I may be, or you may be, just one of the millions of women who cannot help but look over their shoulders while walking down the street at night; who, upon getting into a taxi, text friends and share the taxi’s license plate; who quicken their steps on a dimly lit street; who, at the back door of the metrobus, keep their eyes not on the door but on the stares around them. But we are not alone. This sense of insecurity has become the shared experience not only of women but also of children striving to exist in public space, the elderly, and even animals fighting for survival in the city. From a feminist perspective, the city is not merely a physical setting but a stage on which power relations, discrimination, and invisible labor are continually reproduced. To be a woman in Turkey means confronting a multilayered struggle intertwined not only with the threat of gender-based violence but also with care work, class inequality, and spatial exclusion. In a country where femicides grow more horrifying with each passing year, the question “for whom are cities safe?” is no longer just an issue of urban planning; it directly concerns the right to life and social justice. The insecurity of public space does not merely produce a feeling of unease; at times it leads to fatal outcomes, to streets where silence roams, and to lives left unfinished.
After violence against women, questions like “What was she doing there at that hour?” or “What was she wearing?” are not merely individual lapses of reason; they are patriarchal control transmuted into social discourse. These questions interrogate not the violence inflicted on the woman but her way of life; at times, it is not the one who kills but the one who has died who is “blamed.” The same system also normalizes violence directed at animals. Recall: the mother of a child who brutally killed a cat could muster the audacity to say, “Rapists are roaming free—will my son be prosecuted just because he killed a cat?” This audacity stems not from personal values but from the immunity granted by the system, from the patriarchal privilege that shields the perpetrator’s identity. For in this order, within a male-centered hierarchy, women, children, and animals are all pushed to the lowest rungs. Animals are treated not as living beings but as property. The release of those who commit violence against animals, or the public’s dismissal of such acts as “ordinary childhood behavior,” is a blatant consequence of this devaluation. The fact that the legal status of animals is still defined within an objectifying framework is not merely a legal deficiency; it is a moral collapse. Within this hierarchy, the lives of women, animals, and nature dissolve in the same invisibility; they are subjected to the same modes of erasure. And note: as the streets grow more dangerous, the “solution” proposed is the withdrawal of women from public space. The claim “Women should stay off the streets so they won’t be harmed” is the product of a logic that appears protective but is, at its core, controlling. What is really being proposed is not the prevention of violence, but the erasure of women from public life. If male violence cannot be stopped, women are told to retreat. This mentality, which expands public space for men while constricting it for women, surrenders not only cities but also justice, life, and safety to male control. The fact that public space is so unsafe for women is related not only to physical threats but to a historical form of domination. As emphasized in The Most Beautiful History of Womanhood, the male-dominated system has regarded women’s fertility, bodily autonomy, and capacity to generate life as a threat; to suppress this singular power, it has turned religion, law, morality, and space into instruments of control. This domination is a projection of men’s own insecurities, vulnerabilities, and fear of losing control. The city’s streets, parks, buses, and campuses are structured not only physically but ideologically in line with male dominance. Women’s presence in public space remains conditional: if they are quiet, if they remain invisible, if they do not step beyond the bounds of the “acceptable.” Yet women, children, animals, and nature do not seek merely to exist in this city; they seek to be visible, safe, and free. They demand not domination but equality; not silence but presence.
At this point, the persistence of violence cannot be explained solely by individual malevolence. Every assault directed at women, children, animals, or nature is not an isolated incident, but an expression of a mindset, of a system. This system does not merely tolerate violence; it produces it, normalizes it, and reproduces it. The brutal killing of Özgecan Aslan in the minibus she boarded was not merely the taking of a woman’s life; it was a striking example of how public space has been transformed into a threat for women. The debates that followed likewise scrutinized not the violence itself as evidence of moral decay, but the woman’s “travelling alone at night.”
When the patriarchal culture that feeds gender inequality combines with policies of impunity within the mechanisms of justice, the lives of women, children, and animals become matters of bargaining. A legal order that aligns itself with the perpetrator codes the violence inflicted on women as “the private sphere,” while reshaping the public sphere according to the rules of male dominance. This reality does not remain an abstract notion; at times it confronts us in very concrete forms. As in the recent murder of İkbal Uzuner: Semih Çelik met İkbal in Fatih at 13:58, then took her up to the city walls and killed her. This horrific incident has clearly revealed how male violence penetrates not only the body but also space; how public space operates as a threat for women and, for men, as a domain of domination.
Male violence encompasses not only the home but the entire city.
Public spaces, as feminist theory also emphasizes, are not neutral; the questions of to whom space is open and to what extent it is safe are political ones.
Parks, bus stops, streets, public buildings, university campuses—all these areas become zones of conditional safety for women.
As male violence turns into a threat on the street, leniency in the courtroom, and exploitation in the media, women pay the price of existing in public space with fear, caution, and at times with their lives.
Similarly, the link between violence against animals and violence against women is not merely symbolic. Both are parts of a hierarchical system of domination shaped by power relations. In this system, life gains or loses value according to species, genders, and economic statuses.
Eros was a stray cat living in a housing complex in Başakşehir, Istanbul. He was brutally killed by İbrahim Keloğlan, who lived in the same complex. Eros was one of the first cases in Turkey where violence against animals resonated widely with the public. The killing of Eros became a symbolic turning point that shook consciences in the field of animal rights and sparked the debate: “Are animals property or living beings?” A judicial process was initiated upon the complaints of those who witnessed Eros’s death and the residents of the complex. Yet the justice system once again proved disappointing: the prison sentence of two years and six months imposed on Keloğlan was reduced for “good conduct,” and then effectively suspended by a decision to defer the announcement of the verdict (HAGB).
This decision sparked widespread public anger. Protests were organized across Turkey and social media campaigns were launched. The case heard before the Küçükçekmece 16th Criminal Court of First Instance concluded on 13 March 2024; a travel ban was also imposed on the defendant. Yet these penalties did not deliver a systemic transformation capable of protecting animals’ right to life.
The killing of Eros was not only the loss of a life; it was also a reflection of Turkey’s regime of impunity, of animals still being regarded as “property,” and of the patriarchal privileges extended to perpetrators. That this system had not changed—and indeed was becoming ever more brazen—soon became evident in another case.
In Ankara, a house cat named Cezve was brutally killed, and the perpetrator’s mother said, “Is he going to be prosecuted for this?” This shows that the domination in question targets not only women but all vulnerable beings. A legal order that defines animals as “property” is the product of the same operation as a justice system that subjects a woman’s statement against violence to debate. The chain of violence stretching from Eros to Cezve cannot be explained by individual deviance or “exceptional” cases.
This chain is the result of an organized system of domination that targets animals, women, and children, thickening with every being the justice system fails to protect.
At this point, impunity is not merely a legal gap; it is an ideological choice.
Who the perpetrator is is treated as more important than who the victim is.
A social reflex emerges not when a woman is killed, but when a man is put on trial.
When an animal is killed, the public discussion revolves not around the animal’s right to live, but around the perpetrator’s family or school.
When a child is abused, it is not the victim’s trauma but the perpetrator’s mental state or past that comes to the fore.
Yet justice should align itself with the victim, not the perpetrator.
At times, the perpetrator’s age takes precedence over the victim’s life. On 24 January 2025, the killing of fourteen-year-old Mattia Ahmet Minguzzi in Kadıköy, in the middle of the street by his peers, was a striking example of the increasingly normalized youth violence in Turkey and the public’s lack of response. Comments appeared in the public sphere that sought to legitimize the murder as “urban teenage tension.” The incident was quickly reduced to a “personal tragedy” and stripped of its political frame. Yet this too is violence in its starkest form: normalization and rapid forgetting.
As in cases of femicide, here too the system centered the perpetrator’s future, not the victim’s life. Mattia’s killing revealed how not only young people but all vulnerable groups—children, women, animals—can so easily become targets of violence in public space. Violence should be explained not by the perpetrator’s age, but by the relationship of impunity the system forges with him.
CONCLUSION: Not Silence, but Reckoning
Every instance of violence directed at women, children, animals, or nature is not the product of an isolated evil, but the result of a deepening system. This system leaves perpetrators untouched while interrogating victims; it protects not the right to life but male comfort. Every murder, every act of abuse, every atrocity grows not by the perpetrator’s hand alone, but in the shadow of an order that looks the other way.
The safety of public space cannot be secured merely with more police and more cameras. Safety cannot be established until the voices of the unseen are heard and the lives of the devalued are recognized with equal rights. It is easy to say that the city is for everyone. Yet unless the city becomes a place where a woman need not quicken her steps, where a child can play in the street without fear, and where a cat’s right to live is not made a matter of negotiation, it is not truly safe for anyone.
The violence we experience today is not solely a problem of the present; it is the residue of an unreckoned past, the organized form of silence. And for this reason, the solution lies not only in legal change, but in cultural transformation, feminist solidarity, and a political reckoning.
Let us not stop asking for whom cities are safe. Because this question holds accountable not only urban planners, but also those who make the laws, those who fail to enforce them, and all of us who remain silent.
