TURKEY: Turkey’s health minister, Osman Durmus, has ordered that virginity tests can be performed on high-school girls who are “known to be having sex or engaging in prostitution”, Hurriyet newspaper reported.
If the test shows that a student is not a virgin, she will be dismissed from school and forbidden from studying at any state institution, the regulation states.
The order came despite a ban on the practice brought in two years ago, after five teenage orphans took rat poison and jumped into a water tank rather than submit to the humiliating tests. The girls, who had returned to their orphanage late at night, were forced to undergo the tests from their hospital beds.
Durmus’s order authorises virginity tests on girls at medical high schools, where girls aged 13-17 study to be nurses or medical technicians.
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