The politics of sheltering women: the case of SHÇEK

Abstract

This thesis aims to scrutinize the subjectivities of state social workers sheltering women inside the Directorate General of Social Services and Child Protection Institute (SHÇEK) in Turkey. SHÇEK’s shelter services had been severely criticized especially by women’s organizations in terms of its patriarchal and conservative approach towards gender-based inequalities and violence and its inability to provide an answer to women’s problems. Social workers who are stuck in the middle of this tension between the state and the women’s organizations challenge both the limits of state bureaucracy and civic volunteerism and open up a space transgressing their boundaries. This study shows that they have the potential to take on an important role as negotiators between feminists and the state, as a potential facilitator for the diffusion of feminist ethics and methods to SHÇEK. At the same time, the fact that the elimination of gender inequality and violence against women became the “state policy” in Turkey since the 1990s had limited impact on society due to a failure of implementation of new policies and reforms. It is argued that social workers, as state policy implementers, have the power to mend the breach between policy and implementation and hence build bridges between the law on paper and the life itself as well as between the state and women. Therefore, this research by enquiring about how social workers relate to the state, the feminists, and the women they work with, questions if a space can open up for an institutional transformation in SHÇEK that would eventually lead to a transformation in women’s lives in society. The data collected by interviews showed that there is a space for social workers to challenge SHÇEK’s and the state’s cosmetic, patriarchal, conservative, and pragmatic approach on violence against women, but it does not lead to an institutional transformation even though it creates significant cracks.