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Pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party on Friday announced that its deputies submitted five parliamentary questions to be answered by several ministries over a sexual abuse scandal that shook Turkey this week.
A sexual abuse complaint filed by a girl against a man she was forced to marry at age six has caused a social uproar in Turkey this week, reviving the decades long debate on how religious groups should be regulated.
The HDP’s parliamentary inquiry regarding the case of H.K.G. includes a total number of 105 questions addressed to the Vice President, the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Family and Social Services, and the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.
The story of H.K.G. was first shared by journalist Timur Soykan, who wrote that the girl had been sexually abused by a man since age six. According to Soykan, H.K.G was forced by her family to marry this man at age 14 with a religious ceremony and gave birth at age 17. Her official marriage ceremony was arranged when she turned 18.
However, according to H.K.G.’s testimony, the religious marriage ceremony was conducted by her father when she was six years old. The sexual abuse of the husband, 29-year-old Kadir İstekli, started two days after the ceremony.
H.K.G.’s father Yusuf Ziya Gümüşel is one of the prominent names of the İsmailağa community, one of five main Naqshbandi religious groups in Turkey.
H.K.G., who is now 24 years old, filed a complaint in 2020 and submitted photos of the ceremony and voice recordings to the prosecutors. Following the complaint, the prosecutors asked the court to arrest H.K.G.’s father and husband, but the court decided to release them on bail on the grounds that there was no mental health report prepared for H.K.G. and that the couple had a child.
In fact, the abuse H.K.G. suffered could have been ended as early as 2012, when she was taken to an hospital by her mother due to period irregularities. Noticing the girl who was likely to be pregnant was only 14 years old, the hospital staff informed the police and the prosecutors initiated an investigation. During her testimony in 2012, H.K.G. told prosecutors that she was 17 years old and that she consented to the marriage. The prosecutors also asked for a bone age analysis to understand H.K.G.’s real age. The investigation was closed after the medical report said that H.K.G. was 21 years old according to her bone structure.
In her 2020 testimony, H.K.G. told prosecutors that her family arranged someone else to undergo bone structure examination instead of her.
H.K.G.’s family denied the allegations. Her sisters said the photos H.K.G. provided were from a religious ceremony common for girls around that age. Meanwhile, Hiranur Foundation, a religious institution of the İsmailağa community chaired by H.K.G.’s father, closed its website.
The news about H.K.G. created a fury on social media, with opposition blaming the government for supporting Islamist sects and the government-supporters accusing the opposition of sharing misinformation.
However, the social media uproar forced the government to take action. An indictment over H.K.G.’s 2020 complaint was accepted immediately and the trial against H.K.G.’s family and her abuser will start in May 2023. The Ministry of Justice also opened an investigation into the prosecutor who decided to close the case in 2012 after the bone age analysis.
Yet, the government’s steps have not cooled down the public as the authorities have arrested neither any members of H.K.G.’s family or İstekli. According to the Turkish penal code, the sentences asked by the prosecutors for the dependents require their immediate arrest.
In addition to the sexual abuse scandal, the case of H.K.G. also rekindled the debate over the Turkish government’s close relations with fundamentalist sects. The parliamentary questions submitted by the HDP have included issues raised by the public over the past week, including allegations on Hiranur Foundation’s collaborations with the Ministry of Education and a district municipality in Istanbul, as well as the foundation’s activities related to children brought from Syria for education.
