“In general, we see a very serious backlash against women’s rights,” said Kalliopi Mingeirou, who leads the U.N. division focused on ending violence against women and girls. And that backlash, added Mingeirou, has helped normalize violence and harassment, either by dismantling legal protections or by hollowing out support systems.

More than 17 percent of women around the world have experienced physical or sexual violence from a current or former partner in the last 12 months, according to the U.N. Of the 87,000 women murdered in 2017, half were killed by an intimate partner or family member. And a recent World Bank study estimates that more than one billion women lack any legal protection from domestic violence, one of the most pervasive forms of gender violence.

In Turkey, a secular country where women have long enjoyed many rights, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been widely criticized by activist groups for leveraging religious values to chip away at those rights.

He has repeatedly insisted that men and women can’t be equal because “their nature is different.” That rhetoric, said Ronay Bakan, a researcher at the Johns Hopkins University focused on gender issues and Turkish politics, has manifested in policy changes that seek to protect the traditional family structure. In 2016, for example, Erdogan’s government published a parliamentary report to tackle the rising rate of divorce that recommended couples instead turn to marriage counselors, many of whom are religious imams or clerics who, critics say, often send women back to abusive husbands.

Activists and scholars argue that this emphasis on the family unit has led to an increase in domestic violence. The number of femicides (murdering women on account of their gender) in Turkey has nearly quadrupled between 2011 and 2018, according to an advocacy group, We Will Stop Femicides.