The Association for Struggle Against Sexual Violence (CSMD) emerged as a result of the gender binarism constricting our life and our space for struggle, the gender practices we are forced to live through, the need to stand up against the stereotypical perception of sexual violence in collective memory and to have a space for our bodies, words, sexuality and our silenced voice and fury as survivors of sexual violence. Although our association was officially founded in the summer of 2014, we have advanced and expanded in our struggle against sexual violence since 2009 through our initiatives and regular meetings as activists of Women’s Platform Against Sexual Violence (CSKKP). We are trans and non-trans women, trans men and gender non-conforming individuals of various sexual orientations, questioning the gender binarism and actively participating in the feminist, lgbtiqa+, ecological and animal liberation movements and children and immigrant rights organizations and platforms. As an anti-hierarchical organization, we defend queer imagination, feminisms, solidarity and collective production.
Why are we queer and feminist?
We are aware that sexual violence is a systematical oppression of women in the whole world found in all layers of society from the legal system to the streets. Without forgetting or discarding the reality of this, we also see through our own experience that everyone can be exposed to sexual violence. We recognize and experience the masculinity that silences men, the corrective rapes performed on lesbians, trans people threatened by all kinds of violence, bisexuals who are accused of being indecisive, the invisible asexuals, gay men punished for their betrayal to masculinity, intersex people whose bodies are violated as soon as they are born, young people who are bullied because they do not conform to binary gender norms and all other forms of sexual violence used to control bodies. Our objective is to fight all forms of sexual violence in different appearances without forming any hierarchy among them, for we know that these different experiences are caused by the same authoritative source feeding on the patriarchy, public moral, gender binarism, racism, nationalism and similar mechanisms of power. Therefore we embrace a queer and feminist standpoint in our methods which makes both similar and different areas of struggle accessible.
* We do not describe people who were exposed to harassment, rape or abuse as victims. Instead of “rape victim” we use definitions such as “survivor of sexual violence” or “survivor”. Since these definitions are not widely used in Turkish yet, we wanted to explain that they will be used in all texts regarding our association.
