Tucked away in a quiet corner of Ýstanbul´s Anatolian side is a unique shelter to help young women with no place else to go get back on their feet. When Uður Ýlhan was young, she saw her mother fall victim to continual domestic violence. If only there was someplace she could go, Ýlhan remembers thinking at the time. "There were places like this in the West, but I didn´t know that then. I made up my mind then that, if I could, I would open a place like that some day," she said in an interview with Today´s Zaman.

Decades later, and after falling victim to domestic violence herself, Ýlhan is the president and founder of the three-year-old Young Women´s Shelter Association, which recently opened its -- and Turkey´s -- first halfway home and a new office in Ýstanbul. The shelter, named Güneþ (Sunshine), can house 20 young women aged 18-25 and is different from other shelters in both its outlook and services provided.

Ýlhan explained that the new shelter was intended to give young women hope and the resources they needed to become successful, independent citizens. Too often, she said, young women are grouped in with older women in shelters where, in addition to broken bones, residents have broken spirits that can be a detriment to young women´s psychology at critical points in their lives.

"You have a young woman, maybe 18, 20 years old. If she goes to a normal shelter, what is she going to see there? She herself has probably seen violence. She´s going to meet other women who have been beaten and abused by husbands, fathers, sons. She´ll see women who have succumbed to the idea that this is normal. That´s no place for a young girl to be -- it will lead to her thinking that this is what marriage means, this is what it means to have a relationship. We don´t want these young women to be man-haters or anti-marriage. We want to help them be strong, independent women who can overcome their abusive experiences," Ýlhan said.

More: http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/detaylar.do?load=detay&link=158602

*****

Great initiative! (Sad that it´s still needed, as anywhere in the world.)

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