First steps: reproductive rights and strategic litigation in Turkey
13 November 2015
In order to develop strategic litigation in the area of reproductive rights it is essential to assess the situation of Romani women in the communities and the discrimination they face. Unlike segregation in schools or social housing, reproductive rights violations against Roma are always intersectional: they thrive on the likelihood that Romani women will not assert, or even recognise, the oppression they experience. The ERRC has helped shine a light on forced sterilisations, but it is far from the form of reproductive rights violation Romani women experience because they are Roma – and women.
Before taking the first steps in Turkey, I knew it was going to be hard work. A single meeting with Romani women was not going to be enough to build up and start litigation, maybe not even to open them up and speak about their problems – especially about their reproductive health.
Still, I expected to hit on wide range of issues ready for legal challenges. Once in a safe environment, I expected Roma women to open up and confide in me, revealing the issues we could work together to take to court. I expected outspoken women, fed up with discrimination.
I was naive.
On the first day of my visit to Izmir, I went to a community centre where I met around fifteen women, most of them Romani, but some belonging to the Kurdish community. In this centre, the Izmir Chaldash Roma Association organises trainings for Romani women, teaching them sewing. Normally, I am quite sceptical about the sustainability of empowering vulnerable groups with handcraft projects like this; I have seen some successful projects, but is this emancipation or just the realisation of some stereotype?
So I entered full of doubt. But this is what I saw: enthusiastic, talented women producing beautiful dresses, and proud of their work. Indeed, the most pressing issue they identified in terms of discrimination was access to work. They are desperate to work, but they are often turned down because of their ethnicity. Here, they seemed happy, despite the fact that they do not get paid and they cannot sell their goods. When Ozcan Purcu, the first Roma member of the Turkish Parliament, joined the meeting, they asked him to arrange for them to get more cloth to be able to sew more. He promised them this, and also promised to reach out to the Municipality and the Chamber of Commerce to arrange paid work for them, to make their work sustainable.
If that were all, this project would look like any other handcraft projects for “empowering’” vulnerable groups, with the added twist of a direct link to a national Roma MP, but something more was waiting to unfold here: as part of the project, each week on Wednesdays two trainers (a psychologist and a sociologist) come to the centre and give a training on reproductive health and women’s rights. The Women’s Health Education Programme (WHEP) was established by the TAP Foundation in 2009. The main aim of the programme is to improve the lives of women and their families by training them to develop fundamental preventative health behaviours and raise awareness and access to preventative health services. It is a 13-week programme including presentations and activities about how women’s bodies function, basic hygiene, nutrition and diet, gender-based equality, how to control and manage reproductive health, pregnancy, birth and post-natal care, communication skills with partners, children and other family members, health and safe sex, sexual and reproductive rights, how to access and benefit from social services, safe motherhood, child development, and communicating with adolescents.
And of course, apart from the education it also gives the participants a great opportunity to discuss sensitive issues and share their experiences.
I was still in Izmir on a Wednesday, so I joined their training. Although the same women I had met the day before attended the training, I could barely recognise their personalities. They were cheerful, outspoken and carefree, clearly comfortable in each other’s and in the trainers’ company. At our first meeting, where men were also present, they were very withdrawn and agreed that apart from access to work (an issue affecting men and women alike), everything was fine. At the training day they felt more comfortable to speak out, and not only because the course was about communication. The two trainers did an excellent job in channelling the women’s energy into constructive activities and keeping the discussions lively.
This is the essence of the experiences of women minorities: intersectional discrimination means different circumstances will reveal a different world.
Strategic litigation?
Can we turn this into strategic litigation? How can these empowerment programmes and trainings lead to developing a strategic litigation challenging intersectional discrimination in women’s reproductive health? (And should they?) Well, the road of challenges but nevertheless there is a huge potential.
First, as was the aim of my trip, we need to assess the situation of the community, to see what discriminatory structures exist and how we can use litigation to expose them. When it comes to intersectional discrimination against Romani women, this is not an easy task. We need to build trust, and empower Romani women to speak out about their problems and to seek justice and remedy. The WHEP project is a great occasion for facilitating this.
Our theory of change in the ERRC in relation to women’s rights focuses on the intersectional discrimination Romani women suffer at the hands of health officials responsible for reproductive health services. This includes access to health care facilities, access to information, maternity care, preventative health care services, family planning, access to contraception and similar facilities and trying to secure court judgments that will eliminate the discriminatory structures that prevent them from enjoying full equality in these areas.
Discriminatory structures are often hidden attitudes, deeply embedded in the society that makes the different treatment unseen and automatic. They are doubly obscured when it comes to Romani women, given that gender equality is still only an aspiration in most European countries, and one towards which many people feel ambivalent. All these factors prevent Romani women from achieving emancipation, in ways that are hard for us to recognise.
We have to be mindful of these tendencies when we design our case that is strategic enough to challenge the deeply rooted structures of gender and ethnic based discrimination. This is slower work than it is for school segregation, for example. It will take us longer, and there will be more unconscious, vested interests to fight. But with the stories and enthusiasm of the Romani women in Izmir and elsewhere, I am confident that the ERRC will get there.
