“Don’t talk behind my back, don’t play with my honor,” said the woman, Nevin Yildririm, 26, to some onlookers drinking coffee, as she walked into the village square carrying the rapist’s head by the hair as it dripped with blood, and slung it for public consideration. “Here is the head of the man who played with my honor.”
The beheaded man, Nurettin Gider, 35, father of two, allegedly began his abuse when her husband left town for his seasonal job. He used a gun and threatened to hurt her children if she made a noise, on his first assault. At another time he took pictures of her and threatened to send them to her parents if she didn’t have sex with him. She became pregnant, but didn’t seek an abortion until she was 14 weeks pregnant, and so was refused, since Turkey allows abortions only within the first 10 weeks of pregnancy.
This time, when she heard him climbing the wall of her house, she said at her preliminary hearing on August 30 “I knew he was going to rape me again.” She therefore grabbed the rifle.
“I chased him,” she said. “He fell on the ground. He started cussing. I shot his sexual organ this time. He became quiet. I knew he was dead. I then cut his head off.”
At another time she explained, “Now no one can call my children bastards. I cleaned my honor. Everyone will call them the children of the woman who cleaned her honor.”
This was a concern, for as she said, “He kept saying he would tell everyone about the rape. My daughter will start school this year. Everyone would have insulted my children. Now no one can. I saved my honor. They will now call my children the kids of the woman who saved her honor.”
“She has lived through a terrible trauma, ” said Gursel Oztunali Kayir, a sociologist at Akdeniz University. “She must be charged with self-defense.”
She is seeking to have an abortion at all costs, despite the laws against it, saying she is even willing to give up her life to accomplish it.