Surviving as a Single Woman in Turkey

Rabia Çetin

Freelance journalist

Tuesday, 4 March, 2025

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Selda Çelik, a 35-year-old who lives alone in Turkey’s western coastal province of İzmir, says that she feels most vulnerable at night. 

She assiduously follows steps she hopes will keep her safe; always double-locking the door of her ground floor flat, closing the shutters on the windows and checking her surroundings to be sure no one follows her home. Çelik even tries not to park her car too close to the house, to make it harder for strangers to know where she lives.

“I don’t spend a lot of time outside during the night, because I don’t feel safe,” Çelik explained. “I stopped listening to music while walking to the supermarket. I don’t jog in the neighbourhood.”

“My main precaution as a single woman in Turkey,” she concluded, “is giving up these daily routines.”

Living alone as a woman in a conservative country with high rates of violence against women comes with its own risks and struggles, not least feeling pressure to remain constantly vigilant. Many women interviewed by IWPR said that they routinely took a series of measures including pretending they had a man living in their house, coming home early or having someone on the phone if a workman was present.

Experts argue that this phenomenon should be viewed not as a personal issue of protection but a public and systemic problem that required the state's intervention.  

“I don’t want my neighbours to think that I’m alone,” said Cemile Didem Karaboğa, a 35-year-old lawyer from Ankara. “I want them to know that I have some family members who frequently visit me.” 

Karaboğa locks and checks her door several times every night before going to bed. When she needs help from a tradesman or mechanic, she always makes sure that a male relative is present. 

“When a carrier or the postman rings my door, it distresses me,” she adds. 

Karaboğa said that the situation had been even worse where she had previously lived in in Şanlıurfa, a southeastern province of Turkey known for its conservative nature.

“I wasn’t going out after the dark, and never going to places serving alcoholic beverages,” Karaboğa recalled. “If I was out after 8-9 pm, I had never wore my headphones for listening to music while I was living there. Of course, the situation is better in Ankara but I still continued some of my habits after moving.”

Karaboğa said that she still avoided going out late, shared the license number of taxis she used with friends, and often pretended that there was a male presence at home.

Sociologist Esin Alp - who also lives as a single woman in İstanbul - defines these measures as “voluntary or involuntary habits that women needed to inherit to feel safe”. 

This is in the context of very real threat. Since the beginning of 2025, 64 women have been killed by men in Turkey, according to Anıt Sayaç, which memorialises female victims of male violence. Meanwhile, thousands of women have also been affected by domestic violence and sexual assault.

Hearing about these constant attacks, Alp continued, women feel that they have no choice but to increase measures they take to try and stay safe. This in turn made the public sphere even more masculine.

“Instead of moving freely in public spaces, women are forced to develop strategies to protect themselves from male violence,” she continued. “This could lead to a regression in the struggle for gender equality; women withdrawing from social life due to security concerns could also pave the way for their exclusion from economic and political spheres.”

Psychologist Esra Kahraman works for the Time of Woman Foundation, established in 2020 to promote ways of protecting women from violence.

She told IWPR that social norms, gaps in legislation and state policies that encouraged impunity all impaired women’s sense of security. 

Turkey’s March 2021 withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention had only increased the violence against women, Kahraman continued. 

“It is harder to obtain injunctions or protection orders in related cases. Impunity policies reflect on many femicide or violence against women cases,” she said.

She concluded, “If they had felt safe in terms of legal arrangements, women wouldn’t need this many precautions.”

Rabia Nur, who works in a TV situation in İstanbul, also follows a set of personal rules; she shares her location with her mother or sister whenever she stays out late at night and never opens the door fully when someone knocks.

Although she considers herself politically right-wing, the 33-year-old decries the country’s withdrawal from the İstanbul Convention, a move supported by many conservative politicians.

“My general safety precaution is keeping a distance with men,” Nur says. “The reason behind all of those measures is the impunity policy in this country. We know that there are no intimidating penalties, so we should take our own precautions. Having the İstanbul Convention back could make us feel at least a little bit safer.”

Gamze, a young academic, also lives alone in İstanbul, where she moved seven years ago after a problematic divorce.

“I feared my ex would show up at my door for a long time,” Gamze said, recalling how she downloaded KADES, an app that allows women to get emergency help in case of violence.

When Gamze needs to let into a man into her house to carry out any tasks, she prefers to source a worker with references. Even so, she ensures that she has someone on the other side of the phone during the process.

“Attacks and femicides in this country make me take those precautions,” she said. “It is not possible to not be afraid in a country where a lot of women were killed by men.”