Vigilante Violence against Women in Turkey: A Sociological Analysis

This study examines one of the disturbing political developments over the last years and one that has not received scholarly attention: the rise of vigilantism against women in Turkey. Building on the empirical data on vigilante incidents, I show that vigilantism in Turkey is an exclusively masculine practice carried out by individual men or small groups of men who, calling upon a moral order or higher moral sovereignties, target nonpious-looking women navigating the public places in densely populated big cities. By locating vigilantism in the larger dynamics of gender politics, I argue that vigilantism delineates the emergent dynamics of the current backlash against women’s agency in Turkey, a backlash that manifests itself as a masculinist enforcement of morality in public.