Turkey Teen Sex

Turkey Teen Sex

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Story

May 15, 2012

Under the shade of a tree at an Istanbul cafe, Suzan, a voluptuous woman in her 50s with dyed blond hair and a warm, generous smile, describes how she went from teenage bride to full-time sex worker.
Over several cups of Nescafé during the span of a humid summer afternoon, and backed by the brilliant blue of the Sea of Marmara, Suzan tells her story. As she talks, her cell phone rings nearly every 15 minutes. Customers, she explains. It's a syncopation of male desire, hungry for her attention.
She was married off by her father at age 16, with only a primary-school education, and she left her alcoholic, gambling husband after having seven children with him, one of whom died in infancy. To support the remaining six, she tried everything: selling cheap clothes in a local market, working in a factory, waitressing at a tea garden. But her meager earnings didn't cover school fees for six children. A chance meeting with a sex worker while waiting for a train convinced her it was time to switch careers.
Despite charging only $15 to $30 per client, she found she could make a decent living, particularly as she amassed a steady base of customers who liked and trusted her. Unlike other jobs, however, this one put her in the cross-hairs of the law. In the 20 years she has worked in this field, she has been fined by the police more times than she can count, and she has appeared in court more than 50 times. Four years ago, she spent six months in prison while police investigated her possible involvement with drugs and work with underage girls. They found evidence of neither and released her without charges.
Until then, Suzan had hidden her work from her children. But the six-month sentence compelled her to tell them where she was going -- and why. In a voice clotted with emotion, she recalls how they comforted her during their weekly visits to the jail. "They told me, 'It's OK, Mom. You raised us, and you brought us bread. Can we come and talk to the judge? We can tell him how you were such a great mom,'" she says.
When the last of her children finishes school -- after she has seen her youngest daughter graduate from college -- she plans to leave the industry for good.
***
Istanbul is no Bangkok. Its sex trade is, for the most part, invisible. But sex work, both lawful and unlawful, has a long, distinguished history in Turkey that reaches back to the height of the Ottoman Empire. In the 21st century, however, it is quietly being swept away by an Islamist government whose desired image for Turkey -- modern, pious, and upwardly mobile -- leaves little room for the work of Suzan and her colleagues.
According to its Health Ministry, Turkey currently has 3,000 licensed sex workers, who work in 56 state-run brothels known as genel evler, or "general houses." Unlicensed sex workers number 100,000 -- more than 30 times as many -- about half of whom are foreign. (Turkey is a destination for Eastern European women, known as "Natashas," who either arrive voluntarily or are trafficked.)
Upon Suzan's release from prison, she applied to open a government-licensed brothel of her own. "I was ready to pay my taxes," she says. "I have a family; I know what it means to have a family. I don't want to do this in an apartment building with families around, or in a car like I do now."
Her application, however, was rejected. The stated reason was a "lack of space." She is hardly alone. Over the last decade, as the Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) has steadily accumulated power, the number of licenses granted slowed to a trickle and in the past three years has ceased entirely.
The existing genel evler are also being closed or moved to urban peripheries. In some cities, it's done with little fanfare. In others, grinning mayors hold triumphant news conferences in front of the rubble where the demolished den of sin once stood. For women like Suzan, the net result is the same: fewer places where they can work without fear of harassment, violence, and arrest.
Turkey has long straddled Europe and the Middle East -- both politically and culturally -- and the changing standards toward the sex trade are part and parcel of this larger identity crisis. If Turkey considers itself a European country, the policies on its books fall comfortably in line with neighbors such as Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain, where sex work is decriminalized or legal. But if Turkey sees itself as part of the Middle East, its policies toward prostitution become a jarring abnormality. Although the sex trade flourishes in the region -- Iraqi women and girls engage in survival sex in Damascus and Amman; Eastern European women are trafficked into Dubai; older men from the Gulf take temporary child brides in Egypt -- it does so exclusively in the shadows.
The regulation of sex work in Turkey was always been a murky affair. A 1909 government report noted that brothels located near an Istanbul police barracks had led to the corruption of the police. Generations later, the fetor of corruption still hung in the air. In the 1980s, an Armenian madam named Mathilde Manukyan operated half a dozen brothels in addition to substantial real estate holdings. Before her death in 2002, she was rumored to be one of Turkey's biggest taxpayers, receiving annual prizes from the staunchly secular government for her contributions to the public coffers. But she was also said to employ underage girls, whose presence was blithely ignored by cops allegedly on her payroll.
Filiz Kargal, 35, says her husband sold her to Manukyan "for a bag full of money" when she was just 13 years old. They had been married three months. Sitting on a park bench in the working-class neighborhood of Sirinevler, with her hair tucked under a green kerchief, she describes Manukyan's ruthlessly efficient enterprise.
Women worked from morning until night, she said, breaking only for lunch. The meal was another opportunity for profit: The women were forced to purchase it from a Manukyan-run canteen, mediocre food at inflated prices. Every few months, she and her colleagues were forced to sign papers stating they owed money to the brothel.
Kargal is now suing Manukyan's son for failing to pay her social security over 12 years in the brothels, plus damages. Together, the lawsuits could be worth $500,000. Other women formerly in Manukyan's employ complained of similar shenanigans -- withholding of wages, overcharging for basic necessities bought inside the brothels, failure to pay social security -- leading Kargal's lawyer, Abdurrahman Tanriverdi, to conclude that this was standard operating procedure.
But the present Turkish government is breaking down sex workers' already scant protections. "The government is willing to keep up the fight against prostitution, so the brothels cease functioning," says a spokesman for the Health Ministry. "Before [sex workers] 'fall into' prostitution, we want to reform and correct them, and to rehabilitate them."
The Health Ministry says it now provides cards for health checks instead of licenses, but it is unclear if holding a card allows sex workers to operate unmolested. Little detailed information about the policy exists in the public sphere, and neither the sex workers I spoke to, nor any sex-worker activists, had heard of the health cards. The spokesman, who declined to give his name, cited a 1973 law as the basis for the card system, but that law does not mention cards.
The Turkish economy may be booming, but the AKP's policies have pushed women further to the economic margins. The Turkish economy has more than tripled since the current government took power in 2002, but nearly two-thirds of working-age women -- 62.5 percent -- still have no personal income. Female labor-force participation stands at around 24 percent, the lowest of any OECD country. Furthermore, over 40 percent of women have experienced physical and sexual violence, meaning a woman is significantly more likely to have survived abuse than be gainfully employed.
Chastened, possibly, by the blowback from clumsy attempts to ban alcohol sales in several cities, the AKP has used subtler means to crack down on the sex industry. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the capital, Ankara, where longtime AKP Mayor Ibrahim Melih Gokcek has made it a priority to target the city's long-established brothel district.
"In 1994, when the mayor was elected, the first words he said were 'I will cancel their licenses and take the genel evler out of the city,'" says Hakkan Yildirim, a lawyer who works with Pembe Hayat, a group advocating for LGBT and sex workers' rights. Following the AKP's 2007 reelection, Gokcek finally gained the power to make good on his promise. By 2008, according to Yildirim, the mayor had closed down half the city's brothels, leaving an estimated 330 women out on the street.
Turkish officials' methods for forcing sex workers off the street skirt the boundaries of the law. In 2007, for example, the Commission Against Prostitution and Venereal Disease in Ankara issued a directive to police, ordering them to fine street workers -- especially transgender ones -- for "behavior against public order."
Yildirim filed a case against the directive in November 2007, but by then, it had already been used thousands of times to line Ankara's coffers. "The average working girl can have 2,000 to 5,000 TL [Turkish lira] in fines in a year," he says, the equivalent of $1,100 to $2,800. "And consider that there are 300 to 400 transgender sex workers in Ankara. That's 600,000 to 2,000,000 TL they're making each year in fines."
Yildirim promptly won his case, but police had already seized upon a new law to wield against streetwalkers: the Law on the Powers and Duties of the Police, which cites sex workers for interfering with traffic. The fine? Around $66 -- the same amount as for violating the directive that was just struck down.
In other words, "the state is pimping the sex workers," says Kemal Ordek, the secretary-general of Pembe Hayat.
***
The Kamil Pasha mansion, built in the late 19th century, once hosted Mustafa Kemal Ataturk himself. Its current occupant is Veysel Tiryaki, a
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