It looks like Turkey is starting a nationwide campaign to end to honor killings,
the practice where a women is killed by her husband or relative for behavior that is perceived to disdain the respectability and status of her family, reports the New York Times.

In 2004, a report indicated that 43 women in Turkey were victims of honor killings. But human rights activists say the number is far greater, for families will report deaths as suicides or simply fill a missing persons report.

"Women's groups have been active in raising consciousness to prevent honor killings in the past few years but what they needed was a national campaign to support their work," says Nilufer Narli, a sociologist from Kadir Has University in Istanbul. “Panels and conferences reach the elite, but you need television and movies to reach people in the street." The television spots are scheduled to broadcast this week on at least 10 television stations and hundreds of radio stations.

Honor killings are most common in the rural southeast, where Diyarbakir -- the largest city in the area -- doesn’t have any shelters where women can hide from their families. There are a total of fourteen shelters in Turkey.

Yet there has been some recent improvement. A new penal code was ratified in September 2004, eliminating "protection of family honor" as a mitigating circumstance in murder trials, and stricter penalties have been put forth for honor killing convictions. Parliament also just passed a law that calls for the building of a women's shelter in every large municipality in the country.

Yet some say this is not making significant changes. While the family honor provision has been removed, the commission that made the legal changes left a loophole in the law, protecting "unjust provocation" as a defense that could be called forth in honor killing cases. And while shelters may be built, the women’s protection is not guaranteed. Reyhan Yalcindag, deputy director of the Diyarbakir Human Rights Association, says "Cities will be obliged to build more shelters, but it is the responsibility of the central government to ensure their security, and there has been no promise made on that."