Conceptualizing “Violence” and “Sexual Abuse” in the Campaigns Against Battering of Women and Purple Needdle

Abstract

This article will examine the two foundational campaigns of the feminist movement after 1980s, the Campaign Against Battering of Women and Purple Needle Campaign. While these two campaigns problematized and struggled against “violence against women” and “sexual harassment/sexual assault” respectively, these forms of attacks on women’s bodies did not have proper names in Turkish back then, when the two campaigns were carried out. Rather than “violence against women” terms such as battering, beating, hitting were used in Turkish to refer to this problem. There was no term to cover the terms “sexual harassment” or “sexual assault” in Turkish either, and highly visualized terms such as touching a woman’s body, pinching were some of the most widely used ones to describe the unwanted attacks on female bodies. This article traces the history of the terms, “violence against women” and “sexual harassment/sexual assault”, in Turkish and argues that both terms were coined throughout the processes of the formulation, organization, and carrying out of these two campaigns. I argue that the use of the terms “violence” and “sexual harassment” made these two major attacks on female bodies political issues that can be expressed, discussed, and struggled against.