The 'Honor' of the State: Virginity Examinations in Turkey

Abstract

In 1992, the tragedy of the fifteen-year-old G. made headlines in the Turkish press, in a typically stylized, melodramatic narrative. The principal of the high school G. attended called her father for a private meeting. When her father arrived, she was asked to leave the office. She remained behind the closed door, however, and overheard the principal notify her father, Your daughter has a very low attendance record for the past term. I have been informed that she meets with boys. She might not be a virgin. I suggest that you have her examined. G. fled and was not seen for a week. After several search attempts, her body was found at the bottom of a cliff. The father had the virginity exam performed upon her dead body.' Following this incident, other cases, involving high school girls, principals, and their families, with uncannily similar scripts, made it to the press. In recounting this particular incident, I have deliberately reproduced the sense of temporal progression culminating in a dramatic and violent climax, a narrative mode the newspapers fully exploited. The tragedy of the incident came to be embodied, as it were, in the operation performed upon a dead body. And it was precisely through appealing to such liberal, humanist sensibilities that virginity controls at the hands of state officials, which had not attracted much interest previously, captured the attention of feminist and activist organizations and was reported on by a commission sent by the Human Rights Watch.2 These groups laid bare the fact that virginity exams, despite the lack of pronounced legal basis,3 were routinely performed upon women suspected of illegal prostitution4 and/or charged with immodest behavior; political detainees; girls in state-run dormitories, orphanages, and hospitals; and more sporadically, girls in