Women’s Organisations’ Role in (Re)Constructing the Narratives in Femicide Cases: Şule Çet’s Case

Abstract

In 2020, men in Turkey murdered 300 women, and 171 women were found suspiciously dead. The dominant narrative around suspicious death cases involves a faulty assumption that women are prone to committing suicide. Women’s organisations and cause lawyers unite against all kinds of violence to challenge this dominant narrative, which grants impunity to perpetrators. Drawing on resource mobilisation theory, this article investigates how women’s organisations become involved in femicide and suspicious death cases to articulate counter-narratives and advance women’s access to justice. It focuses on Şule Çet’s case, which raised intense public reactions due to the lack of procedural fairness at the investigation stage. It relies on semi-structured interviews with Şule’s lawyer and the members of the We Will Stop Femicide Platform (Kadın Cinayetlerini Durduracağız Platformu) and the Gelincik Centre (Gelincik Merkezi) to illustrate how women’s organisations made Şule’s story visible and countered the dominant narrative surrounding suspicious death cases. The findings illustrate that women’s organisations’ ongoing struggle to encourage courts to hear women’s stories demands co-operation between different social and legal mechanisms. It includes a combination of several strategies, such as following femicide cases and forming public opinion through social media. The article concludes by arguing that women’s organisations’ use of counter-narratives transforms femicide cases from being only a statistic to a public cause, contributing to women’s struggle in accessing justice.