ABSTRACT
The UN Secretary General's 2006 in-depth study on violence against women indicates that while many states have yet to adopt legislation that criminalizes all forms of violence against women, even existing legislation on the issue is often inadequate in its scope and coverage and may contain inappropriate or discriminatory definitions and remedies. 1 Until the end of the 1990s, this was definitely the case in Turkey: most of the provisions cited in the study in terms of inadequate or discriminatory legislation on violence existed in the Turkish legal framework, such as inadequate definitions of violence and low penalties for perpetrators, sentence reductions to perpetrators of violence such as rape and abduction, discriminatory penal codes.
