Challenging Social Attitudes and Making a Change: The Struggle of Feminist Organisations in Turkey and India against Incest

While it has become easier to find statistics of incest and child sexual abuse and other such ‘data’ from countries of the Global South such as Turkey and India, academic analyses of the issue from the perspective of organisations fighting against it and supporting survivors remain scarce. The purpose of this article is to lay out the existing discourses on gender, family, childhood, innocence and virtue alongside the social and media explosion on the issue, in order to locate the contradictions in social commentary within and against which three feminist organisations function: Mor Çatı Kadın Sığınağı Vakfı [Purple Roof Women’s Shelter Foundation] (Mor Çatı) and KA-MER (Kadın Merkezi) Vakfı [Women’s Center Foundation] (KAMER) in Turkey and Recovering And Healing from Incest (RAHI) in India. Based on interviews with psychologists, lawyers and activists, this article looks at how these organisations challenge the prejudices that allow such abuses to thrive, creating new methods of resistance against incest in the process. In spite of Mor Çatı and KAMER being more involved in developing a feminist critique of the public discourse on incest and challenging existing laws on the issue and RAHI focusing more on mental healing of survivors, all three organisations provide support for survivors and criticise patriarchal structures in similar ways in their attempts to break the silence surrounding incest.