Women’s rights groups in Turkey are calling for a thorough investigation into a surge in suspicious deaths of women, after four women were found dead in the past two days, the BirGün daily reported.
Activists say many of the cases are initially logged as accidents, such as falls from buildings or bodies discovered in isolated areas, without clear evidence of what happened. They argue that the lack of effective investigations contributes to impunity for perpetrators.
“This increase is no coincidence,” said Vahide Şevval Argunşah, a representative of The We Will Stop Femicide Platform, a Turkish women’s rights organization focused on the documentation, advocacy and prevention of femicides and suspicious deaths of women.
“It is directly related to policies that fail to protect women. Since leaving the Istanbul Convention, suspicious deaths have clearly risen.”
Argunşah said many deaths are dismissed as “suspicious” without a thorough investigation, which, she argued, makes violence against women less visible.
The platform said 203 women died in suspicious circumstances in the first eight months of 2025, nearly one every four days. Since Turkey’s 2021 withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention, an international treaty aimed at preventing violence against women, the group has recorded 817 suspicious deaths of women.
Many critics say the main reason behind the situation is the policies of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government, which protects violent and abusive men by affording them impunity.
Turkish courts have repeatedly sparked criticism due to their tendency to hand down lenient sentences to offenders, claiming that the crime was merely “motivated by passion” or by interpreting victims’ silence as consent.
Erdoğan’s allies have also been calling for further rollbacks, urging the repeal of a domestic law that stipulates protection mechanisms for women who either have suffered or are at risk of suffering violence.
