Far too often one hears and reads about the oppression of women in migrant families. People who often flee the land of their ancestors themselves to live in a country that offers them and their families more freedom, more opportunities – only to deny their own children the freedom for which they have sacrificed so much. Correction: your own daughters. The image of women, which is transported and actively lived in many migrant communities, stands in stark contrast to the views and values of the western world, in which they have often built a new life for themselves in the second or third generation. When their daughters want to break out of this cage, they often have a rude awakening – the keywords oppression, forced marriage and honor killing are often all too omnipresent. Female self-determination of any kind, but especially of a sexual nature, is not only taboo but impossible.
Yasemin Toprak (29), a young German with Semidic roots, also had to experience this painfully. She was rejected by her own family and threatened with death by her father for “daring” in a podcast – completely harmless, far from vulgarity and just plain open, genuine, with a refreshing naturalness and also with a pinch Humor – to talk about sex. An absolute no-go for their family and their community: “My compatriots want a woman who has no past, who has never kissed a man,” says Toprak. “I don’t want to lead this life that my cousins and aunts lead. They have these dreams of a big wedding and pompous dresses. But in the end it’s not what they imagined. “
The young woman tells this in an open and honest interview with the German “Welt”. She invites you into her little world, her first own apartment, to which she had to flee from her own family. She remembers: It was in March 2021, two weeks after the podcast was recorded, in which she appeared under the pseudonym “Yazzy” as the door to her room in the apartment where she was with her parents and her siblings lived, was blown up and her father stormed in. Behind him the mother – tattooed herself and, like the father in Yasemin’s childhood, had a loving relationship with his daughter, the tide had suddenly turned when her daughter had reached her teenage years. Then the restrictions began, the end of freedom. Where other girls her age would go out raving about boys, Yasemin should stay at home and save herself. So she did – up to a point. Yasemin made her own picture of the world, formed her own opinion, became a feminist and after saving herself until she was 27, she also had sex. And as if that weren’t “bad enough”, she then also talked about it. About sex. Publicly, on a podcast. Too much for her parents, especially her father – that brings us back to the moment he stormed into Yasemin’s room. He threatens her with violence. The mother next to him does not stop him – it is Yasemin’s brother who steps in and saves his sister from physical injuries. He cannot ward off the emotional ones.
Yasemin became depressed, even considering harming himself after her father was so obviously ready to hurt his own daughter. Yasemin was born in Germany. Her parents, Yazidi Kurds, came to the country as asylum seekers in 1989 after they were persecuted in Turkey. In Germany they found freedom, built a new life for themselves and received a German passport in 1999, ten years after their arrival. But they did not want to let go of a certain set of ideas in their new freedom either. When her daughter thought about harming herself, they reacted with hypothermia: “I no longer know whether it was my mother or my father, someone said: Why didn’t you kill yourself?”, Remembers Yasemin.
Finally, her father throws her on the street in the middle of lockdown, and Yasemin spends the first night in a playground. Then she finds shelter with a friend, then in a shelter for the homeless. Through the moderator of the podcast that led to the scandal, she finally finds her own apartment and can start a new life. For the first month Yasemin is allowed to live in the apartment free of charge, but the young woman quickly gets on her own feet: She finds a job in the call center of a cell phone manufacturer and is now, completely independent of her family had sent her an email after her involuntary move out and threatened his daughter with death on August 1st, when she was under police escort to pick up the last of her belongings from her parents’ house.
Yasemin is happy about her new freedom and manages to speak openly and relatively calmly about her experiences. She realizes that the problem is much bigger than her father’s attitude. He takes an old, widespread attitude among Yazidis. And she is merciless. Yasemin is enlightened – and wants to enlighten himself. ”If you look at Twitter, it always says that the Germans are to be blamed for everything and that they are racist. And of course there is racism. But migrants are much more blatant among each other. If I had brought a black man home with me, I know what my father would have done. There are Turks who adore Adolf Hitler. ” Yasemin remembers a moment in her childhood when another Turkish girl was not allowed to play with her. “Because as a Yezidi, I would worship the devil, she said.”
But Yasemin doesn’t let herself get down, she wants to make a difference: “I want to be a voice. I want to be seen I would like to say something about cultural oppression and abuse. I want to be part of the education. I want to show that Germans are not the enemy and foreigners are not the poor victims. ” Interesting postscript: “Ironically, German privileged feminists have often criticized and attacked me for this. And they want to tell me what racism is? “
