Özgecan Aslan Femicide in Turkish Parliamentary Sessions

This study examines discussion of Özgecan Aslan murder by deputies in parliamentary sessions. Many research link the murder of Özgecan Aslan and, more generally, violence against women to the conservative and male dominated mentality that the AK Party politicians encourage by their public speeches. The speeches of the politicians of all four parties in the parliament are examined to seek traces of conservative and male dominated discourse. In doing so, content analysis with a mixed method, i.e. quantitative and qualitative content analysis, was applied. A computer-assisted qualitative data analysis was carried out on the 26 written reports in which Özgecan Aslan was mentioned and which are accessed from the TGNA website. Qualitative data analysis programs MaxQDA 2018 and Nvivo 10 programs were used for this purpose. Findings revealed that the fact that Özgecan Aslan’s murder is a primary agenda in the TGNA is directly related to the reactions in Turkish public; that the event is still not defined as a “femicide”; that the tendency of political parties to explain it for individual reasons and resolve them with aggravated punishments ignores the social dimension of femicide. As a result, even at a time when social reactions and sensitivity to violence against women is at its highest, male and female parliamentarians have not gone beyond the limits of male dominated discourse.