Turkey’s child marriage ‘reform’ ignores consent and sanctions rape in a man’s world

Breaking news, meanwhile, from the Ottoman Empire…

Might as well be, as the formerly secular and progressively modernising Turkey continues its latter-day recidivist descent under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan towards 19^th century social values, with the reemergence of an appalling proposed legal “reform”.

It’s so awful, I find it hard to describe. However, the government is promoting a bill which would overturn a man’s conviction for child sexual assault if he marries his victim. This was previously attempted by Erdogan in 2016 but withdrawn after a storm of protest. 

It’s back.

The detail, as I understand it, is that if a man has been convicted of raping a girl under 16, and he is no more than 10 years older than her, he will be effectively pardoned if he and she subsequently marry.

According to the government, the law is not designed to legitimise child rape, but to address the widespread problem of child marriage in Turkey.

How, exactly? Back in 2016, the justice minister explained that child marriage was “unfortunately a reality”, but that the men who were doing it “were not rapists or sexual aggressors”.

Now, let’s be clear: we’re not talking about marriages between children, but marriages between female children and male adults. 

Turkey is far from alone in this; in many countries and cultures, girls are routinely given or sold into marriage with older (often very much older) men. There are many aspects to this practice, including using marriage to absolve, or rather cover up, sexual crimes or incidents which are considered to bring shame upon the family. It’s a complicated and entrenched cultural phenomenon.

The proposed law is literally an attempted return to the good old days. In a case in the Ottoman courts in 1846, for example, a woman’s allegation of rape was accepted but the court’s remedy was to offer her the opportunity to marry her rapist. She was awarded a substantial dowry. In return she had to withdraw her allegation on the logical basis that the marriage effectively converted the rape to a consensual act.

Same principle here, applied to children. It’s an important point to understand, because otherwise we’d make the mistake of assuming that the promoters of the Turkish law believe a child can consent to sex. That’s not what they’re saying at all, in the sense that it has not occurred to them as a consideration.

Australian law says, explicitly, that a child under the age of consent cannot give consent to a sexual act (with some messy and inconsistent provisions at the margins). Absence of consent is an element of the crime of rape, and it is deemed absent where the victim is a child. That’s the end of the argument.

What the Turkish men are arguing is that, in Turkey, it isn’t quite the end of the argument. Their point is not about the emotional or intellectual capacity of a child to consent, but rather that her consent is in some circumstances irrelevant. In theory, the law will apply only where the child was not forced to have sex, but that we know is a nonsense. A child’s consent is never consent.

The proposed Turkish law reflects a very ancient principle: the one that says that sex is a right, of men, to be taken from women as men wish. On that basis, the woman’s age is not a significant concern, given that her consent is not a central element in the equation.

Turkey does outlaw rape, including rape in marriage (the latter only since 2005). There, as in every country, rape’s evolution from a property crime (against the woman’s owner) to a personal one (sex without consent) is a slow-moving thing. It’s painfully hard for societies to let go of the idea that sex is a male proprietary right.

The Turkish government is correct, at least, in its assertion that there is a relationship between child rape and child marriage. They’re just different manifestations of the one concept: that women are the property of men. In that construct, it’s not a logical leap to say that there are circumstances in which a woman’s non-consent can be rendered irrelevant, as in the Ottoman example where she subsequently marries her rapist.

It makes one wonder why the same men are saying child marriage is a problem at all. Nevertheless, giving them the benefit of that doubt, it should be obvious that the solution to the problem of child marriage is not to excuse child rape. It is as offensive as are honour killings, and laws which say that rape cannot be proved without the testimony of male witnesses. They’re all medieval and should be shamed out of existence.

It isn’t obvious, to them, because they’re still trapped in a mindset which sees consent as an inconvenience. In that, the lawmakers of Turkey are far from alone.