Kadın Zamanı Derneği (Women’s Time Association) was founded in Istanbul in July 2020 with the aim of contributing to the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women and to the empowerment of women in every area of society. In the first year of our association’s founding, we have been working to provide legal, psychological, and social support to women who have experienced physical, sexual, psychological, and/or economic violence, to help them cope with the effects of violence and break free from the cycle of violence. Our association’s activities rest on three core pillars: the Counselling Centre, Field Work, and Advocacy. Our Counselling Centre became operational around a year after our association’s founding, and we provide support to women in line with their needs or refer them to organisations we work with that can provide support. We also publish a report on our counselling centre every six months, sharing it both on our website and on our social media accounts.
Starting from the problem that Kurdish women are kept outside public life due to official or de facto barriers to their mother tongue, that they face difficulty accessing even the most basic human rights, including healthcare, and that, as a result of both private and public patriarchy, they are subjected to double discrimination on account of both their gender and their ethnic identity, we have focused on providing our support in both Kurdish and Turkish. As Kadın Zamanı, while our work targets women who cannot access solution mechanisms, our emphasis to date on delivering work in this field in Kurdish has also opened the way for us to build networks that reach women directly. We set out having recognised this need among the millions of Kurdish women living in Istanbul who wish to express themselves in their mother tongue. We work to create an alternative to this othering, and, in this direction, we carry out work on legal rights, support available for coping with violence, and awareness-raising for Kurdish women. We provide bilingual support in this work, which enables us to become a point of application for women who need support in Kurdish.
You can reach our Women’s Counselling Centre by phone at 0542 602 69 62, or by emailing info@kadinzamani.org – basvuru@kadinzamani.org.
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