable measures to prevent domestic violence perpetrated against the applicant, Nahide Opuz, and the murder of her mother.
Much like many of the cases we would later document in Turkey, Nahide Opuz had suffered years of brutal domestic violence at the hands of her husband, including stabbings, beatings, and death threats. For four years from 1995 onward, Nahide and her mother requested protection from the police and a prosecutor, claiming their lives were at risk. After one complaint, authorities questioned and then released the husband. Despite numerous complaints, the police and prosecuting authorities did not adequately protect the women: Nahide’s husband murdered her mother in 2002.
The European Court of Human Rights held that Turkey had failed to fulfill its obligations to protect the right to life of Nahide’s mother and that it was in breach of the right not to be subject to torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment for its failure to protect the applicant against ill treatment perpetrated by her former husband. It also held that Turkey was in violation of the right to nondiscrimination, confirming that domestic violence is a form of discrimination against women.
This judgment constitutes the first time the court has elaborated the exact nature of state obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights with respect to violence in the family and the first time it has explicitly confirmed that gender-based violence is a form of discrimination under the Convention. Relying heavily on international and comparative law, the court emphasized what activists have long known: that domestic violence is not a private or family matter, but an issue of public interest that demands effective state action.
Two years later, in May 2011, the Council of Europe adopted the Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence. This historic convention has the potential to improve the lives of women and other victims in forty-seven member states and other countries, with a total of some 800 million citizens. The convention defines and criminalizes various forms of violence against women, including forced marriage, female genital mutilation, and stalking, as well as physical, sexual and psychological violence. The Convention obliges states to create innovative mechanisms, particularly a range of protective measures including evicting violent spouses, lifting professional secrecy under certain conditions, establishing free twenty-four-hour telephone hotlines, and taking gender into account in the examination of asylum requests. It truly raises the bar.
Negotiations for this landmark treaty were not easy. Countries resisted several parts of the text, especially in the field of asylum and immigration. But after years of negotiating, the text of the convention is now open for ratification. Women’s rights groups, lawyers and other human rights defenders from Albania to the United Kingdom have already started using it to push their governments to improve legislation and, more important, the practical protection of women against violence. Countries are signing up not just to a piece of text, but to a set of clear measures they will have to take and be held to account for.
What we have learned is that it all comes down to implementation. In recent years Turkey for example has taken important legislative steps toward addressing violence against women. But despite these impressive legal advances including penal code reforms and a protection order system, remaining gaps in the law and failures of implementation make the protection system unpredictable at best, and at times downright dangerous. The legislative process is undermined by the government’s failure to better prevent abuse in the first place, change discriminatory attitudes, and effectively address the barriers that deter women and girls from reporting abuse and accessing protection. Countries should learn this lesson before it costs even more lives.
It is time for a swift advance toward better safeguards in Europe, and other continents, for women seeking to flee domestic violence.
A sense of urgency throughout the system, from top to bottom, in every country would mean budgets expressly dedicated to combating domestic violence, making an effective response part of the official police curriculum, and improving women’s empowerment and participation in the workforce. Above all, it means accountability for failing to protect women. It is what we owe to Selvi, Deniz, Bianca, Aisha, and the countless abused women whose names we may never even know.
Gauri van Gulik is a researcher and advocate for the Women’s Rights Division at Human Rights Watch, covering Europe and Central Asia. Her fields of expertise include reproductive health and issues affecting women migrants. She is the author of the 2010 Human Rights Watch report Fast-Tracked Unfairness, on the obstacles faced by many abused women seeking asylum in the United Kingdom, and the 2011 report “He Loves You, He Beats You” on domestic violence in Turkey.