This article explores the discrimination practices encountered by lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) individuals in education, income, employment, and health care in Turkey. Limited quantitative data on LGBT individuals are available in Turkey. This study collected data from 2,875 LGBT individuals through a Web-based survey. The findings suggest that LGBT individuals report perceived direct and indirect discrimination in accessing education, employment, and health care. In a country where LGBT rights are not yet recognized and antidiscrimination legislation covering sexual orientation and gender identity is still nonexistent, findings demonstrate perceived discrimination of LGBTs rarely turns into a legal complaint. Even when they do, most LGBTs in our sample report that they did not feel that the justice system addressed their grievances.
This article aims to explore women's decisions to freeze their eggs for non-medical reasons in Turkey. It draws on semi-structured interviews conducted with twenty-one women who were either in the process of freezing their eggs, or had completed the process within the previous year. Being highly educated and holding prestigious occupations, on the one hand, and faced with traditional gender norms, on the other, these women are confronted with a challenging decision. When making such a decision to freeze their eggs, women act under the constraints defined by biomedical paradigms, the society they live in, and the future uncertainty of their lives. However, it becomes apparent that women are able to reconcile different kinds of rationalities and concerns in their decisions to freeze eggs. They engage in rational calculations to find a solution to their reproductive concerns; they turn to their own belief systems when dealing with future uncertainty; and they negotiate social norms concerning virginity, while trying to conform to traditional reproductive roles.
Religiously motivated welfare provisioning has played an increasingly important role in the Turkish social welfare arena over the previous two decades. This paper investigates the society-specific mechanisms behind the contemporary proliferation of religiously motivated associations (RMAs) in Turkey. The historical analysis of the development of the Turkish welfare regime demonstrates that the spread of RMAs cannot be attributed to retrenchments within the welfare state. In fact, the provision of social assistance by central and local state institutions has expanded over the same time period. The paper claims that the rise of RMAs is not only a response to increasing liberalization and economic deregulation, but also an outcome of the rise of religion as a principle line of cleavage within the political sphere.
In recent decades, the changing roles of voluntary organizations in the European welfare states have been a focus of interest. In some countries a specific group of organizations put under the policy spotlight is faith-based organizations. This article undertakes a historical-institutionalist analysis of faith-based organizations in France, Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. The article explores the contemporary social welfare roles of faith-based organizations in these countries through studying the institutionalization of religion and the voluntary sector in the sphere of social welfare since the time of national revolutions. The comparative analysis shows that neither the extent of change in the position of faith-based organizations in social welfare, nor the main mechanisms triggering change, is the same for the different welfare states.
The purpose of this article is to explore experiences of discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) individuals in three domains of social policies: employment, housing and health care — domains in which LGBT individuals are not openly recognized as equal citizens and anti‐discrimination legislation is absent in Turkey. Drawing on qualitative content analysis of the data collected from 14 focus group interviews with 139 LGBT individuals conducted in ten provinces of Turkey in the first half of 2014, this article sheds light on diverse forms of discrimination facing LGBT individuals in employment, housing and health care in a largely under‐researched country. The article concludes that the contemporary understanding of Turkish citizenship and its practice are rooted in heterosexist universalism that does not recognize LGBTs as equal citizens, which, in turn, leads to systematic breaches of LGBTs' social rights in employment, housing and health care. The article shows that even strong and universalistic social policies fail to serve LGBTs on an equal footing with other citizens unless equal citizenship rights of LGBTs and anti‐discrimination principles are recognized and realized.
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