A contestant on Turkey’s version of ‘The Voice’ was shot in the head while rehearsing
Mutlu Kaya was shot in the head after taking part in a Turkish singing contest.
Some women risk more than their dignity when they sing in public.
Mutlu Kaya, a 19-year-old woman from Diyarbakir province in Kurdish-majority southeast Turkey, was practicing at home on Monday for her country’s equivalent of "Britain’s Got Talent" when she was shot in the head.
The teenager is now in hospital fighting for her life.
This is Kaya in action on the "Sesi Cok Guzel" show.
The attack wasn't entirely unexpected. Kaya had reported receiving death threats after taking part in the nationwide singing contest.
“When they heard that I was going to join the competition, they told me they would kill me. I am afraid,” Kaya had told the show’s production team, the Hurriyet Daily reported.
Her mentor, Turkish folk singer Sibel Can, wrote on Instagram: "My beautiful girl Mutlu, how could they wound you? I am very sad."
The motive for the attack is still unclear, but authorities have detained three so far, including the 19-year-old singer's boyfriend. According to NBC News, authorities are investigating whether her boyfriend might have carried out the attack because he was jealous over her rising popularity.
The story has sparked outrage both in Turkey and in other parts of the world.
According to the BBC's Güney Yıldız, the shooting highlights some of the challenging contradictions of life for women in Kaya's hometown, where they have made huge strides in public life but continue to face a variety of restrictions on their behavior:
These contradictions are more visible among the poorer sections of the society where Mutlu Kaya's family comes from. For a poor girl living with her family in a run-down one bedroom flat, attracting national media attention could have triggered a fatal conservative social backlash.
Violence against women is a growing problem throughout Turkey.
An estimated 281 women were murdered in 2014, up 31 percent on the year before, and the death toll has already topped 90 this year, the Hurriyet Daily reported, citing figures from Turkish women’s advocacy group Stop Women Homicides Platform.
The Turkish government does not release figures on the country's femicide rate so the figure could be much higher.
One of the women killed this year was 20-year-old university student Ozgecan Aslan, whose brutal death at the hands of a bus driver ignited outrage across the country and prompted President Recep Tayyip Erodgan to acknowledge that "violence against women is the bleeding wound of our country."
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A major problem in Turkey is the leniency shown to offenders by the mostly male judicial system.
Although the government introduced legislation in 2012 to better protect women from violence, offenders often receive mild sentences.
And that, say critics, is fanning the problem.
“Murderers do research on the Internet,” Aysen Ece Kavas, Ankara representative of Stop Women Homicides Platform, told the New York Times.
“They look into Turkish penal codes and decide how to kill. They say, ‘If I kill you, I will get only 10 years’ sentence and I will be free — so what?”’
Violence against women isn't unique to Turkey, of course.
The United Nations estimates that 35 percent of women around the world have been victims of violence in their lifetime and in some countries the rate is as high as 70 percent. Most cases go unreported.
And it seems like this story is part of an international problem: Around 66,000 women and girls are violently killed every year, according to this Small Arms Survey.