In Turkey more and more women are dying, and fewer and fewer questions are being asked. In April 2026 alone, according to the "We Will Stop Femicide" platform, 26 femicides were recorded, and another 23 women died under "unclear or suspicious circumstances." For all of 2025, the number of women killed is at least 294. But behind every statistic stands a question the state clearly doesn't want to ask out loud.

The largest share of victims are killed by current or former partners and relatives - husbands, boyfriends, family members. And what many of them share is chillingly familiar: the woman wanted to leave, to refuse a reconciliation, to keep her own money or her own decision about a pregnancy. In other words, punished for wanting to be in control of her own life.

What alarms activists most are the deaths ruled as suicides - falls from windows and balconies, which families, lawyers and associations claim have investigations full of "logical inconsistencies, contradictory statements and insufficiently gathered evidence." When a woman with no signs of crisis suddenly "jumps" from a third floor, and the investigation closes in a hurry, the question isn't whether something is suspicious - but why no one wants to look.

The institutional backdrop makes the picture even darker. In 2021 Turkey withdrew from the Istanbul Convention - the very Council of Europe document meant to protect women from violence. Since then, associations say, investigations have weakened and penalties for attackers have grown milder. When a state gives up the tool for protection, the message to perpetrators is clear.

For the reader of this region, this isn't a distant Turkish story. Violence against women, the silencing of families, investigations that "find nothing" - all of it sounds painfully familiar in the Balkans too. The difference is only in the numbers and in how loudly someone dares to speak up. The question that remains isn't only Turkish: how many signals have to be ignored before one death stops being an "unclear circumstance"?