ŞÖNİM — Turkey's Nationwide Network of Violence Prevention and Monitoring Centres

Şiddet Önleme ve İzleme Merkezleri (ŞÖNİM — Violence Prevention and Monitoring Centres) are Turkey's national one-stop response network for gender-based violence, established in 2013 by the Ministry of Family and Social Services under Law No. 6284 on Protection of the Family and Prevention of Violence Against Women (in force since March 2012). Centres operate 24/7 with a preference for female staff, offering counselling, referral, legal, psychological and economic support, and case monitoring, reached via the national 183 helpline, the 155 police line, and the Ministry of Interior's KADES mobile panic-button app.
The network began with 49 centres in provinces such as Adana, Ankara, Antalya, Bursa, Diyarbakır, Gaziantep, İstanbul and İzmir, and was subsequently expanded to cover all 81 Turkish provinces. In November 2022 the then-Minister of Family and Social Services announced a cumulative total of 1,285,490 people served since the centres' inception, including roughly 1,071,080 women and 123,098 children (a men figure of around 91,312 appears in a secondary source but was not independently cross-confirmed against the ministry's own figures). A separate UNFPA/Turkish Women's Associations Federation analysis of 28,198 domestic-violence hotline calls (2007–2021) found 90% of perpetrators were male and 63% were intimate partners.
The Council of Europe's GREVIO baseline evaluation of Turkey (2018) found that, at 49 centres for 81 provinces, ŞÖNİM coverage and shelter capacity were insufficient relative to need and called for expansion — a call the subsequent rollout to all 81 provinces appears to answer, though no post-expansion follow-up assessment from GREVIO was found in this research. No independent audit of per-centre staffing ratios, average caseloads, or outcome measures such as re-victimisation rates has been published; the 1.28 million figure is a ministry-reported usage count, not an evaluation of effectiveness. Turkey's 2021 withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention, while Law 6284 and the ŞÖNİM network itself remain formally in force, is important political context for assessing the durability of this practice.

Read the full analysis: https://www.aile.gov.tr/ksgm/haberler/siddetle-mucadelede-81-ilin-sonim-i-olacak/