What law can restrain heartlessness?

There are moments like that, events like that, which all people live through and all eyes witness. It becomes a lesson better than a million pieces of advice. Not just a lesson, in fact: you say that in the hearts branded by this fire, nothing will ever be the same again.

You say that a society that has witnessed this will never again experience such things, because it is as if this event did not happen merely to make us feel and live its own pain, but to show all people the gravity of what occurred, to awaken those who remain indifferent, to make them partners in the matter, to make them witnesses.

Those moments are lived like a verse, like a verse that delivers a shock to our hearts about our course, our sorry state and our fate. To say "enough" to us, to sound the alarm of "awakening," to make us think that this course is no course at all and that this is your problem too.

When humanity's shames, the lowly depths to which it can sink, are displayed through such events, do hearts, I wonder, become more familiar with evil instead?

How many hearts did little baby Aylan sow compassion into, with his tiny frame and the enormous drama he lived through? If the seeds of compassion he scattered over hearts had not been as if strewn on barren land, would the Aylans washing up on the shores of the Mediterranean today, every day, not have come to an end?

What did the cries of a child yesterday, "mom, please don't die," make us witness? And the death, a short while later, before all our eyes, of the mother who had desperately called out to him, "I don't want to die," as she lay dying: how many fires did it set to the sapling of compassion that never manages to mature in our hearts?

Yesterday, in the very hours of the incident, in another city of ours, in a similar case, a mother of three children was killed by her husband, stabbed in 20 places. Among the many curious common features of the two cases are the statements of the murderer husbands: "I loved her, we argued, I did not want it to come to this."

From whichever angle you look, we are modernizing. We cover more distance in modernization with each passing day. Compared with the past, both those who commit murder and those who plot it are more educated and more urban. Violence against women is not a rural issue at present; it is an urban one. Moreover, we live in an urban-modern world in which, with each passing day, the legal position of women is improved much further, and in which, under the name of positive discrimination for women, almost even privileges are granted.

The strange thing is that, despite the legal position of women being so highly developed, cases of violence against women are increasing all the more.

What is going on?

Do all these laws that have been enacted fail to protect women sufficiently? What more is there?

It is not even the case that anyone refrains from wanting the harshest punishment for those who commit this violence against women. That is, there is no shortfall on the part of society either in condemning, denouncing and cursing violence against women. After a woman dies, voices rise from society demanding the most severe punishment for the murderer who killed her. You would think these voices are the voices that have learned their lesson and, even by their own means, will not allow such a thing again. Yet, despite these voices, there is no hopeful development toward such things not happening again.

Do not think this is only Turkey's problem, but it is Turkey that concerns us right now, and in this geography, which has always been fertile soil for compassion, we are receiving serious signs of a gradual barrenness in terms of compassion.

It is as if, in a place where everything is bound to laws, that is, where conscience is conspicuously not trusted, conscience takes its revenge in a dreadful way and renders the laws invalid. Without conscience, without compassion, without responsibility, what law could there be to protect woman against man, child against the cruel parent, woman against woman, the young against the old, the worker against the employer?

In fact, everything begins with seeing the incident chiefly as violence against women. The problem is the lack of control that people display in using the power they have irresponsibly. The problem is not limited to men's violence against women. This problem concerns the strong social morality that the strong must be bound by regarding how they should treat those weaker than themselves, the wealthy the poor, the elders the young. When a man is strong enough to exert physical violence against a woman, to what extent and for what reason should he control this power?

You can apply this to all other human balances of power as well. When a woman is strong, what will prevent her from abusing this power against weaker women, or against her very own children?