TITLE:
The Principle of Retributive Justice and Subjects: Femicide in Türkiye
AUTHORS:
Assiye Aka
KEYWORDS:
Retributive Justice, Femicide, Just, Emotion
JOURNAL NAME:
Sociology Mind,
Vol.13 No.4,
August
31,
2023
ABSTRACT: Recently in Türkiye, tweets with a wide variety of hashtags have been
tweeted to create an alternative digital public opinion (Twitter) to produce urgent
solutions to the problems of women who are subjected to fatal violence just
because they are women. This is because between 2008 and 2023, as in other
countries, there is a significant increase and continuity in the rate of
femicides in Turkey. Due to the “status of being a citizen” of the modern
state, this deadly violence must be stopped. In this context, the aim of this
study is to determine the social perception of the principle of retributive
justice, which focuses on the criminal act itself, within the framework of its
basic components (necessity and proportionality) and its subjects (perpetrator
and supporters; punisher/judge; victim and supporters). In addition to this, it
aims to discuss why “transitional justice” should be applied as a temporary
solution (in the case of lethal gender-based violence) with theoretical and
concrete data. For this purpose, qualitative (observation, content analysis of tweets and questionnaire responses) and
quantitative (1707 coding drawn from 14,214 tweets and semi-structured
questionnaire conducted with 94 people) research techniques were used together
without considering a hierarchical order. In the survey, when asked open-ended
question about the cause of femicide and what kind of solution is needed to end
this type of murder, most of the respondents stated that the principle of
harsher retributive justice should be applied.