1. Introduction: From Isolated Crimes to a Structural Pattern

Public discussion of violence against women in Turkey is often triggered by individual tragedies: a woman killed by her husband, a former partner ignoring restraining orders, or another “fall” from a balcony or window later recorded as suicide or accident. Yet when these cases are examined collectively, they reveal not a series of disconnected incidents but a persistent and patterned form of gender-based violence embedded in intimate relationships, institutional responses, and criminal justice practice. Recent international reporting has drawn attention to the striking recurrence of women allegedly “falling to their deaths”, frequently in contexts involving current or former partners, prior complaints to authorities, or unresolved domestic conflicts (The Guardian, 31 January 2026). Earlier investigations documented days in which multiple women across different provinces were killed by spouses or ex-spouses, illustrating both the geographic spread and the repetitive structure of these crimes. Similar patterns are highlighted in German and U.S. media coverage, emphasizing separation violence, ineffective protection orders, and the routine escalation from prior abuse to lethal outcomes.

These observations are consistent with academic and policy literature, which conceptualizes femicide not as spontaneous violence but as the terminal stage of an abuse continuum: psychological control, economic coercion, physical violence, threats, stalking, and finally homicide. In this framework, lethal violence is rarely the first act. It is typically preceded by warning signals – complaints to police, restraining orders, family interventions, or documented injuries – that fail to trigger effective preventive responses.

From a legal perspective, Turkey has not remained static. Substantive criminal law has undergone significant hardening in recent years, particularly through the expansion of aggravated forms of homicide and injury committed “against women”, increased minimum sentences, and the inclusion of former spouses within qualifying circumstances under the Turkish Penal Code. Parallel to this, protective mechanisms formally exist, including emergency protection orders, removal of perpetrators from shared residences, and shelter systems administered by the Ministry of Family and Social Services. Yet the persistence of femicide despite this normative expansion points to a deeper structural problem: the growing distance between law on the books and law in action. Official statistics and administrative data tend to underrepresent the true scale of lethal and non-lethal violence, while civil society monitoring consistently reports higher figures and a large category of “suspicious deaths” that remain legally unresolved. Political discourse has at times minimized or reclassified femicide as ordinary homicide or isolated domestic disputes, further obscuring its gendered and systemic nature.

This article proceeds from the premise that domestic violence and femicide in Turkey cannot be adequately understood through criminal law alone, nor reduced to individual pathology. Rather, they must be analyzed as the outcome of interacting layers:

• substantive criminal norms that increasingly recognize gender-based risk,
• procedural practices that often fail to translate these norms into timely protection,
• institutional fragmentation between police, prosecutors, courts, and social services, and
• social and political narratives that normalize or individualize structural violence.

Accordingly, the central thesis of this study is as follows: Turkey today does not primarily suffer from a lack of criminalization of violence against women; it suffers from a systemic failure of prevention, risk assessment, enforcement, and procedural protection. Femicide persists not because the law is silent, but because institutions respond more effectively to death than to danger.

Methodologically, the analysis integrates criminal law doctrine (particularly recent developments under the TCK), policy materials on gender-based violence, public health and criminological research, and investigative journalism. It also builds on the author’s prior normative mapping of women’s status under Turkish criminal law, which demonstrated that although the TCK increasingly treats women as an independent protected category, enforcement still operates largely through role-based and reactive mechanisms (Bıçak, 2026). The chapters that follow examine, in turn, the conceptual foundations of domestic violence and femicide, the empirical scale of the problem in Turkey, the existing legal framework, institutional failures along the violence trajectory, criminal procedure and secondary victimization, political and discursive dimensions, and finally the structural reasons why femicide continues despite legal reform – before concluding with reform directions centered on prevention, procedural capacity, and institutional integration.

2. Conceptual Foundations: Domestic Violence, Femicide, and the Continuum of Abuse

Understanding domestic violence and femicide requires moving beyond episodic or event-based interpretations of harm. Both phenomena are better conceptualized as processes unfolding over time, shaped by power asymmetries, relational control, institutional responses, and social norms. Legal analysis that focuses exclusively on the final criminal act—most often homicide—risks obscuring the patterned trajectory that precedes it.

2.1. Domestic Violence as a Pattern of Coercive Control

Domestic violence is frequently mischaracterized as isolated incidents of physical assault. Contemporary scholarship and international policy frameworks instead describe it as a composite of behaviors aimed at domination: psychological intimidation, economic restriction, surveillance, threats, sexual coercion, and episodic physical violence. This understanding aligns with the definition advanced by the World Health Organization, which frames intimate partner violence as encompassing physical, sexual, emotional, and controlling conduct within close relationships.

From this perspective, violence is not reducible to discrete criminal episodes. It is better understood as coercive control – a sustained strategy through which one partner regulates the other’s autonomy, mobility, and decision-making. Physical assault is only one instrument within this broader regime. Many women who are later killed report long histories of threats, monitoring, isolation from family, financial dependency, and repeated intimidation before any lethal act occurs. This conceptualization has direct legal relevance. If violence is treated solely as a series of isolated acts, institutions respond reactively and fragmentarily. If, however, it is understood as a continuous pattern, then early interventions – restraining orders, risk assessments, supervised release, and social support – become central to prevention rather than peripheral administrative measures.

2.2. Femicide: Gender-Based Killing, Not Ordinary Homicide

Femicide refers to the killing of women because they are women, most commonly by current or former intimate partners. It is distinguished from general homicide by three interrelated characteristics:

• the relational context (intimate or familial),
• the gendered motive structure (control, ownership, punishment for autonomy), and
• the predictable escalation from prior abuse.

International research consistently shows that the majority of female homicide victims are killed by partners or ex-partners, whereas male homicide victims are far more likely to be killed by acquaintances or strangers. This asymmetry is critical: femicide is not randomly distributed violence; it is concentrated within private relationships marked by dependency and power imbalance. Equally important is the temporal dimension. Femicide is rarely sudden. It typically represents the culmination of a sequence: verbal threats, stalking, prior assaults, ignored complaints, breached protection orders, and separation conflicts. Media investigations in Turkey repeatedly document this trajectory, revealing that many victims had already sought help from police or courts before being killed. In this sense, femicide is best understood not as an unforeseeable crime but as the terminal point of an identifiable risk pathway.

2.3. The Continuum of Abuse

The concept of a “continuum of abuse” provides a unifying framework for domestic violence and femicide. Rather than treating psychological abuse, physical violence, and homicide as separate categories, this model situates them along a single spectrum of escalating harm. At one end lie controlling behaviors: jealousy, monitoring, isolation, and economic restriction. These are followed by explicit threats, episodic assaults, and stalking. The final stage is lethal violence. Crucially, progression along this continuum is often accelerated by moments of perceived loss of control by the perpetrator – most notably separation, divorce, or attempts by the woman to reassert autonomy.

This pattern is repeatedly confirmed in Turkish cases. Reporting shows that women face heightened danger when leaving relationships, filing for divorce, or entering new partnerships, with former spouses frequently responsible for lethal outcomes. Academic studies likewise identify post-separation periods as among the most dangerous phases in abusive relationships. From a legal standpoint, this continuum challenges traditional criminal justice sequencing. Waiting until serious injury or homicide occurs means intervening at the very end of a long, visible process. Effective protection therefore depends on recognizing early indicators of escalation and treating them as legally significant, rather than dismissing them as “private disputes” or minor conflicts.

2.4. Structural, Not Individual, Violence

A further conceptual shift concerns causation. Domestic violence and femicide are often framed as the product of individual pathology – jealousy, anger, substance abuse, or personal conflict. While such factors may be present, they do not explain the systemic repetition of similar fact patterns across regions, socioeconomic groups, and time periods. Policy-oriented analyses instead emphasize structural contributors: gender inequality, economic dependency, weak institutional coordination, inconsistent enforcement of protection orders, and cultural narratives that normalize male authority within intimate relationships. These conditions shape both perpetrator behavior and institutional response.

This structural perspective is particularly important for legal analysis. If femicide is treated as an aberration, the solution appears to lie in harsher punishment after the fact. If it is understood as the predictable outcome of systemic failures, then responsibility extends beyond individual offenders to include policing practices, prosecutorial discretion, judicial risk assessment, and the availability of social support mechanisms.

2.5. Implications for Criminal Law and Procedure

The conceptual framework outlined above has three direct implications for the Turkish legal context. First, substantive criminal law must be evaluated not only by the severity of penalties but by its capacity to intervene earlier along the abuse continuum. Aggravated homicide provisions, while symbolically important, address only the final stage. Second, procedural law becomes central. Risk assessment, enforcement of protection orders, treatment of victim testimony, and speed of intervention determine whether escalation is interrupted or allowed to continue. Third, institutional integration matters. Domestic violence spans criminal law, family law, social services, and administrative protection regimes. Fragmentation between these domains enables perpetrators to exploit gaps while victims navigate multiple systems with limited coordination. These themes recur throughout the Turkish experience: expanding criminal norms coexist with delayed enforcement, underused protective tools, and inconsistent recognition of escalation risk.

3. The Scale of the Problem in Turkey: Statistics, Patterns, and Invisible Deaths

Any serious discussion of domestic violence and femicide in Turkey must confront a fundamental difficulty at the outset: the available data are fragmented, contested, and structurally incomplete. Official statistics, media monitoring, civil society counts, and international reporting frequently diverge – sometimes dramatically. This divergence is not merely technical; it reflects deeper institutional and political tensions surrounding how violence against women is defined, recorded, and acknowledged. Accordingly, this chapter does not aim to establish a single “true” number. Rather, it maps the landscape of available indicators, identifies recurring patterns, and highlights the phenomenon of invisible deaths – cases that fall outside official classifications yet fit the empirical profile of femicide.

3.1. Official Data and Its Structural Limits

Turkey’s primary source of nationwide survey-based data on violence against women is produced by Turkish Statistical Institute (TÜİK) in cooperation with the Ministry of Family and Social Services. The most recent large-scale “Violence Against Women in Turkey” survey confirms that a substantial proportion of women experience physical, sexual, psychological, or economic violence during their lifetime, most commonly perpetrated by intimate partners or former partners.

While these surveys are methodologically robust for prevalence estimates, they do not function as real-time monitoring systems for lethal outcomes. Homicide data, meanwhile, are typically published in aggregated criminal statistics without consistent gender-disaggregated or relationship-based breakdowns. As a result, official homicide figures rarely specify whether victims were killed by intimate partners, former spouses, or family members – precisely the relationships that define femicide.

This structural limitation produces a critical blind spot: the state records killings, but not systematically gendered killings. Without mandatory classification by victim–perpetrator relationship and motive context, femicide becomes statistically diluted within general homicide categories. International observers have repeatedly noted this gap. Reporting by Voice of America highlights that Turkish authorities often emphasize declining overall homicide rates while avoiding disaggregated femicide indicators, thereby understating the scale of gender-based killing.

3.2. Independent Monitoring and Media-Based Counts

Because of these limitations, much of what is publicly known about femicide in Turkey comes from independent monitoring initiatives and investigative journalism. Civil society platforms and journalists compile case-by-case databases based on media reports, court records, and family testimony. These sources consistently show annual femicide numbers significantly higher than what can be inferred from official channels. Media investigations documented that in some periods women were killed at a rate approaching or exceeding one per day, with clusters of multiple killings occurring within single 24-hour windows (The Guardian, 2024).

Coverage by Deutsche Welle has emphasized both the frequency and the brutality of recent cases, noting recurrent patterns of stabbing, shooting, and strangulation, overwhelmingly committed by husbands, former husbands, or intimate partners (DW, 2023; DW, 2024). These reports also underscore a recurring institutional theme: many victims had previously contacted police, sought restraining orders, or initiated divorce proceedings. The reliance on media-based counting, however, introduces its own distortions. Rural cases, suspicious deaths labeled as “suicide”, and killings lacking immediate press attention often escape documentation. Thus even independent tallies likely underrepresent the true scale of lethal gender-based violence.

3.3. Characteristic Patterns of Femicide in Turkey

Despite data fragmentation, a remarkably consistent empirical profile emerges across academic studies, media investigations, and international reporting. First, relationship proximity is central. The overwhelming majority of women killed are murdered by current or former partners, not strangers. This confirms that femicide in Turkey is primarily an intimate crime rather than a public-security phenomenon. Second, separation and autonomy triggers recur with striking regularity. Divorce filings, breakup attempts, new relationships, or requests for protection frequently precede lethal attacks. Former spouses and ex-partners appear prominently among perpetrators, corroborating the legal relevance of post-separation risk recognized in recent Turkish criminal law reforms. Third, prior warning signals are common. Many victims experienced repeated threats, stalking, or assaults before being killed. Protection orders were often issued but inadequately enforced, or violated without immediate consequence. Fourth, methodological brutality is notable. Killings frequently involve excessive force, multiple wounds, or acts carried out in front of children or family members, reinforcing the interpretation of femicide as a form of domination rather than impulsive violence. These patterns closely mirror international findings summarized in medical and criminological literature: femicide typically represents the end-stage of prolonged abuse rather than an isolated event.

3.4. Invisible Deaths: Suicide, Suspicious Fatalities, and Classification Gaps

One of the most troubling aspects of Turkey’s femicide landscape is the category of invisible deaths. These include:

• women whose deaths are classified as suicide despite documented histories of abuse,
• suspicious falls from balconies or high places,
• alleged accidental shootings or stabbings within domestic settings, and
• cases rapidly closed without thorough forensic or relational investigation.

A non-negligible portion of these cases may in fact involve coercion, forced suicide, or staged accidents. When such deaths are excluded from femicide statistics, the apparent scale of the problem is artificially reduced. This phenomenon illustrates why femicide cannot be measured solely through conventional homicide categories. Without systematic investigation of domestic context and prior violence, lethal outcomes tied to coercive control remain legally invisible.

3.5. Misinformation, Minimization, and Political Framing

Beyond technical deficiencies, the representation of femicide in Turkey is shaped by political narratives. Reporting by Voice of America documents instances in which officials and pro-government media have framed femicide as exaggerated or statistically marginal, emphasizing broader crime trends instead of gender-specific patterns. This framing has two consequences. First, it shifts attention away from structural causes toward individualized explanations. Second, it weakens public pressure for systemic reform by portraying femicide as episodic rather than endemic. At the same time, international advocacy organizations and women’s rights groups continue to highlight Turkey as a high-risk environment for intimate partner homicide, particularly in periods following withdrawal from or weakening of gender-protection frameworks.

3.6. From Numbers to Normative Meaning

The statistical picture, however imperfect, supports three core conclusions.

• Femicide in Turkey is not rare, random, or unpredictable.
• It is overwhelmingly embedded in intimate relationships and preceded by identifiable warning signs.
• Existing legal and institutional mechanisms frequently fail to interrupt escalation trajectories.

These conclusions directly challenge any legal approach that treats femicide as merely aggravated homicide. The data instead demand a continuum-based understanding: killings are the final manifestation of prolonged abuse, institutional delay, and unaddressed coercive control. This empirical reality provides the foundation for the legal analysis that follows.

4. The Legal Framework in Turkey

The Turkish legal response to domestic violence and femicide rests on three partially overlapping pillars: substantive criminal law (primarily the Turkish Penal Code), preventive-protective mechanisms (most notably Law No. 6284), and an institutional architecture involving police, prosecutors, family courts, and social services. On paper, this framework appears comprehensive. In practice, however, its fragmented design and uneven enforcement produce structural gaps that directly shape the trajectory from abuse to lethal violence. This chapter maps these three pillars and highlights the points at which normative ambition diverges from operational reality.

4.1. Substantive Criminal Law: From General Offences to Gender-Sensitive Aggravation

At the core of Turkey’s criminal-law response lies the Turkish Penal Code (5237), which regulates violence against women primarily through general offences – homicide, injury, threats, deprivation of liberty – supplemented by aggravated forms and enhanced minimum penalties. In recent years, the Code has undergone a visible shift toward gender-sensitive aggravation. Killings committed “against women” and violence perpetrated by current or former spouses are now treated as qualifying circumstances in key offences, particularly homicide and intentional injury. This development reflects a legislative acknowledgment that women face structurally heightened risks in intimate settings and that ordinary offence definitions were insufficient to capture this reality.

Two features of this evolution deserve emphasis. First, Turkish criminal law no longer treats marital status as the decisive factor. The explicit inclusion of former spouses recognizes that separation and divorce often intensify danger rather than mitigate it. This mirrors empirical findings showing that femicide frequently follows attempts by women to exit abusive relationships. Second, lawmakers have increasingly relied on minimum sentence increases, not merely classic qualified forms. In intentional injury, for example, the elevation of the lower sentencing threshold for acts committed against women narrows judicial discretion and reduces access to suspended sentences or alternative sanctions. This technique signals a policy preference for inevitability of punishment over individualized calibration.

From a doctrinal perspective, this represents a move toward “substantive equality” (maddi eşitlik); the law differentiates not because women are legally distinct subjects, but because their exposure to violence is structurally unequal (Bıçak, 2026). Yet this same approach raises concerns about proportionality and automatism, especially when applied without parallel improvements in investigation and risk assessment. Crucially, criminal law intervenes after violence has occurred. Even in its aggravated form, it remains reactive. As public health and criminological research repeatedly shows, femicide is rarely prevented by punishment alone; it is prevented by early disruption of abuse trajectories. This limitation places exceptional weight on the second pillar: preventive protection.

4.2. Law No. 6284 and Preventive Protection Mechanisms

Preventive intervention in Turkey is primarily governed by Law No. 6284 on the Protection of Family and Prevention of Violence Against Women. This statute authorizes a wide range of measures, including:

• emergency protection orders,
• removal of perpetrators from shared residences,
• restraining orders,
• police accompaniment,
• temporary financial assistance, and
• placement in shelters.

Implementation involves family courts, law enforcement, and social services under the Ministry of Family and Social Services. In theory, Law No. 6284 constitutes a powerful early-intervention tool. Protection orders can be issued rapidly, even on the basis of preliminary risk indicators, and violations may trigger coercive detention. Guidance published by the Ministry explicitly encourages women to seek help through hotlines, police stations, and social service units at early stages of abuse. International legal analyses confirm that, on paper, Turkey’s protection regime aligns with comparative European standards. However, empirical reporting consistently shows that these mechanisms often fail at precisely the moments they matter most. Common deficiencies include:

• delayed issuance of orders,
• inadequate monitoring of compliance,
• lack of immediate response to violations,
• insufficient coordination between police and prosecutors, and
• limited shelter capacity, particularly outside major cities (Wilson Center, 2023).

In many documented femicide cases, victims had already obtained restraining orders or filed complaints. Yet enforcement proved symbolic rather than protective. This pattern underscores a central paradox: Turkey possesses formal preventive tools, but lacks a reliable system for transforming them into real-time safety.

4.3. Institutional Architecture: Fragmentation and Diffused Responsibility

Domestic violence and femicide cases in Turkey traverse a complex institutional landscape involving:

• local police units,
• public prosecutors,
• criminal courts,
• family courts,
• social services, and
• municipal or NGO-operated shelters.

Each institution operates under its own mandate, data systems, and performance criteria. What is missing is a fully integrated, risk-centered framework. No single authority maintains comprehensive oversight of a victim’s trajectory from first complaint to final outcome. Risk assessments conducted by police are rarely embedded in prosecutorial decision-making. Family courts issuing protection orders do not systematically coordinate with criminal courts handling assault charges. Social services often lack direct access to judicial files. This fragmentation produces institutional diffusion of responsibility: every agency acts within its limited scope, while no agency assumes ownership of the overall safety outcome.

The consequences are tangible. Warning signs accumulate across institutions without triggering escalation protocols. A threat reported to police, a restraining order issued by a family court, and a pending criminal investigation may coexist without being synthesized into a unified risk profile. In such conditions, lethal violence becomes not an unforeseeable catastrophe but an institutional failure of aggregation.

4.4. Criminal Procedure and the Timing Problem

Another structural weakness lies in procedural tempo. Criminal investigations into threats, injuries, or stalking frequently progress slowly, while protection orders are time-limited and require renewal. This creates windows of vulnerability in which perpetrators remain at liberty, aware of complaints, and unrestrained by effective supervision. Media investigations repeatedly document cases where women were killed while proceedings were pending or shortly after filing complaints (DW, 2024; The Guardian, 2024). These timelines highlight a critical mismatch between the speed of escalating violence and the pace of legal response. From a systemic perspective, this is not merely a capacity issue; it reflects a conceptual bias. Turkish criminal procedure is still largely oriented toward adjudicating past acts rather than preventing future harm. Yet domestic violence and femicide demand precisely the opposite orientation.

4.5. The Gap Between Normative Recognition and Operational Reality

Taken together, Turkey’s legal framework reveals a striking asymmetry. On the normative level, lawmakers increasingly recognize women as an independent risk-bearing category, expand aggravated offences, and provide formal protective tools. On the operational level, enforcement remains episodic, reactive, and fragmented. This gap explains why femicide persists despite legislative hardening. The problem is not primarily insufficient criminalization; it is insufficient institutional integration, risk management, and preventive capacity. In this sense, Turkey exemplifies a broader international pattern: when domestic violence is treated mainly as a criminal-law issue rather than a coordinated safety system challenge, deaths continue to occur in the shadow of existing laws.

5. From Abuse to Femicide: Escalation Pathways and Institutional Failure Points

One of the most consistent findings across criminology, public-health research, and investigative reporting is that femicide rarely occurs without warning. It is typically preceded by a sequence of escalating behaviors – psychological control, threats, stalking, physical assaults, and repeated institutional contacts. Understanding this continuum of abuse is essential, because it is precisely along this trajectory that prevention is possible, yet most frequently fails. This chapter reconstructs that pathway in the Turkish context and identifies the critical institutional failure points that allow violence to progress from non-lethal abuse to homicide.

5.1. The Continuum of Abuse: From Coercive Control to Lethal Violence

Academic literature conceptualizes intimate partner violence not as episodic conflict but as a process of coercive control: a pattern of domination combining intimidation, isolation, surveillance, and economic pressure, often punctuated by physical assaults. Homicide emerges at the far end of this continuum, typically when the victim attempts to assert autonomy – by seeking separation, filing complaints, or entering a new relationship. Empirical studies focusing on Turkey reach similar conclusions. Femicide cases are overwhelmingly embedded in prolonged abusive relationships, with separation acting as a key trigger rather than a protective turning point (Leiden University Thesis). This aligns with the legislative shift discussed in Chapter 4, whereby former spouses were brought within aggravated offence regimes: the law has begun to reflect what data has long shown. Investigative journalism repeatedly documents the same pattern:

• prior threats or assaults,
• applications for protection orders,
• police reports or prosecutor complaints,
• followed by lethal violence when control is perceived to be slipping.

These sequences expose femicide as a process failure, not a sudden anomaly.

5.2. First Contact: Underestimation at the Entry Point

The earliest institutional contact usually occurs at the level of local law enforcement. Women report threats, harassment, or assault; officers take statements; preliminary records are created. This entry point is decisive. Yet it is also where systemic minimization most often begins. Common problems include:

• characterization of incidents as “family disputes”,
• encouragement of reconciliation,
• reluctance to initiate criminal proceedings in “non-serious” assaults, and
• insufficient documentation of coercive control behaviors.

Such practices fragment the evidentiary trail. Each episode is treated in isolation, rather than as part of an escalating pattern. As a result, prosecutors later encounter files that appear minor, despite representing repeated victimization. The structural consequence is clear: early-stage abuse is downgraded administratively, which weakens all subsequent interventions.

5.3. Protection Orders Without Protection

Law No. 6284 allows rapid issuance of restraining and removal orders. In theory, these measures interrupt escalation by creating physical distance and signaling institutional seriousness. In practice, however, protection orders frequently function as symbolic barriers rather than effective safeguards. Recurring deficiencies include:

• delayed service of orders,
• lack of electronic monitoring or supervision,
• minimal response to violations, and
• absence of structured follow-up.

Media investigations show that many femicide victims were already under formal protection when they were killed (DW, 2024; VOA, 2025). Violations were either not reported, not acted upon, or treated as low-priority infractions. This reflects a deeper design flaw: Turkish protection mechanisms are largely complaint-driven. Responsibility for alerting authorities to breaches falls on the victim, even though coercive control often makes such reporting dangerous or psychologically impossible. In risk-management terms, the system externalizes monitoring to the very person it seeks to protect.

5.4. Prosecutorial Fragmentation and the Loss of Risk Visibility

When cases reach prosecutors, they often arrive as disconnected files: a threat here, an injury there, a restraining order elsewhere. There is no unified platform aggregating these interactions into a cumulative risk profile. Consequently, prosecutorial decisions tend to be offence-specific rather than trajectory-based. Charges focus on individual acts instead of patterns of domination. Requests for detention or intensified protection are assessed in isolation, without systematic reference to prior incidents handled by different units or courts. Comparative policy research emphasizes that effective femicide prevention depends on integrated risk assessment, combining police data, court orders, prior convictions, and social-service reports into a single evaluative framework (Wilson Center, 2023). Turkey currently lacks such an architecture. This fragmentation explains why danger is often recognized only retrospectively – after death has occurred.

5.5. Separation Violence and the Critical Window

A particularly dangerous phase emerges when women attempt to leave abusive relationships. Divorce filings, custody disputes, or moves to shelters frequently precede lethal attacks. Despite this well-established risk, Turkish institutions do not systematically treat separation as an automatic escalation trigger. Protective measures are not routinely intensified during divorce proceedings, nor are criminal files fast-tracked solely because a victim has initiated separation. The result is a critical window in which perpetrators experience loss of control, while institutions maintain routine response tempos.

5.6. Invisible Escalation: Suspicious Deaths and Forced Suicides

Beyond documented homicides lies a shadow category of suspicious deaths: balcony falls, alleged suicides, and “accidental” fatalities occurring in domestic contexts. When such cases are classified as suicide without thorough relational investigation, escalation pathways disappear from official records. This phenomenon reinforces the illusion of isolated incidents while concealing cumulative institutional failure.

5.7. Structural Diagnosis: Why the System Intervenes Too Late

Across these stages, a consistent pattern emerges:

• early abuse is minimized,
• protection is formalized but weakly enforced,
• information remains siloed,
• separation risk is underestimated, and
• escalation is recognized only after lethal outcomes.

These are not accidental shortcomings. They reflect a system designed primarily to adjudicate completed offences rather than to manage evolving danger. In this sense, femicide in Turkey is not primarily a problem of insufficient punishment. It is a problem of temporal misalignment: institutions respond decisively to death, but hesitantly to danger.

6. Criminal Procedure, Secondary Victimization, and the Limits of Adversarial Justice

While substantive criminal law defines offences and penalties, it is criminal procedure that determines whether protection is real, whether evidence is effectively assembled, and whether victims experience the justice system as a source of safety or as an additional site of harm. In cases of domestic violence and femicide in Turkey, procedural dynamics frequently operate not as safeguards but as accelerators of vulnerability. This chapter examines how evidentiary practices, adversarial structures, and institutional routines contribute to secondary victimization, and why traditional criminal procedure – designed primarily for episodic crimes between strangers struggles to address coercive, intimate violence.

6.1. The Procedural Paradox: High Stakes, Low Urgency

Domestic violence cases typically enter the criminal justice system as minor offences: threats, simple injury, harassment, or violations of protection orders. Each file is processed according to ordinary procedural timelines, evidentiary thresholds, and workload constraints. Yet empirically, these “minor” cases often sit on the direct pathway to lethal violence (PMC, 2018). This produces a structural paradox:

• substantively, the risk is extreme and cumulative;
• procedurally, each incident is treated as low-level and discrete.

Investigations advance slowly, indictments may take months, and hearings are scheduled according to routine calendars. Meanwhile, victims continue living under immediate threat. International policy research stresses that femicide prevention requires front-loaded urgency—rapid prosecutorial assessment, early judicial involvement, and continuous risk review (Wilson Center, 2023). Turkish procedure, by contrast, remains backward-looking: it evaluates completed acts rather than anticipating future harm. The result is a system that mobilizes fully only after irreversible outcomes.

6.2. Evidence in Intimate Violence: The Limits of Classical Proof Models

Traditional criminal procedure relies heavily on external corroboration: eyewitnesses, forensic traces, or objective recordings. Domestic violence rarely provides such evidence. Abuse occurs in private spaces, without neutral observers, and often leaves injuries that fade quickly or are deliberately concealed. Consequently, women’s cases depend disproportionately on:

• victim statements,
• medical reports,
• prior complaints, and
• circumstantial indicators of coercive control.

Despite this reality, evidentiary culture continues to privilege physical proof over narrative continuity. Each complaint is assessed in isolation, rather than as part of a longitudinal pattern. This atomization has several consequences:

• Prior threats or assaults lose probative force once time has passed.
• Psychological violence and stalking are under-documented.
• Patterns of domination fail to crystallize into legally persuasive narratives.

Comparative research confirms that systems failing to recognize course-of-conduct evidence systematically underestimate danger (PMC, 2018). Turkish practice largely mirrors this weakness. Thus, although femicide is almost always preceded by escalating behavior, procedure rarely captures escalation as such.

6.3. Secondary Victimization: When Process Becomes Punishment

Secondary victimization refers to harm inflicted not by the perpetrator, but by the justice system itself. In Turkey, this manifests in several recurrent ways. First, repetitive testimony. Women are often required to recount traumatic experiences multiple times: to police, prosecutors, forensic doctors, and judges. Each retelling risks retraumatization. Second, confrontational hearings. Victims may be questioned aggressively by defense counsel, sometimes in the presence of the accused, with limited use of protective courtroom arrangements. Third, credibility skepticism. Inconsistent details, delayed reporting, or continued contact with abusers are frequently interpreted as indicators of unreliability, rather than recognized as typical features of coercive relationships. Fourth, procedural fatigue. Long delays, adjournments, and perceived indifference lead many women to withdraw complaints or disengage entirely. From a systemic perspective, secondary victimization undermines not only individual well-being but evidentiary integrity: traumatized or exhausted victims are less able to participate effectively in proceedings.

6.4. Protection Versus Fair Trial: A Persistent Structural Tension

Efforts to protect women during criminal proceedings inevitably intersect with defendants’ rights: confrontation, equality of arms, and the presumption of innocence.

This creates a recurring dilemma. Measures such as closed hearings, remote testimony, or limited cross-examination can reduce harm to victims—but may be perceived as constraining defense rights. Conversely, full adversarial exposure may satisfy procedural orthodoxy while exacerbating victim vulnerability.

Turkish practice tends to resolve this tension conservatively, favoring classical adversarial forms. Protective procedural innovations exist in principle, but are unevenly applied.

The deeper issue, however, is conceptual. Criminal procedure remains organized around a model of symmetrical parties and isolated events. Domestic violence disrupts this model: power is asymmetric, harm is cumulative, and the risk is ongoing.

Without adapting procedural logic to these realities, formal fairness can coexist with substantive injustice.

E. Time as a Risk Factor: Delays, Gaps, and Exposure

Perhaps the most underestimated procedural variable in femicide cases is time.

Every delay—between complaint and investigation, between indictment and trial, between protection order and enforcement—extends exposure to danger.

Media investigations repeatedly reveal killings occurring while files were pending or hearings awaited (DW, 2023; The Guardian, 2024). These are not anomalies; they are structural byproducts of ordinary caseflow management applied to extraordinary risk contexts.

In practical terms, criminal procedure treats domestic violence as legally urgent only after it becomes fatal.

F. Procedural Culture and Institutional Expectations

Beyond formal rules, informal expectations shape outcomes.

Police may anticipate reconciliation. Prosecutors may expect victims to withdraw. Judges may presume that non-lethal violence is manageable within family dynamics. Each expectation subtly lowers intervention thresholds.

This culture reflects a lingering perception of domestic violence as a private conflict rather than a public safety emergency—a perception repeatedly challenged by empirical evidence but slow to disappear institutionally (Wilson Center, 2023; VOA, 2024).

G. Structural Assessment

Taken together, procedural practice in Turkey reveals a consistent pattern:

– escalation is not legally constructed as such,
– victims carry the evidentiary and monitoring burden,
– protection measures are weakly synchronized with prosecutions, and
– adversarial routines overshadow safety imperatives.

These features explain why criminal procedure often functions as a rear-guard mechanism, responding to completed harm rather than preventing foreseeable catastrophe.

Femicide thus emerges not merely from violent individuals, but from procedural architectures that fail to convert early warning into decisive action.

VII. Political Narratives, Misinformation, and the Normalization of Femicide

Legal frameworks and institutional procedures do not operate in a vacuum. They are embedded in political discourse, media representation, and broader cultural narratives that shape how violence is perceived, prioritized, and ultimately addressed. In Turkey, these discursive environments play a decisive role in transforming femicide from an exceptional emergency into a normalized social fact.

This chapter examines how political framing, selective statistics, and public narratives contribute to the minimization of domestic violence and femicide—and how this normalization feeds back into institutional inertia.

A. From Structural Violence to “Isolated Incidents”

A recurring feature of official communication is the tendency to frame femicide as a collection of unrelated criminal acts rather than as a structural phenomenon.

Public statements frequently emphasize that homicide is a general crime affecting all segments of society, thereby dissolving gendered patterns into abstract crime rates. In this framing, women killed by partners are treated as victims of generic violence rather than as targets of a specific, predictable risk configuration.

Reporting by Voice of America documents how government-aligned narratives have repeatedly stressed overall crime trends while avoiding sustained engagement with femicide as a category, sometimes portraying civil society figures as exaggerated or politically motivated (VOA, 2024). This rhetorical move has a clear effect: it shifts the debate from prevention of gender-based violence to disputes over statistical interpretation.

Once femicide is reduced to “ordinary homicide,” the policy implications narrow. Structural reform gives way to routine law enforcement, and the demand for coordinated prevention loses urgency.

B. Statistical Framing and the Politics of Measurement

Numbers are not neutral. What is counted—and how—defines what is politically visible.

As discussed in Chapter III, Turkey lacks a unified, official femicide registry disaggregated by relationship context and gender motive. This absence allows competing narratives to flourish. Authorities may rely on aggregate homicide figures, while civil society tracks case-by-case killings of women. The resulting discrepancy becomes a political battleground rather than a basis for shared diagnosis.

International reporting repeatedly highlights this divergence. Investigations by Deutsche Welle describe how independent monitors consistently report higher femicide figures than those implied by official crime data, particularly when suspicious deaths and alleged suicides are excluded from state counts (DW, 2023; DW, 2024).

This statistical ambiguity serves a stabilizing function: uncertainty dilutes accountability. Without authoritative, gender-sensitive data, femicide remains contestable rather than undeniable.

C. Misinformation and Discursive Deflection

Beyond selective statistics, misinformation operates through framing devices that redirect attention away from institutional responsibility.

Common discursive strategies include:

– attributing killings to “psychological problems” of perpetrators,
– emphasizing jealousy or passion,
– framing violence as mutual conflict, and
– invoking family breakdown rather than coercive control.

Such narratives individualize violence while obscuring its patterned nature. They also implicitly relocate responsibility from institutions to personal tragedy.

Coverage by Voice of America shows how some political actors have portrayed femicide as an unavoidable byproduct of modernization or social change, rather than as a preventable outcome of failed protection systems (VOA, 2024). This framing discourages structural solutions by presenting violence as culturally diffuse and administratively intractable.

D. Media Representation and the Spectacle of Violence

Mainstream media plays an ambivalent role. On one hand, graphic reporting and headline coverage bring attention to brutal cases. On the other, this episodic sensationalism often substitutes for sustained analysis.

Investigations by The Guardian document days in which multiple women were killed across different provinces, generating momentary outrage but little policy continuity (The Guardian, 2024). The cycle is familiar: shock, mourning, social media mobilization—followed by institutional quiet.

This pattern transforms femicide into a recurring spectacle rather than a persistent policy problem.

Moreover, repeated exposure without systemic response can produce compassion fatigue. Violence becomes normalized precisely because it is constantly visible yet structurally unaddressed.

E. Withdrawal from International Normative Frameworks and Symbolic Messaging

Discursive normalization has also been reinforced by Turkey’s withdrawal from international gender-protection frameworks, most notably the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women.

While domestic law formally retained many protective mechanisms, the symbolic impact of withdrawal was substantial. It signaled a deprioritization of gender-based violence at the highest political level and emboldened narratives portraying women’s rights advocacy as external or ideological.

Analyses by Wilson Center underline how this move reshaped public discourse, strengthening conservative framings of family integrity over individual safety and reframing protection policies as cultural intrusions rather than human rights obligations (Wilson Center, 2023).

Symbolic politics matters: when commitment appears conditional, enforcement becomes negotiable.

F. Normalization Through Predictability

Perhaps the most insidious dimension of political narrative is predictability.

When killings follow familiar scripts—jealous husband, restraining order ignored, woman killed during separation—and these scripts recur without systemic consequence, violence becomes socially anticipated. Families, activists, and journalists often express a grim sense of inevitability: “We warned; it happened anyway.”

This expectation reflects a deeper normalization. Femicide is no longer perceived as a failure of governance, but as a tragic constant.

From a legal-sociological perspective, this represents a collapse of deterrence not at the level of offenders alone, but at the level of institutions. If escalation is foreseeable yet unprevented, violence becomes administratively routinized.

G. Structural Consequences for Law and Institutions

Political narratives do not merely shape public opinion; they directly affect institutional behavior.

When femicide is framed as isolated crime:

– prosecutors feel less pressure to pursue pattern-based cases,
– police downgrade early complaints,
– courts prioritize procedural routine over risk escalation, and
– preventive systems remain under-resourced.

Conversely, where femicide is publicly acknowledged as structural violence, institutions are compelled to adopt integrated risk management, specialized units, and accountability mechanisms.

Turkey currently operates closer to the former model.

H. Assessment: Discursive Environments as Risk Multipliers

This chapter’s central claim is that political narratives and misinformation function as risk multipliers. They do not merely misdescribe femicide; they actively shape the conditions under which it continues.

By individualizing violence, contesting data, and emphasizing cultural inevitability, discourse dampens institutional urgency. In doing so, it indirectly facilitates the very outcomes it refuses to name.

Femicide persists not only because warning signs are ignored, but because normalization makes ignoring them socially acceptable.

VIII. Why Femicide Persists: Structural Diagnosis and Systemic Accountability

The preceding chapters demonstrate that femicide in Turkey cannot be explained by individual pathology, cultural exceptionalism, or isolated institutional mistakes. What emerges instead is a recurring architecture of failure—predictable, multi-layered, and self-reinforcing. This chapter synthesizes those findings into a structural diagnosis and reframes femicide as a question of systemic accountability rather than episodic criminality.

A. Beyond Individual Perpetrators: Femicide as Institutional Outcome

Public discourse often locates responsibility almost exclusively in the offender: a violent husband, a jealous ex-partner, a psychologically unstable man. While criminal liability rightly attaches to the perpetrator, this framing obscures a crucial reality. In most Turkish femicide cases, institutions were already present.

Police had received complaints.
Courts had issued restraining orders.
Prosecutors had opened files.
Social services were, at least formally, available.

Yet lethal violence occurred anyway.

From a governance perspective, this means femicide must be understood not only as a crime committed by an individual, but as the terminal point of a failed protection chain. Each actor performed fragments of its mandate, but no actor assumed ownership of the final outcome: the woman’s survival.

This is the defining feature of systemic failure.

B. Fragmentation as the Core Structural Defect

Across all stages—from first report to homicide—the most persistent problem is fragmentation.

Information is siloed between police, prosecutors, family courts, criminal courts, and social services. Protection orders exist separately from criminal investigations. Risk assessments, where conducted, are not embedded in prosecutorial strategy. Prior threats, injuries, and violations remain dispersed across files and jurisdictions.

What is missing is a unified operational logic: a mechanism that aggregates signals, recalibrates risk dynamically, and escalates intervention accordingly.

Comparative policy research consistently identifies integrated case management as the single most effective tool in femicide prevention. Where agencies share data, conduct joint risk reviews, and designate lead coordinators, lethal outcomes drop markedly (Wilson Center, 2023). Turkey lacks such a model.

Instead, responsibility diffuses horizontally. Each institution waits for another to escalate.

The result is institutional paralysis masked as procedural compliance.

C. Reactive Justice in a Preventive Crisis

Turkish criminal justice remains structurally reactive.

It excels at responding to completed harm: opening homicide investigations, conducting autopsies, prosecuting killers. But it struggles to intervene decisively when danger is still unfolding.

This temporal mismatch is fundamental. Domestic violence and femicide are future-oriented risks. Criminal procedure, by contrast, is historically oriented: it adjudicates what has already occurred.

This creates a tragic asymmetry:

– Legal energy peaks after death.
– Institutional caution dominates before it.

Despite aggravated penalties and expanded offence definitions, the system still mobilizes fully only once prevention is no longer possible.

D. The Illusion of Legal Sufficiency

Turkey does not suffer from a lack of legal instruments. On paper, it has:

– aggravated homicide and injury provisions,
– emergency protection orders,
– restraining mechanisms,
– coercive detention for violations, and
– shelter systems.

Yet femicide persists.

This exposes a critical misconception: that legal sufficiency equals practical protection.

In reality, norms without enforcement capacity produce only symbolic safety. Protection orders that are not monitored, violations that are not sanctioned immediately, and complaints that are not consolidated into risk profiles create a false sense of institutional presence while leaving women effectively unprotected.

Law exists; implementation does not keep pace.

E. Procedural Neutrality as a Form of Inequality

Another structural factor lies in procedural formalism.

By treating domestic violence as a sequence of discrete offences between formally equal parties, criminal procedure reproduces substantive inequality. Coercive control, fear, economic dependency, and psychological trauma are rendered legally peripheral, even though they define the lived reality of victims.

This produces what might be called neutral injustice: rules applied evenly to unequal situations.

Victims are expected to report violations repeatedly.
They are required to appear in hearings alongside their abusers.
They carry the burden of maintaining protective processes.

Meanwhile, perpetrators benefit from delay, fragmentation, and evidentiary atomization.

This is not bias in the classical sense. It is structural asymmetry embedded in procedural design.

F. Discursive Normalization and Institutional Desensitization

Political and media narratives, examined in Chapter VII, further entrench these failures.

When femicide is framed as isolated tragedy, jealousy, or private conflict, institutional actors internalize reduced expectations. Each killing becomes unfortunate but unsurprising. Escalation signals lose urgency.

Over time, predictability becomes normalization.

Once violence is anticipated, prevention ceases to be treated as an operational imperative and becomes a moral aspiration.

G. Accountability Without Ownership

Perhaps the most telling feature of Turkey’s femicide landscape is the absence of outcome-based accountability.

After killings, investigations focus on the perpetrator. Rarely is there systematic inquiry into:

– why prior complaints failed,
– why protection orders were ineffective,
– why violations did not trigger detention, or
– why risk escalation protocols were absent.

There is no routine institutional audit of femicide cases.

No agency is required to explain, in structural terms, how a woman moved from first report to death under state supervision.

Without such feedback loops, failure is never transformed into reform.

H. Structural Diagnosis Summarized

Femicide persists in Turkey not primarily because:

– penalties are too low,
– offences are insufficiently defined, or
– victims fail to seek help.

It persists because:

1. Risk information is fragmented rather than integrated.
2. Protection is formal rather than operational.
3. Procedure prioritizes past acts over future danger.
4. Victims carry disproportionate procedural burdens.
5. Political narratives dilute urgency.
6. Institutions are not held collectively accountable for outcomes.

In short: the system reacts to death instead of managing danger.

I. From Criminal Justice to Safety Governance

If femicide is understood as a systemic outcome, its solution cannot lie solely in harsher punishment or additional offence categories. It requires a shift from criminal justice to safety governance.

That shift entails:

– integrated case management,
– mandatory cumulative risk assessment,
– real-time monitoring of protection orders,
– automatic escalation upon violations,
– prosecutorial ownership of high-risk cases, and
– institutional review after every femicide.

Without these structural changes, new laws will continue to coexist with old failures.

IX. Toward Prevention: Legal, Institutional, and Policy Reform Pathways

If femicide in Turkey is understood not merely as criminal wrongdoing but as a systemic failure of prevention, then meaningful reform must move beyond incremental penal adjustments. The challenge is not simply to punish violence more severely, but to interrupt escalation earlier, more consistently, and with coordinated institutional authority. This chapter outlines core reform pathways across three interdependent domains: legal design, institutional architecture, and policy implementation.

A. Reorienting Criminal Law from Reaction to Risk

Recent amendments to the Turkish Penal Code reflect a growing recognition of women as an independent risk-bearing category. Yet substantive criminal law remains fundamentally retrospective. It intervenes after harm has occurred.

A preventive orientation requires a complementary doctrinal shift: from offence-centered logic toward risk-centered logic.

This does not imply abandoning classical criminal law principles. Rather, it means embedding cumulative danger into legal evaluation. Concretely, this would involve:

– formal recognition of course-of-conduct evidence in domestic violence prosecutions, allowing prior threats, stalking, and protection-order violations to be assessed holistically rather than atomistically;
– statutory guidance requiring prosecutors and judges to consider escalation indicators when deciding detention, release, or protective measures;
– clearer integration of coercive control patterns into existing threat and injury offences.

Comparative research shows that systems recognizing longitudinal abuse trajectories intervene earlier and more decisively (PMC, 2018; Wilson Center, 2023). Turkish law already gestures in this direction through aggravated forms involving former spouses and violence “against women.” What is missing is explicit doctrinal emphasis on accumulation of risk.

B. Integrated Case Management and Lead-Agency Responsibility

The most urgent institutional reform concerns fragmentation.

Turkey currently disperses responsibility across police, prosecutors, family courts, criminal courts, and social services. No single authority owns high-risk cases end-to-end.

Prevention requires the opposite model: integrated case management with designated leadership.

Key elements include:

– a unified digital case file aggregating police reports, court orders, prior convictions, and social-service contacts;
– mandatory multi-agency risk conferences for cases involving repeated complaints or protection orders;
– assignment of a lead prosecutor or case coordinator responsible for overall safety outcomes, not merely legal processing.

International best practice demonstrates that when agencies share data in real time and designate accountable coordinators, femicide rates decline significantly (Wilson Center, 2023).

Without institutional ownership, legal tools remain fragmented gestures.

C. Automatic Escalation Protocols for Protection Order Violations

Protection orders are only as effective as their enforcement.

Currently, violations often result in delayed or discretionary responses. This must be replaced with automatic escalation:

– immediate notification to prosecutors upon any breach;
– presumptive short-term detention for repeat violations;
– electronic monitoring for high-risk perpetrators;
– rapid judicial review within strict time limits.

Such protocols shift the burden of vigilance from victims to institutions. They also signal that restraining orders are not advisory instruments but enforceable safety mechanisms.

Evidence from European jurisdictions indicates that consistent sanctioning of early violations dramatically reduces subsequent lethal outcomes (DW, 2023; Baker McKenzie Resource Hub).

D. Specialized Domestic Violence Units Within Prosecution Services

Generalist prosecution models dilute expertise and continuity.

Domestic violence and femicide prevention demand specialized units trained in:

– coercive control dynamics,
– trauma-informed interviewing,
– cumulative evidence evaluation, and
– risk-based charging strategies.

These units should maintain active oversight of ongoing cases rather than limiting involvement to indictment stages. Their mandate would extend beyond prosecution to coordination with police and social services.

Such specialization already exists in many jurisdictions facing similar challenges and is repeatedly recommended in comparative policy analyses (Wilson Center, 2023).

E. Procedural Reform: From Adversarial Formalism to Protective Justice

Criminal procedure must evolve to reflect the asymmetries of intimate violence.

Reforms should prioritize:

– minimizing repeated victim testimony through early recorded statements;
– routine use of remote or shielded hearings in high-risk cases;
– judicial recognition of delayed reporting and continued contact as features of coercive control rather than indicators of unreliability;
– expedited handling of domestic violence files, especially during separation phases.

These measures do not undermine fair trial guarantees. They recalibrate procedure to acknowledge unequal power relations and ongoing risk.

F. Mandatory Post-Femicide Institutional Reviews

Every femicide should trigger a structured, multi-agency review examining:

– prior institutional contacts,
– missed escalation points,
– enforcement failures, and
– coordination breakdowns.

Findings must be published in anonymized form and translated into operational reforms.

Without feedback loops, systems cannot learn from their own failures. Currently, Turkey prosecutes perpetrators but rarely audits institutions.

This absence of institutional self-examination perpetuates repetition.

G. Data Transparency and Gender-Sensitive Statistics

Prevention requires visibility.

Turkey needs a centralized femicide registry that records:

– victim–perpetrator relationship,
– prior complaints or protection orders,
– procedural timelines, and
– case outcomes.

Such data must be publicly accessible and methodologically consistent.

As long as femicide remains statistically ambiguous, political accountability remains optional.

H. Beyond Law: Social Services, Housing, and Economic Security

Legal intervention alone cannot neutralize coercive control.

Women attempting to leave violent relationships often face economic precarity, housing insecurity, and childcare barriers. Shelters are unevenly distributed, and long-term support is limited.

Effective prevention therefore requires:

– expanded shelter capacity,
– transitional housing programs,
– guaranteed financial assistance during separation, and
– coordinated child-protection services.

These are not auxiliary measures. They directly affect women’s ability to escape danger.

Public health research consistently identifies economic dependency as a major predictor of lethal outcomes (PMC, 2018).

I. Reframing Political Commitment

Finally, prevention depends on sustained political acknowledgment that femicide is a governance issue, not merely a criminal one.

This entails:

– abandoning narratives of isolated tragedy,
– committing to outcome-based institutional accountability, and
– treating women’s safety as a core public-interest function.

Symbolic gestures without operational reform will not reverse current trajectories.

X. Conclusion – From Tragedy to Accountability: Reframing Femicide as Preventable Institutional Failure

This article has examined domestic violence and femicide in Turkey not as isolated criminal events, nor as culturally inevitable tragedies, but as the predictable outcome of systemic breakdown across legal, institutional, procedural, and political domains.

The evidence is consistent and convergent.

Femicide rarely arrives without warning. It is typically preceded by identifiable escalation: coercive control, threats, stalking, physical violence, institutional contact, protection orders, and separation attempts (PMC, 2018; DW, 2023; The Guardian, 2024). Each stage presents opportunities for intervention. Yet again and again, those opportunities are missed.

Turkey does not suffer from a lack of law. Criminal provisions have been strengthened. Protection regimes exist. Emergency mechanisms are formally available. The problem lies elsewhere: in fragmentation, delayed response, procedural inertia, and the absence of integrated risk governance.

Throughout this study, a recurring pattern has emerged.

Police receive complaints but treat incidents discretely.
Family courts issue protection orders that are weakly monitored.
Prosecutors evaluate files offence by offence, rather than as trajectories of danger.
Criminal procedure advances slowly while risk escalates rapidly.
Victims are burdened with monitoring compliance.
Institutions act in parallel, not in concert.

No single authority assumes ownership of the ultimate outcome: whether a woman lives or dies.

This diffusion of responsibility is the defining structural feature of femicide in Turkey.

The legal system remains fundamentally reactive. It mobilizes decisively after death, but hesitates before it. Criminal justice is organized around completed acts, while domestic violence is future-oriented risk. This temporal mismatch explains why punishment intensifies while prevention stagnates.

Equally important is the role of political narrative. Femicide is routinely framed as individual pathology, jealousy, or isolated crime. Statistical ambiguity is tolerated. Structural explanations are resisted. This discursive environment normalizes predictability. When killings recur without institutional self-examination, violence becomes administratively anticipated rather than urgently prevented (VOA, 2024; Wilson Center, 2023).

Criminal procedure compounds these failures. Classical evidentiary models fragment patterns of abuse. Victims endure secondary victimization through repeated testimony, adversarial exposure, and procedural delay. Separation—the most dangerous phase—is not treated as an automatic escalation trigger. Protection orders function symbolically rather than operationally. Suspicious deaths disappear into suicide classifications.

These are not incidental shortcomings. They are design features of a system built to adjudicate past wrongdoing, not to manage evolving threat.

The central conclusion of this article is therefore straightforward:

Femicide in Turkey persists not because violence is unpredictable, but because prevention is structurally unsupported.

This diagnosis demands a shift in paradigm.

From punishment to prevention.
From isolated files to integrated risk management.
From procedural neutrality to substantive protection.
From fragmented authority to institutional ownership.
From symbolic law to operational safety.

Effective reform requires:

– cumulative risk assessment embedded in prosecution strategy,
– integrated case management with designated lead agencies,
– automatic escalation for protection-order violations,
– specialized domestic violence units,
– expedited procedures during separation phases,
– mandatory post-femicide institutional reviews,
– transparent, gender-sensitive data systems, and
– robust social support enabling women to exit violent environments.

These measures are not radical. They are standard components of safety governance in jurisdictions that have succeeded in reducing intimate partner homicide.

Ultimately, femicide must be recognized as a failure of coordination, not merely of character.

When institutions know the danger but fail to aggregate it, when protection exists but is not enforced, when escalation is visible but unacted upon, responsibility extends beyond the perpetrator. It reaches the system itself.

Reframing femicide in this way does not diminish individual criminal liability. It expands collective accountability.

Only through this reframing—from tragedy to governance, from sympathy to structure—can Turkey move from memorializing victims to preventing their deaths.

At stake is not merely legal reform, but the credibility of the state’s most basic obligation: to protect life.