Sustainable Development for the Women
in Istanbul, Turkey:

Positions of Loç Migrants, Teenage Female Sex Workers, Teenage Females of Garipçe Village and Shared Perspectives of Women in the Media

Güliz Erginsoy
To my son

This paper addresses itself to a very brief sociological overview of three different groups of women of Turkey, Istanbul (1), according to their positions vis à vis education, religion, labour and media. These three different groups are partial presentations of the Turkish society. It is very wrong to perceive Turkey as a developing country with monolithic and homogeneous demographic structure. Turkey is a country of variations and the pictures presented here are only the three examples of this variation. Loç villagers are a group of women – daughters, mothers and grandmothers – who were unable to access education in their homeland villages in the North western Anatolia region, and had to migrate to Istanbul, the big apple and work in the informal sector as domestic labourers for the last two-three generations (2). As an opposing group to the women of Loç, the women of Garipçe (3), who are living in Istanbul for at least four generations, can be considered as Istanbulites (4), deeply anchored to their Eastern Black Sea region patriarchal norms and Islam doctrines. The third group, the teenage female sex workers are neither able to sustain labour in the informal sector as domestic house workers via using nepotistic networks, which is seen to be offering a sense of security for self for the Loç villagers or as the women of Garipçe, who are ‘protected’ by patriarchal norms. They are the daughters of migrants from all over Anatolia.

The manifestation of the underdeveloped aspects of the social structure of the Turkish society is seen in the fields of health, education, approaches to religion and occupation; in the inequality of the differential access of men and women to health, educational services rendered and opportunities of job offered. The reason for this, in the case of education, is the allocation of scarce resources in favour of the male children in the family, increased in-migration to the urban areas and unorganised urbanisation, regional imbalances over the geographical surface of the country and the increased attendance of the female children to non secular education offered by alternative religious organisations specially in recent years with the rise of the radical Islam movement and the Welfare Party backing up this movement silently as the third party in the parliament.

As a result of this latest inclination, two ways of education; which severely affects the female gender, specifically arising from the patriarchal structure of the traditional family and the role of the women in such a structure as the second sex (5), in religion become available, other than the education provided by the secular public secondary schools. The alternatives are either to study in one of the officially recognised religious secondary school or to take certified/quasi legitimate/illegitimate Koranic courses from (6) their respective teachers in an unknown and non-scheduled system. This educational organisation has not emerged entirely out of the blue. Usually the female members of the family are inclined to perceive their extra-domestic activities in their free time in the same manner as a time to implement a religious ‘educative’ program in their leisure. Surprisingly, such organisation might dominate the whole of their everyday life and turns out to be one of the determinants for status and prestige in the neighbourhood and the corresponding geography in which the locality is embedded; it becomes for them an ideological landscape wider than the community (7).

According to the results of a research conducted on ‘Child Female Sex Workers in Istanbul Metropolitan Area’ (8), attendance to religious Koran courses instead of or after the secular education is seen to be quite common. However this is usually induced or even in some cases forced by the family upon the Child. She might not go to the courses willingly, yet she does not have a choice. As one of the subjects mentioned:

‘I was bored to death, I was talking too much and eventually they kicked me out. I also hated religion lessons in school’ (9).

This is in violation of the Article 14 the CRC on Freedom of Thought, Conscience and Religion (10). The private schooling and educational opportunities such as vocational and language courses are all together under the monopoly of a small group of privileged people with incomes high above the average incomes.

General societal norms as a form of popular cultural representations and global trends, marginalising or even sometimes stereotyping women is an additional and important factor for the groups of women dealt within this article. Tuchman’s concept of the ‘symbolic annihilation of women’ refers to the way cultural production and media representations ignore, exclude, marginalise or trivialise women and their interests (11). Cultural representations of women in the mass media is seen as working to maintain the prevailing sexual division of labour, orthodox conceptualisations of gender roles not only in Turkey, but also in many other EU countries. The symbolic annihilation of women practiced by the mass media serves to confirm that the roles of mother, wife, bride, housewife are the fate of women in a patriarchal society. Another concept of Tuchman is operational at this point, the ‘reflection hypothesis’, which suggests that the mass media reflect the dominant social values in a society. Some values are also circulated on the mediascape in the global platform beyond boundaries, like the soap operas.

The press and the women’s magazines provide further evidence of the symbolic annihilation of women. Popular media culture does not show neither to us nor to the women of Garipçe, Loç or to the teenage female sex workers, the real lives. The counterparts to the absence, condemnation and trivialisation of women is omission, bias and distortion on the part of the mass media. The popular culture offers a fantasy, a surrogate world, an imagined community to its dedicated consumers.

For some female teenagers, this methodology is further reinforced by the religious magazines acting as a powerful ideological force. Not only the numerative appearance of content, but also the messages, which such content signifies becomes critical. The religious magazines are specific signifying systems, where particular messages are produced and articulated. So they function as an antidote of what is watched in ‘soaps’ on television and what is listened on the radio, in the songs of ‘nostalgic-desperate-arabesk love’. This religious culture as a part of the dominant ideology of a patriarchal family structure, has saturated the lives of numerous young girls, colouring and modeling the way they dress, the way they act and the way they communicate. For some, this ideology is predicated upon their future roles as wifes, mothers and grandmothers. Others are left alone in a metropole with conflicting norms and ideas and found ‘refuge’ in a precarious and peculiar mode of existance as sex workers.

Thus if one does not want to see these young girls as the passive victims of a dominant ideology or the capitalist and patriarchal quest for hegemony, the enforcement of eight years of compulsary education law (or even longer) should reach to the distant corners of the Turkish society, and be effective as well, as soon as possible.