KEBABBLE Turkish
women want to have it all By
Fazile Zahir
FETHIYE, Turkey - Although
the number of working women in Turkey is falling
overall, the proportion of middle- class, urban
women working full time is rising. Like their
counterparts in the West, these working mothers
are finding that grandparents are no longer as
available for child care as they once were -
either they live too far away or they have
middle-class aspirations of their own that
preclude looking after the grandkids. Unable to
maintain the standard of living and opportunity
they desire without both partners being employed,
more and more city families are relying on nannies
- or dadis as they are known in Turkey.
In the past four to five years, the nanny
industry has become big business, and one can even
shop for a nanny online (www.edadi.com). Parents
in Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir and
Gaziantep have been able to
heave a sigh of relief and get on with the
personal endeavors that support the family while
their little treasures are safe in the loving
hands of a professional child-care provider - or
at least that's what they thought.
An
expose aired on the Arena television
program has shattered those illusions and left
mothers and fathers wondering exactly who is
looking after their children and just how
qualified they are to do it. Arena is an
investigative weekly documentary whose reporters
often go undercover to expose wrongdoing and
malpractice. Their secret cameras filmed
unscrupulous agency owners advising prospective
nannies to lie their way into parents' homes and
deliberately deceive them as to their working and
personal habits.
Two young female
reporters approached a variety of agencies and
applied for work. All of the agencies advertise
that their employees come with excellent work
references and have experience with children and
good, amenable personalities free from bad habits
such as smoking. The undercover girls explicitly
told the agencies they had never cared for
children, had bad tempers and smoked. The agencies
advised them to keep the smoking secret, made no
attempts to explore their psychological
instabilities, and told them to pretend they had
worked for foreign couples who had since returned
home and could not be contacted for references.
When one of the reporters explained that
she had no training in child care, the agency
owner reassured her, saying, "Don't worry, the
parents aren't bothered by things like that. We
give jobs to people who only have primary-school
education themselves." None of the agencies
carried out the most basic checks to see whether
the applicants had any criminal convictions, and
no agencies asked for health certificates. One
agency even offered to provide false references.
A very different image is presented to
parents seeking a nanny. Arena sent a
couple, purportedly wealthy and fussy, to the same
agencies, and the undercover girls were
recommended to them as "super girls, really good,
really clean and with great experience".
While families want educated and stable
nannies, the reality is that this industry is
dominated by women who cannot find other work
because they lack any qualifications. It is a
career opted for by those who cannot choose
another career. Eighty percent of Turkish nannies
have little or no formal education, but they earn
wages significantly higher than cleaners (the
other option for most uneducated urban women) with
incomes varying between 600 and 1,500 liras
(US$360-$900) a month.
Tina Pardo, a
European living in Istanbul, took a career break
to have her son, Jeymi. When she returned to work,
she was astounded by the terrible quality of
nannies offered to her. In six months she changed
nanny 18 times. She was so upset that she decided
to found her own agency - the Nannies Club - to
find quality nannies for other people. The biggest
problem in her view is lying. "The nannies say
they don't smoke, then you find out they do. They
apply for jobs as nannies and in interviews say
inappropriate things like, 'I can give your
husband massages, too.'"
There are some
welcome signs of creeping professionalism, though.
Last year Pervin Albayrak opened Turkey's first
state-recognized Nanny Training Academy in
Istanbul. To be accepted, students must have
finished high school. They are then enrolled in a
two-and-a-half-month course that covers child care
and education, nutrition, psychology, literature
and basic medical training, as well as 10 days'
work experience in a creche and with autistic
children. Previously, Pervin says, to find a
genuinely qualified nanny, parents had to recruit
from overseas.
Arena's expose has
sparked huge debate in Turkey about the
responsibilities of parents to their children, and
in particular the role of working mothers.
Turkey's modern women believe it is possible to
have a working life, a social life and a home life
provided one has the right sort of support.
This is not to say that women have never
worked before, but until very recently children of
working parents were looked after exclusively by
the extended family or very close family friends.
As families became smaller, children were
increasingly looked after by home helpers or
housekeepers, but one still never recruited a
stranger from an unknown firm to come and care for
them. As the number of stories about children
abused by the home help increased, and family ties
fractured under the strain of modern life, some
parents came to regard professional agencies as
more reliable and likely to offer a better quality
of child-care provider than an uneducated woman
from the village.
The European approach of
agency recruitment became favored, but the
Arena program has exposed that while the
family seeking a nanny may have adopted a
"Western" mentality, most agency owners are
hopelessly "Oriental" in their outlook to placing
staff.
Perhaps the most vicious part of
the debate, though, has centered on the
selfishness of the modern mother. Previously,
working mothers would rush home at the end of the
day and look after their children all evening and
on weekends, but now there are women prepared to
employ someone so they can continue to have a
social life, too.
Despite the fact that
Turkish fathers have always maintained an
independent life outside the home, it is still not
acceptable for women to do the same. Those mothers
who talk about quality rather than quantity time
are vilified as failing Turkey - they are
abandoning the next generation and thus destroying
the future health and well-being of the nation.
Turkey's paternalist society is unwilling to
accept that what children need is stability in
their care, and that this can be provided by a
good nanny, by an attentive mother or even by a
responsible father.
Some members of
society are happy that Arena has exposed
the dangers of the nanny system because they
believe a woman's place is in the home. What they
fail to consider is that Turkey is probably the
only country in the world where the percentage of
working women is falling, and the detrimental
effect to an economy of having half its potential
workforce and brain power unemployed or
under-used.
Fazile Zahir is of
Turkish descent, born and brought up in London.
She moved to live in Turkey in 2005 and has been
writing full-time since then.
