Turkce’si için buraya tiklayiniz.
I claim that most of us in Turkey had been subjected to sexual abuse at least once in our lives. We still are…And I’m afraid it’ll only get worse if we don’t change our paradigms.
We know from several research that most of those who suffer such violence remain silent because of guilt born out of their trauma. So I base my ‘majority’ assertion on my own experiences, on the researches I have done about ‘abortion rates and reasons’ when I was working in a pharmaceutical company, and from the sharings of people who were courageous enough to open to me.
There is a new law proposal in Turkey that would allow the release of men who assaulted a minor without “force, threat, or any other restriction on consent” and married the victim.. The bill was approved in an initial parliamentary reading on Thursday and will be voted on again in a second debate on Tuesday. We began to demonstrate our social reaction with a promising commitment and a loud voice against the bill for the last couple of days. We have been reflecting our main concerns and emotions on the social/ traditional media. Now I will highlight 3 new issues that we can also mirror back to our individual selves;
1-SURVIVORS:
Today I watched a movie called Spotlight today. The film, which won the Best Film and Best Original Screenplay Award, is about a real event in America, where journalists in Boston Globe discover hundreds of Catholic Church priests sexually abuse over 1,000 children in a systematic and institutionalized way over the years. If you have not seen the yet, I recommend it. I spotted something in the movie; The children who were abused are called ‘survivors’ instead of ‘sexual abuse victim’. This is an important difference in the posts we write, in the newspapers we read, and when talking to each other; We call the abused kids ‘victims’. So we continue to make them oppressed and victimized. Being a victim or often creates feelings of pity. But if you are a survivor, you can leave the trauvma behind and continue easier than
the first case, being a survivor gives strength, courage and hope. It means the darkness is behind. This simple detail can change our perceptions and encourage survivors to continue their normal lives and heal better.
In summary, the understanding of facts in a society is influenced by cultural and emotion loaded items. In that sense the role of the language we use is very important, the codes of our culture are built on the grounds of language. We need to wake up and progress in our perception of ‘reality’ as society. It begins with the words you and I and the ones we use because you and I are ‘we’ and we communicate with the words and share our reality.
2-KOL KIRILIR YEN ICINDE KALIR (A famous Turkish saying; when the arm is broken, it stays in the sleeve, meaning ‘Don’t let it out of this room’):
Sexual offenders need to be transparently announced, regardless of which foundation, title, and power group they belong to. Every crime that is swept under the carpet in order to protect the reputation of the power groups is no use other than to increase the inflammation grow like sticking a bandage on the incarnation and growing the disease in the airless environment. If America could have done this by resigning the Cardinal by suing the 249 priests of the Orthodox Church with the determination of a handful of brave journalists, we can do it with a greater determination as we heal free our inflammation and initiate our deep recovery process as a moral and sensitive Turkish society. Ask yourself first; Is abuse embarrassing/ shameful? And for whom it is shameful?; For the offender? For the survivor? Or for anyone who becomes aware of it? In previous cases of abuse in Turkey, we heard that the Minister of Family and Social Security saying; ‘This incident (child rape) has been encountered once and can not be a reason to dismiss an institution that has come to the forefront with its services’. We wrongly see shame belonging not only to abuser but to all 3.
And instead of focusing on this wrong paradigm of shame, and curing the inflammation, we are trying to legitimately sweep the body under the guise. And we are using marriage, -the social and cultural accepted version of human love in Turkey- as an instrument to this. This system based on wrong paradigms is destined to collapse, and as it’s collapsing, the other values and beliefs we respect are bound to sink along with it . As long as the arm is broken and hidden under the sleeve, we won’t be able to use our arm.
Another way to get into the source of inflammation is to research the abusers. We can find common patterns who, what and why’s and design programs to solve the problem from the roots. As we focus only on punishment and forget to design solutions to heal the society, we will continue to live below our potential as humanity, we transmit our poison to future generations. I will stop this topic here because I think it is a valuable and rich approach that needs to be addressed stand alone and more broadly.
3-I AM JUST DOING MY JOB:
A very dangerous sentence from Spotlight film that repeats: “I was just doing my job.” It was a defense of everyone who knew systematic harassment and still kept silent. Let’s put the harassment aside and look at the spectrum of our lives.
What are your moral values that you base your business and everyday life decisions?
What are you doing automatically by saying ‘I’m just doing my job’ or ‘This is always how it’s done in my village’?
How do your actions and decisions affect you?
How much responsibility does your business that you work for take for the goodness of humanity, such as learning, protection of nature?
I’ll leave the answers to these questions to you. Just remember that what you do is the manifestation of your life and this is where you stand. This is the story you have for the kids of the world.
UNIFIED HUMAN BEING
We can make our development effective and sustainable only by improving ourselves. We must enrich our learning with methods such as philosophy and art in order to become ‘unified human beings’ with moral values and ethics. As we move away from the effects of ‘Id’ and ‘Super Ego’ and become ‘Unified Self’ (mind, heart and belly), we can live our sexuality in a healthy way and protect our societal oneness as superior human beings. The life design that we’ll inherit to our kids is not functioning even today, how do you expect it to serve tomorrow’s needs that are getting complicated with the rise of technology? We have to expand our dreams and experiences to design meaningful life that we dream of. Today is the time to face ourselves in the mirror, read, learn, and have dialogues for our enlightenment. Wishing tomorrows that we deserve with love, hope, wisdom and faith …
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