Children in Turkish society have an almost revered status, a roomful of adults will happily quieten down to hear the sage words of a three year old, walls are filled with smiling portraits of offspring and fillial duties and ties are lifelong rather than till adulthood. Additionally children have a great deal of freedom to walk to school, play in the street, hang out in playgrounds after dark and generally enjoy their youth. Child abuse and its most severe form, paedophilia, were largely unknown or at least unacknowledged until recently. However the spread of the internet, growth in sales of the DVD players and gradual liberalisation of the media have led to an increasing awareness by the general public that child abuse takes place, that some people are avid consumers of it and other more depraved individuals participate in it. Recent police operations against paedophiles have outraged the nation and will perhaps lead to the spread of the, until now predominantly, western idea that a child abuser lurks on every street corner.

A few days ago the police announced the arrest of 26 year old Hakan Y., the alleged owner of 36 child porn internet sites based out of Istanbul. The sites were largely aimed at Americans but a two month police observation led to the arrest and upon confiscation his two laptops were found to contain multiple images of abused children. Hakan is believed to have been earning 40,000YTL (approx £14,000) per month from credit card payments by customers wanting to download images from his sites. His sites have now been closed and he is being charged under Law 226 with having brought and made available to others in Turkey pornographic images of children. If found guilty he faces two to five years in jail.

Canan Arıtman, an MP from the left wing CHP Party, believes that the sentences for those people and organisations who profit from child pornography are not sufficient and is putting a motion to Parliament to increase the stautory sentences. She has also started a campaign on her website www.tbmm.info/cananaritman since the beginning of December asking people to vote  in favour of incresaing sentences for child abusers. In 4 days 118,036 people had taken part in her poll and 117,771 voted yes. Aritman says they are getting more than a thousand votes an hour and that this gives her great hope with regards to how people feel about the protection of children and proves the power of democratic action. Her aim is to get 1 million votes and to use those to lever her motion to the forefront of Parliament’s attention.

Ms Arıtman was also in the media spotlight after the horrific case of child abuse that came to light at the end of October this year when she again demanded better safeguards for minors.

Perhaps the most appalling and widely discussed case of child abuse happened just over a month ago when on the 29th of October a 17 month old baby, known only as N.N.B was taken to her local hospital in Izmir supposedly suffering from a fall. As the doctors examined her they became suspicious about the multiple contusions on her body, some of them even on her eyelids and undertook further examinations of her. The result of their investigation was the discovery that this one and a half year old girl had been anally and vaginally raped on repeated occasions, beaten, bitten and burnt.

Her heartless mother was in court this week being tried along with three men for the abuse of the little girl, she is accused of torturing the baby and being an accomplice to her rape. If convicted she may serve 24 years in prison. N.N.B’s mother, known as F.B explained to the court that two of her children were already in care and that she made her living as a prostitute. She claimed that she knew nothing about the rape and that in fact she had tried to protect her daughter from witnessing her unsavoury work by dosing her with sleeping daughts every time she had a customer. She claims she once had suspicions about another of the defendants and followed him after he went to the room the baby was in and found him shaking her, F.B. also says that the same man smacked her daughter and beat her up. Under questioning she explained away the burns on the child’s body by saying that ash from her cigarettes must have fallen on the baby when she had her on her lap.

All four of the accused deny the charges of rape and each of them blames the others for the sexual damage to the toddler. The court case has been suspended pending further investigation and all four accused are being held in custody. The police have been asked to provide further evidence as it is believed that the child featured in pornography CDs found on sale in Tire is none other than little N.N.B. The toddler has been in and out of hospital since her mother was arrested and is now in a state orphanage, exactly which one has been kept secret after the media infiltrated the first one and broadcast pictures of her crying in her bed.

Some internet users have hit back at the pornography sites and started their own Turkish protest on MSN messenger. Those who are interested in axpressing their disapproval and disgust with abusers and voyeurs put the icon of a small girl by typing an ‘x’ before their user names.

Some foreign websites have been quick to highlight this new blight on the landscape of Turkish society and to paste news stories in English that serve to embarass Turkey but the reality is that the number of arrests for child porn are increasing as the police make good use of the nation’s strong feelings about the abusers of children. This is after all the country where the proverb ‘Çocuklu ev pazar, çocuksuz ev mezar’ exists, an approximate translation should give some idea of the high value placed on children; ‘A house with children is a carnival and a house without is a funeral.’