JINHA

NEWS CENTER – In Turkey’s Sincan Women’s Prison, women prisoners are protesting the escalating use of strip searches from their cells with a naked protest.

Resmiye Vatansever, a political prisoner of the Turkish Communist Party – Marxist Leninist (TKP/ML), has written a letter reporting on conditions in Turkey’s Sincan Women’s Prison. Resmiye described the way that male perpetrators of violence against women are persecuted in Turkey, while prisons are turned into “individual harassment and rape centers for women and LGBTI people.”

Recently, Resmiye wrote, soldiers have added strip searches to the routine patdowns to which prisoners are subjected when going to the hospital and to court. She noted that soldiers were attempting to strip-search the women in a room with no security cameras.

“We didn’t accept this type of search and so far we have stopped it from happening,” wrote Resmiye. Now, women political prisoners from the TKP/ML; the PKK-linked PAJK; and the communist organization MLKP have started to protest the strip searches.

Whenever a strip search takes place in the prison, Resmiye said, the women chant slogans and bang on their doors. Every time the prisoners are taken from their cells, they chant “no to strip searches” and “human dignity will defeat torture” while stripping down to their underwear.

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