An Honorable Retreat?

On May 11, 2011, 47 senior representatives of the Council of Europe’s member states gathered in the magnificent Beylerbeyi Palace on the shores of the Bosphorus, which today is part of the Kempinski hotel chain. The Slovenian delegation was led by the then foreign minister, Samuel Žbogar. At a ceremony, 13 states signed a new convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence. This international legal instrument, today better known as the Istanbul Convention, was the result of many years of effort by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, civil society and professional organizations, and some governments, which demanded a common and effective international response to violence against women, a problem that was, and still is, widespread in every country and every social class. Slovenia did not sign the convention in Istanbul but a few months later, and it is among the 34 member states that have so far also ratified it. Such a high number of accessions to a convention in such a short time is rare in the practice of international organizations. A little under a decade ago, there was consensus on the need for an effective common response to violence against women and domestic violence; no one politicized these topics or called them into question. Today, unfortunately, it is different.

The Beylerbeyi Palace, where the senior diplomats signed the Istanbul Convention, was built in 1865 to designs by the Armenian architect Sarkis Balyan for Sultan Abdulaziz, the first supreme ruler of the Ottoman Empire to visit the West. Among other things, Abdulaziz modernized the state’s administration, introduced public schooling on the French model, founded the university in Istanbul and was responsible for the first civil code in the Ottoman Empire. He was a lover of literature and a composer of classical music. The signing of the first international convention against violence against women in the palace of a reformist sultan was full of symbolism. But Abdulaziz was better at classical music than at economics. He piled up debts for the empire, so in June 1876 he was deposed by his own ministers. A few days later he asked for scissors to trim his beard, but evidently had other plans for them, as he was soon found dead in a pool of blood. Supposedly it was suicide, although rumors still circulate that the sultan was murdered. I admit that at the time, leafing through the hotel brochure, I did not think of an analogy between the tragic fate of the reformist sultan and the somewhat less tragic, but still unpleasant, fate of some signatories of the Istanbul Convention, who are today being dragged through the mud in their countries as enemies of traditional values. Progressive social policies and deeds are often poorly understood and even more poorly rewarded.

To understand how, in a few years, we went from progressive consensus to populist revolt on combating violence against women, three questions need to be answered. Why the convention? What solutions does it bring to victims of violence against women and domestic violence? And what is it that so irritates the defenders of “traditional values” in some countries that they start shouting and stamping their feet at every mention of the Istanbul Convention?

First, some statistics. According to the World Health Organization, by now almost as notorious, more than a third of women worldwide are exposed to physical or sexual violence in their lifetime. In most cases it is violence by an intimate partner, who, among other things, commits almost 40 percent of all murders of female victims. The fact that these are global statistics is no consolation to victims of violence in Europe. A 2014 survey by the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights reveals a tragic picture for many European women. Eight percent of them had been victims of violence in the twelve months before the survey, and the statistics on the frequency of violence against women after the age of 15 are identical to the WHO data. More than one in three women in Europe is exposed to physical or sexual violence in her lifetime. This violence has very broad and destructive consequences, first of course for the direct victims, but also for children, families and society as a whole.

The second important fact highlighted by both institutions is that this violence is structural in nature, since it stems from the general, often subordinate position of women and gender-based discrimination in all areas of social life. The data on the prevalence of violence against women are estimates based on surveys and interviews with victims, not official numbers of cases reported to the authorities. Many victims of violence do not decide to report it—out of fear of the consequences for themselves and their families, because of various pressures, or simply because they do not trust the police and prosecutors. In defense of its announcement that it is withdrawing from the Istanbul Convention, the Polish government recently claimed that the number of reports of violence in Poland is extremely low. Of course I want to believe that Poland is an exception in which the number of reported attacks is not just the tip of the iceberg of violence, but one cannot rule out that the low number of reports is itself an indication that Poland needs the Istanbul Convention very much indeed.

So what do the Council of Europe and the Istanbul Convention bring to solving these tragic problems? Certainly the most important fact is that it is an international legal standard that commits signatories not to treat violence against women and domestic violence as a private matter, and the fight against it not merely as a matter of their goodwill and current interests and priorities. By acceding to the convention, the proper and effective prevention of violence, assistance to victims and prosecution of perpetrators become the subject of legal obligations. In a little under a decade, the convention has brought a series of positive changes in many signatory states, from new legislation and more appropriate forms of help for victims of violence to training programs for police officers, social workers, health and other staff. One of the more important goals is changing the definition of sexual harassment and rape, which must be based on the absence of consent, not merely on evidence of the use of force, and therefore cannot be relativized or excused by “patterns that somehow cause certain things.”

Although the Istanbul Convention does not refer only to violence against women, since men are also among the victims of domestic violence, it is based on the fact that in the vast majority of cases the victims are women. Not by chance, but because they are women. Since violence against women is largely structural in nature, the problem cannot be solved without confronting the wider issues of gender inequality. This inequality, of course, is not a consequence of biological differences between the sexes but above all of social constructs, prejudices, traditions and stereotypes that put women in a subordinate position. Article 3 therefore provides that, in the convention, the term “gender” means the socially constructed roles, behaviors, activities and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for women and men. And the first paragraph of Article 12 obliges the parties to take “the necessary measures to promote changes in the social and cultural patterns of behavior of women and men with a view to eradicating prejudices, customs, traditions and all other practices which are based on the idea of the inferiority of women or on stereotyped roles for women and men.” And this is what has most enraged the supporters of “traditional values,” among which they evidently also count the inferiority of women.

The arguments behind the attacks on the Istanbul Convention are a confused and illogical jumble of misinterpretations and brazen untruths, which, however, in today’s times, when lies have ever longer legs, are often effective. With the claim that the convention erases the biological differences between the sexes and thus opens the way for the promotion of homosexuality, right-wing populism tries to kill two birds with one stone: to smear both the commitment to women’s equality and the efforts for the rights of the LGBT population. The latter is, of course, an obligation stemming from the European Convention on Human Rights, but it should be stressed that, as regards the rights of sexual minorities, the Istanbul Convention introduces no new standards or obligations. What irritates the champions of “traditional values” most, however, is the term “gender,” which in their view denies the biological differences between the sexes. That is, of course, not true. All the convention says is that violence against women does not stem from biological differences between the sexes but from social constructs that often push women into a subordinate position. Just as violence against people suffering from albinism in some parts of Africa cannot be explained by their lack of pigment, but solely by the “prejudices, customs, traditions and all other practices” based on the belief that body parts of murdered albinos have miraculous healing powers, so violence against women cannot be explained by the fact that men have willies and women don’t.

On that May day nine years ago, the first to proudly sign the Istanbul Convention was the then Turkish foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu. Today, members of the ruling party, like their soulmates in several European countries, including Slovenia, are demanding ever more loudly a withdrawal from the convention. At the end of July, the body of 27-year-old student Pınar Gültekin was found in a forest near the Aegean coast. She was murdered by a jealous ex-partner. Last year, 474 women were murdered in Turkey, most in circumstances similar to Pınar’s. This year, because of the hardship and tension caused by lockdown, the figure will probably be even higher. In Turkey, this form of taking a human life is often called an honor killing.