20-month-old toddler accompanies mother to Turkish prison

A former Turkish academic has been sent to prison along with her 20-month-old daughter to serve a six-year sentence for alleged links to the religious Gülen movement, news website Kronos reported on Wednesday.

Hatice Kaya was taken to a prison in Manisa province on August 23 after the Supreme Court of Appeals upheld her sentence. She was accused of investing money in the now-closed Asya Bank.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has targeted supporters of the Gülen movement, which was inspired by Turkish Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, since the December 2013 corruption investigations that implicated then-Prime Minister Erdoğan, his family members and his inner circle.

Erdoğan dismissed the investigation as a coup attempt by the Gülenists and a conspiracy against his government, labeled the movement a terrorist organization and began targeting its members. After a failed coup in July 2016, which he blamed on Gülen, he intensified the crackdown on the movement. Gülen and the movement strongly deny involvement in the coup attempt or terrorist activities.

According to the Turkish government, an account at Bank Asya, then one of Turkey's largest commercial banks, is a benchmark for identifying and arresting suspected supporters of the movement for membership in a terrorist organization, despite a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in an earlier case that using or owning an account at Bank Asya does not constitute a criminal offense.

Kaya's detention was sharply criticized on X by Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu, a member of parliament from the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Equality and Democracy Party (DEM).

“Today [Kaya] with her baby Neva in Manisa prison. Worse still, the father is also in prison,” said Gergerlioğlu. “Our proposal to prevent parents from being imprisoned at the same time was rejected by the ruling coalition.”

A relative of Kaya expressed outrage at the arrest, saying the young mother was taken away by anti-terror police along with her daughter. “The child is now in prison with her mother and we have heard that she has been denied additional milk.”

The number of children accompanying their mothers to prison has skyrocketed in Turkey following the attempted coup, when thousands of women were arrested for their alleged links to the religious Gülen movement.

According to the Civil Society in Prisons (CİSST), there are currently 552 children aged six and under in Turkish prisons.

A report published by CİSST in 2022 also found that these children were deprived of the most basic necessities of life.

Previous reports have also highlighted that Turkish prisons do not meet the needs of children and young children. Most prisons do not provide crayons, toys or carpets for crawling babies. Many children do not have their own bed and share their mothers' food.