JINHA

NEWS CENTER – JINHA reporter Handan Tufan has received an award for her coverage of women survivors of intrafamilial sexual violence in Turkey.

Turkey’s Society of Free Journalists (based in the largely Kurdish city of Diyarbakır) has announced the winners of its 23rd annual journalism awards. The awards honor the assassinated writer Musa Anter and other Kurdish journalists killed in Turkey. The jury awarded the prize for best news piece on women to JINHA reporter Handan Tufan.

In August, a young woman, Aysun Altay, killed herself in Turkey after developing psychological problems caused by her older brother’s sexual abuse. The suicide started a conversation about incestuous abuse in Turkey. Handan’s August 5 article, “No lesson from Aysun’s death: court acquits family-wide sexual violence,” exposed the role of the courts in enabling this sexual abuse to continue within families. Handan’s article follows a young woman sexually abused by multiple family members since the age of 12 who brought a case against her abusers. Courts acquitted all the perpetrators in the case.

Other winners included Dicle News Agency reporter Nedim Türfent, who won the prize for best Turkish-language news. Nedim’s article “This is what this state did!” exposed a Turkish police operation at a construction site in the Kurdish town of Yüksekova. Police handcuffed dozens of Kurdish construction workers and laid them out in a line on the ground. “You will see the power of the Turk! What did this state ever do to you?” a masked police officer shouted at the workers in a video that went viral. Soon after Nedim’s piece was released, the Turkish government was forced to launch an investigation into the officer.

The Society of Free Journalists planned to hold an awards ceremony on September 21, but have rescheduled the ceremony to November 15 due to ongoing martial law and state of emergency in many parts of the country.

(dk/fk/cm)