The room the father ushers me into is small and bare. In one corner stands a tall wooden wardrobe; in another, a television concealed beneath an embroidered cloth. The floor is covered with a carpet that is ragged but clean. It must have taken his wife many hours to wash it of their daughter’s blood. For an hour before the father arrives home, his wife has been describing events on the morning 14-year-old Berruan died. As difficult as it is to comprehend any such death, the more she talks about what happened, the less what she says makes sense.

Snow lay thick on the ground that day last January. Her husband and 15-year-old son had left the house. She was tending to domestic chores outside when she heard a gunshot. She immediately thought it must be a hunter shooting birds, she says. “But then my little boy ran outside screaming, ‘Come quickly! Come quickly! My sister has killed herself!’”

The mother ran inside and saw her daughter’s body lying on the floor of the cramped room that the father later shows me. “At first I thought she must have fallen and hit her head. But then I saw the gun. There was no reason for her to do that,” Berruan’s mother insists. “She was so happy with us. She had no problems – no problems at all.”

As she talks, we sit on the doorstep of the family’s dilapidated home in a small village near Batman in Turkey’s southeastern Anatolia. This area has become notorious in recent years for the high number of suicides, particularly of girls and young women whose despair is said to stem from their severely restricted lives. But women’s groups and human-rights workers believe a more sinister explanation lies behind many of the deaths. They’re convinced a growing number of girls and women are being locked in rooms by their families, with a gun, poison or a noose, and left there until they kill themselves.

Such deaths are referred to here as “forced suicides” – murder by any other name. Whether Berruan was one of those pressured by her family to take her own life is impossible to know. But such suspicion now surrounds any such death in the community that, shortly after she died, one local Batman newspaper reporting her death carried the headline “Was it suicide or murder?”

Yet those who expose domestic violence risk being rapidly silenced in this country. In recent months, three national TV talk shows have been pulled off the air after two women appearing as guests were shot shortly afterwards – one by her son, another by her husband – for denouncing domestic abuse and so “tainting” their family’s honour. Turkey is not a country where the concept of free expression has as yet sunk deep. Those in the media who touch on other subjects considered too sensitive also risk breaking the law – 33 journalists and writers currently face trial on charges of “insulting Turkey’s national character”. For, as far as many are concerned, Turkey is a country on a knife edge.

That this vast, mainly Muslim country of 71m is where East meets – and often clashes violently with – West, has become a hoary adage. But rarely since Kemal Ataturk founded this republic in the ashes of the Ottoman empire in 1923 and ordered it to “face west” has this been truer than now. As the country battles to balance its aspirations to continue to modernise, and so improve its chance of becoming a member of the EU, with the desire of many to maintain conservative and often religious tradition, many subjects are thought best swept under the carpet. In recent years it has been Turkish women who have been at the forefront of this battle.

As Berruan’s mother speaks, her grandmother kneels close by and mutters: “It was her destiny.” Berruan’s mother nods. “What can you do if God writes on your forehead that it is time to die?” When I ask them to describe what sort of girl Berruan was, they use words like “beautiful”, “strong” and “fearless”. They say she did well at school until she left when she was 11, as most girls in this area do – if they go to school at all.

They insist again and again that she was “a good girl” who “never cast her eyes outside the home”. But to be born strong-willed or beautiful or clever can be a curse for a girl in parts of Turkey such as this. To attract attention can be a death sentence. Once the words “adi cikmis” – translated roughly as “her name is known” or “she has become notorious” – are uttered, the girl or woman of whom they are said stands little chance of survival. A “family council”, or kangaroo court, is convened at which it is decided how she who is “notorious” should die. Such ritualised deaths are deemed by those responsible to be an “honour killing” – a deadly oxymoron meaning her behaviour has offended the “namus”, or honour, of male members of the family. Only by killing her, they believe, can the family’s honour be restored and its “slate be cleaned”.

Turkey is not, of course, the only country where honour killings take place. The United Nations states – and it is believed to be a great underestimate – that more than 5,000 women are killed across the world every year by relatives who accuse them of bringing shame on their families. The majority occur in the Middle East. But British police are currently investigating more than a hundred such suspected crimes among minority communities in this country. In Turkey over the past six years, an average of one or two women have died every week owing to honour killings and blood feuds. According to a recent Turkish police report, the true figure is believed to be three or four times higher.

Such wholesale blood-letting, believed by many to be on the increase, appears to be of little concern to more than a third of the population. A Turkish parliamentary commission set up last year to investigate honour killings found that 37% of those surveyed thought a woman should be killed for committing adultery, while many others supported punishments such as facial disfigurement, with 64% thinking the husband should be the one to carry out such punishments.

In communities such as Batman, and where Berruan died, it is enough for a girl to glance for a few seconds too long where men are gathered to cause lethal offence. Or to request a love song on the radio, or wear jeans, or a skirt that is a little too short. Or, however unwittingly, to catch the eye of boy or man who then flirts with, seduces or rapes her. Death sentences have been imposed here on daughters, wives and sisters for all of the above. The “guilty” have been shot, strangled, stoned, had their throats slit or been buried alive.

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