Women's conflict divorce experiences from a feminist social work perspective

This study discusses the experiences of conflict-divorced women from a feminist social work perspective. Within the scope of the research, it focused on how women experienced the divorce process, what kind of difficulties and opportunities they faced, and how they struggled against the inequalities. It has discussed how social services based on the needs were provided to divorced women in Turkey and Belgium, which is a good practice example. In this thesis, which takes women's experiences as a starting point, the feminist method, perspective, and social work theory were used. In this study, in-depth interviews were conducted with a total of 31 people, including 20 subjects from Istanbul, 6 actors, and 5 subjects from Belgium. A semi-structured questionnaire was used in in-depth interviews. The data obtained from the research were analyzed with thematic coding using the MAXQDA Pro 2020 program. As a result of the analysis, two main themes were reached: "Women Experiencing the Conflict Divorce Process" and "Experiences of Services Provided to Divorced Women". One of the important results of this study is the "women's divorce spiral", which is designed to understand the experiences of conflicting divorced women going from marriage to divorce. In this thesis, it has been revealed that the conflicted divorce process brings legal, financial, cultural, and psycho-social difficulties. Within the scope of this study, the concept of "aggravated motherhood" has been developed to explain the motherhood experiences of women who undertake the custody and care burden of their children and cannot take child support. Women gave up all their legal rights to get a divorce as soon as possible. Instead of liberating and empowering services, family-oriented ideology services are provided to divorced women. Social policy and services should be provided by taking into account the needs of women from a feminist perspective. It is believed that this thesis will make an important contribution to making the experiences of women's divorce process visible and providing empowering social services for women.