TURKEY: A confessional afternoon show on Turkish television is breaking boundaries, sometimes with tragic consequences. Nicholas Birch reports from Istanbul.
You only have to glance at her daily show Woman's Voice to see why Turkish TV agony aunt Yasemin Bozkurt has been likened to Oprah Winfrey.
In front of a studio audience, her guests complain of children who've run away from home; violent husbands; invasive in-laws. The wider public is equally gripped: despite its early-afternoon slot, her programme regularly rates among Turkish TV's top 10.
These days, though, it's not Oprah the pundits are comparing her with, but Jenny Jones, the American host whose show never recovered after one of her guests was murdered by a man he'd admitted to having a homosexual crush on.
Discussing homosexuality is taboo on Turkish TV. But the topic Bozkurt chose this April 15th proved no less explosive. Her guests that day were the Ozbeks, whose daughter had recently been murdered by her husband, convinced of her infidelity.
According to newspaper reports, an argument erupted between the Ozbeks and the murderer's father, calling from the western city of Izmir. "I'll make you pay for this," Kemal Alp is said to have shouted.
He did the next day, when the family returned home, gunning down Muammer and Yusuf Ozbek, father and son, outside the police station where they had gone to give statements. A policeman who tried to intervene was also killed.
Reactions to the triple murder were not long in coming.
"This was an explosion waiting to happen," media psychologist Arif Verimli told mass circulation daily Hurriyet.
If the hosts of these shows decide to continue unchanged, Nedim Hazar, a columnist for daily Zaman wrote on April 19th, "they should build a clinic, a prison and a morgue in their studios." Kemal Alp's brother, meanwhile, blamed Yasemin Bozkurt for the murders, adding that his family would be seeking damages of €1.1 million.
Despite hints that a parliamentary commission will be looking into the killings, some still think not enough has been done.
"After the Jenny Jones murder in the States, there were massive protests. Companies advertising on the TV station withdrew their money," notes Asli Tunc, a media expert at Istanbul's Bilgi University. "Nobody here is taking any real responsibility."
Bozkurt herself was unavailable for comment yesterday. But members of her production team insisted they had learnt the lesson of April 15th.
"We've toned down the topics, and we vet guests much more closely," said one.
Kemal Alp, it transpired after the murders, had a previous conviction for attempted murder.
Not everyone in Turkey is willing to go along with the media scapegoating of the Woman's Voice star.
A columnist for the liberal daily Radikal, Haluk Sahin, agrees Bozkurt may have made mistakes, but insists her programme has almost nothing in common with its American trash equivalents.
"Over there, the shows are to a large extent staged, and the themes chosen for their crassness," he says. "Over here, it's the sincerity of the programmes that is so suffocating, and the degree of helplessness - and extraordinary openness - of the participants. Watching Yasemin Bozkurt is like reading Émile Zola, or Dickens."
For sociologist Ayse Oncu, the vilification of these shows has a lot to do with the audience they cultivate - lower middle-class housewives. It's not for nothing, she points out, that the women's afternoon programmes that have mushroomed over the past two years are condescendingly termed "shantytown TV".
"Listen to the media and you get the impression that these women are like children, are in danger of being poisoned by what they see on TV," she says. "The assumption is that they can't distinguish between fact and fiction and need to be protected."
And if Woman's Voice and its ilk show one thing, it is that it's not the TV these women need to be protected from. Often enough, it's their own families.
There are no Turkey-wide statistics on the incidence of family violence. But as an Amnesty International report published last year made clear, a series of surveys done across the country suggest that around half Turkey's adult female population have at some stage been victims of the physical aggression of relatives.
In the past, problems of adultery, runaway children and family violence would have been dealt with, for better or worse, within the community.
But traditional bonds have been destroyed by decades of rural exodus, and there is little yet to replace them. Civil society in Turkey remains weak. Women's shelters are few. The Amnesty report cites numerous cases of beaten women seeking police protection - and being told to go home.
Before Bozkurt and others came along, Sahin says, the only way people like her daily guests would have got into a TV studio was "as a cleaning lady".
"Back then, these people had no voice. Now that they do, what they are saying should be taken as an alarm signal. If people heed the alarm, maybe something good will come out of all this."