#ChallengeAccepted: Femicide in Turkey is the real meaning behind latest social media trend

Over the past several days, a new trend has been running on Instagram with women posting black and white photos of themselves alongside the caption #ChallengeAccepted.

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#challengeaccepted #womenempoweringwomen

A post shared by  Mila Kunis Official.🦋 (@mila_kunis_oofficial) on Jul 29, 2020 at 12:23am PDT

The premise of the trend is that these photos promote female empowerment. But it actually started for a very specific reason.

It was in Turkey where the challenge began as part of a women’s rights campaign to protest against the violence many Turkish women face.

Protests broke out when a 27-year-old woman called Pınar Gültekin was strangled, burned and murdered by her ex-boyfriend in the Mugla province earlier in July.

A total of 474 Turkish women were murdered in 2019 – the highest in a decade for the country.

As the #ChallengeAccepted trend has got bigger on social media, the original meaning has completely been lost. It has become a celebration of women in many parts of the world, but the trend itself is no longer serving its original purpose.

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#challengeaccepted thanks for making me a part of this @jeetihairtstylist @nuria.contreras @devinanarangbeauty love you 3 so much and happy to be amoung strong women!! Love you! #womenempowerment

A post shared by  Sunny Leone (@sunnyleone) on Jul 29, 2020 at 11:23pm PDT

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Challenge accepted . Strong women uplift each other 🖤 Thanks to @priyancka_surana . I challenge @therealpurnima @konasinger @badhon__hq 🖤

A post shared by  Faria (@nusraat_faria) on Jul 27, 2020 at 2:44am PDT

Many are now fighting for people to remember the original meaning of the challenge.

One Twitter user said: “Absolutely love all your posts, just wanted to draw your attention to the origins of the “challenge accepted” posts. It began to spread awareness in Turkey as they grieve the deaths of several women who are victims of Femicide. #istanbulsözleşmesiyaşatır,” reports HITC.

The hashtags #kadınaşiddetehayır and #istanbulsözleşmesiyaşatır were used by Turkish women as part of the challenge, but they were dropped as the trend became more westernized.