ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the Directorate for Women's Status and Problems since it was named the official National Women's Machinery (NMW) in charge of implementing Turkey's international obligations and since it focuses on the extent of state accountability to those obligations. The NWM's active collaboration with women's organizations, activists, and academics has been a new experiment that is unusual for the top-down bureaucratic structure in Turkey. Institutionalization of gender issues in national and local governance remains limited but some significant changes have occurred. A special law entitled Family Protection Law on violence against women was enacted in 1998. As one analyst comments: 'the feminist movement dared to voice and bring into the public agenda issues no one had voiced publicly before-violence against women, rape, incest, sexual harassment and wife battering'. The grassroots activism of women in low and middle income neighborhoods who worked for the Welfare Party's election campaign in 1996 constitutes a significant form of political mobilization.
