KEBABBLE Winning the
gender gap war in Turkey By
Fazile Zahir
FETHIYE, Turkey - The meeting
was called for the early evening so that the men
would not bake in the heat of the day. They
gathered solemnly in the Guvecli village square
and listened as the young father outlined his
ideas to them. They would not be bullied, he said,
they would stand firm and be united. No one should
tell them how to bring up their families or how to
run their lives. Other voices rose in support,
dark brows nodding in encouragement as his
arguments rang a common chord. Their
way of
life had sustained them for generations, and they
had seen the benefits of their principles.
Each of the older men at the village
gathering had at least six children and knew that
when he returned home they would all be there to
ensure his comforts and needs were met. The
outsiders proposed to take away one of the most
important parts of their honor and their
households. A show of hands served as a vote and
the decision was unanimous. None of the men in the
village - fathers, brothers, uncles, grandfathers
and cousins - would allow their daughters to go to
school. They vowed to stand resolute in the face
of the current government campaign, and 100 young
girls stand condemned to a fate of ignorance and
illiteracy as a result.
The vote was
prompted by the incursion into the village of the
government's "Come on Girls, Let's Go to School"
campaign. Guvecli is 30 kilometers from Van and
has no school of its own. Populated by Kurds,
there are 150 houses containing 2,000 people. This
month eight teachers went to the village and
knocked on everyone's door to talk to them about
educating their daughters. These teachers are the
foot soldiers of the government's complex and
multi-stranded grassroots movement to increase the
number of girls at school.
Roughly a
million girls of primary-school age are not going
to school in Turkey. In some provinces (primarily
in the southeast) more than 50% of girls between
six and 14 years of age are unschooled. The "Let's
Go to School" crusade was launched in Van in 2003
by UNICEF (the United Nations Children's Fund) and
the Turkish Ministry of National Education. The
efforts of the government, the media and hundreds
of volunteers have made great strides in
redressing the gender imbalance in schools, and
villages like Guvecli are becoming less and less
common. The village men's vote was condemned in
the papers as an "agreement for ignorance" and as
being behind the times. Turkey is making good
headway against these old attitudes: 10 years ago
the female literacy rate stood at 72% (73rd in the
world), but the current level stands at a much
more respectable 82%.
Parents offer many
reasons their daughters should not attend school,
the most common of which is that they cannot
afford it. However, the government has taken
measures to manage this argument. It gives away
free textbooks and offers a monthly stipend, the
Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT). Other reasons are
used as a fallback - that schools are of poor
quality or far away, that their pubescent
teenagers cannot wear headscarves and thus their
honor is at risk, that co-educational schools will
corrupt their daughters and render them unfit for
marriage, and that the children are needed to work
(seemingly only the female children).
Many
of these are excuses used to disguise the fact
that parents see no value in girls being educated.
In fact, it is considered a threat, for an
educated girl may not be the subservient,
quiescent wife that is valued in these rural
Kurdish areas. A girl with education is a woman
with options and choices, and that threatens
centuries-old male-dominated societies.
The campaigners remain undaunted, and the
highest levels of support from the prime minister
and his wife to national television and newspaper
promotions have ensured that progress is being
made. Twenty thousand girls in the Van area alone
have been enrolled, and 40,000 extra girls were
entered for schooling in the policy's first year
of implementation. In 2004-05 that figure rose to
120,000.
In August 2004, UNICEF trained
and deployed 13,000 teachers, nurses, midwives,
social workers and other volunteers. They were all
armed with "blue books" full of at-the-ready
counter-arguments to the traditional
justifications for non-enrollment of girls.
Volunteers also discuss the availability of the
CCT monthly stipend and the benefits of educating
girls, including better family nutrition, lower
infant-mortality rates, higher potential family
income, and more significant contribution to the
household and community at large. The most direct
approach, employed in the southeastern province of
Sanliurfa and elsewhere, is that eight years of
schooling is compulsory; otherwise, "you are
breaking the law".
Sukran Celik, a teacher
from Van and one member of the vast network of
volunteers who go door to door, explained how she
tries to persuade parents to agree: "I say to
them, isn't it hard for you to read instructions
when you go places? If your daughter is educated,
she can earn money and bring in a salary and care
for you."
If Sukran can't get through to
the parents, she can rely on the backup of the
local imams who promote girls' education during
Friday prayers. Ibrahim Yasin, a village imam,
said: "It is a girl's right to go to school; a
girl must be educated. Islam tells us this."
Although there are many obstacles that
hamper the progress of the campaign, a new
attitude is forming in Turkey's southeast. There
is now a hunger for change that promises to pay
dividends for decades to come. Zozan Ozgokce, the
head of the Van Women's Association (and also a
foot soldier), said there is a growing consensus
that education is an imperative for every child:
"When we ask women how they want their children to
live, they almost never say, 'like me'. And when
we ask the women what they want to be, they say,
'educated'."
UNICEF country representative
Edmund McLoughney said: "Sending a girl to school
is a way to transform society and generate
progress among the poorest, most marginalized
families of the country." He underlined the shifts
in ancient habits that it causes: "Just getting
families into the habit of sending their girls off
to school every morning can break the practice of
generations. It may not change the attitudes of
the present generation, but if their daughters get
an education, they will want to send their own
daughters. They won't need to be pushed anymore."
It seems that Turkey is winning the
gender-gap war and that its future involves
empowered and educated women.
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.
