Ankara: Thousands of sexual offenders in Turkey have married their victims in a bid to avoid jail. This was revealed in a damning report submitted by the country’s parliamentary committee on sexual offences, highlighting the miscarriage of justice to victims.
Speaking to a Turkish newspaper, the country’s Supreme Court judge Mustafa Demirdag said that the rules could impact adults and children as young as five and that type of marriage was 'not acceptable'.
“It is cruel to force someone to marry a person she does not want and force her to spend the rest of her life with him,” he said.
Demirdag referred to several instances where the victim was subjected to the ordeal of marrying her rapist. Speaking to the Turkish paper Milliyet, he said “One girl had been kidnapped and raped by three men, but when one married her, the sentences of all of them were lifted.”
Speaking about another case that exposed the loopholes of the law, he recounted the instance where a 15-year-old girl who fell in love with a boy in her neighbourhood, threatened him with suicide if he did not kidnap her.
“The boy kidnapped her. Afterwards they married according to the norms. When the case came to us, they were already married officially and they had three kids. Before the (new) law came into force, the boy would have been sentenced to a minimum eight years and four months in prison.”
The parliamentary committee to look into sexual offences in the country was constituted after three men were sentenced to life in prison for murder and attempted rape of a 20-year-old student.
Activists have alleged that not enough has been done for women in the country, which is vying to be a part of the European Union, and there have been several cases of wives being killed by their husbands.
