Examining Changes in Gender-Based Violence Prevention Policies: Critical discourse analysis in the Turkish political context

This chapter derives from a larger qualitative research project that focuses on gender-based violence (GBV) prevention policies passed by the various governing parties in Turkey in the past 30 years approximately. The Turkish National Action Plan on Gender Equality 2008-2013 asserts that “[t]he Law broadens the concept of gender based violence and defines the concepts of ‘violence’, ‘domestic violence’ and ‘violence against women’ in such a way as to comprise physical, verbal, sexual, economic and psychological violence” (p. 2). Much research has been conducted on GBV in Turkeyto explain the reasons behind high GBV rates. While understanding the motives behind physical, sexual, emotional, and economic violence is indeed crucial, this contribution approaches the problem from a different perspective and examines cultural violence, a term coined by Galtung in 1990 and defined as “those aspects of culture, the symbolic sphere of our existence exemplified by religion and ideology, language and art… that can be used to justify or legitimize direct or structural violence” (p. 291). Galtung’s concept is used in order to understand how language and discourse may be utilized to perpetrate cultural violence: “una dimensión de la violencia que no se puede contabilizar, que se conforma por diversos procesos subjetivos de interacción discursiva y que constituyen el tejido de cualquier espacio socio-cultural” [”a dimension of violence that cannot be quantified, and that is composed of various subjective processes of discursive interaction]”. ¹ Public discourse of GBV prevention policies between the 1990s and 2018 are examined with a socio-cultural perspective and a gender focus, as such analysis can illuminate new understandings of GBV prevention policies. Quite likely, public discourse in general and governmental policies, in particular, will mostly focus on domestic violence and assume a heteropatriarchal perspective and understanding of gender and sexuality, but for the purposes of this research study, “woman” includes cisgender (heterosexual, lesbian, queer, or other) and transgender women. This chapter aims to understand whether, and, if so, to what extent, political discourse in governmental GBV prevention policies may enact symbolic and cultural violence by portraying women in negative or stereotypical ways, thus perpetuating certain preferred social identities for women (mother, wife, victim) while obscuring others (partner). The analysis and conclusions here are derived from analyzing governmental policies and related documents via (Feminist) Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA) and Corpus Linguistics (CL). Such analysis and conclusions purport to contribute to understandings of global feminisms by identifying potential dangers of uncritically embracing policies and laws in the name of gender justice that may ultimately reproduce gender binaries and normativities that are involved in the gender-based violences we seek to contest.