The main controversy stems from an amendment to AK’s law, signed by six male AK MPs, which would grant a form of amnesty to anyone who sexually abuses a child if they marry them.
It’s a move that puts it on a similar track to other European countries: Britain, for example, makes it an offence to engage in sexual activity with any child under the age 13, with different rules to cover older teenagers. The AK Party government says that under its new proposals any sexual activity involving a child under the age of 12 will carry harsher sentences. This month’s proposals stem from that ruling.
But they also gave the government six months to draft new proposals to redress the law. Judges on the Constitutional Court upheld that ruling by a 7-6 margin, the narrowest possible. A uniform rule criminalising all under-15 sexual activity distorted the balance between law’s requirements and the punishments it delivers, it had said. In early July – just days before this summer’s coup attempt, incidentally – Turkey’s Constitutional Court annulled part of a law that would have rendered any sexual activity with a child below the age of 15 as sexual abuse.Ī lower court in the Black Sea town of Bafra, near Samsun, had ruled children between the ages of 12 and 15 in some instances have a greater ability to comprehend sexual activity. The reason the law is on the table right now is because the government is addressing a law that was struck down in the summer. Tuesday’s parliamentary debate is shaping up to be another episode in Turkey’s alarming attitude towards women’s rights. It is evidence again that the government regards the family, and not the individual, as the basic social unit around which life should rotate. But the government’s justification is telling of its social attitudes: if young families are created they must be kept together, even if the children are the result of rape. That alone is a monstrous allegation to be saddled with. Turkey’s governing AK Party is denying opposition claims that an amendment to a law introduced by its backbench MPs legalises underage rape. It is hard to spot the good intentions in the AK Party’s attempt to keep young families together
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