#ChallengeAccepted

Year: 2020
Medium: watercolor on paper
Size: 60”x48”

In the summer of 2020, many women throughout social media posted a black & white selfie supporting female empowerment with the hashtag #ChallengeAccepted.  But many users, including myself, began asking about the origins of these posts, and learned to discover it was about Femicide in Turkey. According to PBS, this campaign was originally aimed to combat violence against women in Turkey, where rates of femicide – often perpetrated by current and former romantic partners – have grown dramatically in just the last few years.

Turkish women began posting black & white selfies following the July disappearance and brutal murder of Pinar Gültekin, a 27-year old Turkish woman whose murderer confessed to killing her and trying to hide her remains after she rejected his advances.
In Turkey last year, there were 474 instances of women being murdered by men, almost half of whom were current or former spouses or romantic partners.  And this year, 27 women across Turkey were killed by men in just June alone. The We Will Stop Femicide Platform reported that the coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated the crisis by forcing people, including women and their potential assailants, indoors for months on end.

The intention of this piece is to amplify this cause that many of us women may have overlooked when posting #ChallengeAccepted. Women standing up for one another to speak out against domestic violence is absolutely necessary, and everyone needs to take notice.  We cannot allow our young girls (daughters) be faced with the same struggles of brutality that our generation and the several generations before us have faced.