Police Harassment, House Raids and Detainment in Istanbul

Source: “İstanbul’da Polis Tacizi, Ev Baskınları ve Gözaltı”, (“Police Harassment, House Raids and Detainment”), Pembe Hayat, December 4, 2014, http://www.pembehayat.org/haberler.php?id=594

Over the last week the police have targeted trans women and sex workers in Istanbul. House raids were conducted targeting the homes of trans people working and living in Findikzade and Haseki regions.

The police arbitrarily detained trans women street sex workers the previous week and took them to the Venereal Diseases Hospital, also known in slang as“Can Can”. This past week they conducted house raids. The women were released after being subjected to blood tests.

The police acquired trans women’s phone numbers and addresses through the internet and social media and raided their homes. Women were detained without cause and some of the women’s residences were sealed by the police.

Transwomen who have been harassed by the police and who point to the recently passed “Domestic Security Blanket Bill” as the cause behind these arrests and raids, will object to the fines they are issued based on the Law of Misdemeanors. The new bill has created major concern among the LGBTI community and trans women sex workers.

Read “the New Domestic Security Legislation and Its Potential Implications for LGBTI Individuals” to access trans activist and lawyer Idil Su’s report.

One comment

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo

You are commenting using your Google account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.