The Turkish journalist was imprisoned over an article she wrote two years ago about LGBTQ+ people in Georgia. Her case has become one of the clearest individual stories emerging from “My Family is Safe,” a nationwide operation that has put dozens of people behind bars while targeting activists, associations, websites and protesters.
On the night of September 13, 2026, Turkish police detained journalist and author Tuğba Tekerek in Istanbul. She was taken first to the police department’s morality bureau and then transferred to Ankara. Two days later, a court ordered her imprisonment pending trial on suspicion of obscenity.
Tekerek has worked as a journalist for 24 years. Yet the material at the centre of the investigation was not an underground publication, an anonymous social-media account or political propaganda. It was a piece of journalism.
Published by Kaos GL on October 26, 2024, the article was titled “Being LGBTI+ in the Georgian election: I feel both like a hero and like I’m in a dystopia.” It examined the situation facing LGBTQ+ people during Georgia’s parliamentary elections and the increasingly hostile political climate surrounding them.
The article focused particularly on Tamar Jakeli, president of Tbilisi Pride, whose image had been used by the ruling Georgian Dream party in an election campaign attacking what it called “moral degeneration.” Jakeli described taking precautions because she feared for her safety. She avoided crowded places, informed friends about her movements and increased her digital-security measures.
Tekerek also described Georgia’s recently adopted legislation on “Family Values and the Protection of Minors,” which imposed extensive restrictions on LGBTQ+ rights and expression. Two years later, the journalist who documented that political climate would herself be caught in a Turkish operation carried out under another slogan invoking the protection of the family.
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, which examined Tekerek’s police interrogation records and the court order authorising her detention, investigators questioned her not only about the Georgian article but also about the social-media activity of Kaos GL.
Tekerek denied the allegation that she managed the organisation’s Instagram account. She told the court that she had never been a member or volunteer of Kaos GL and that her relationship with the organisation consisted essentially of the single article she had written while reporting on the Georgian elections.
“I have been a journalist for 24 years,” she told investigators, according to the Turkish news organisation Medyascope. “I only wrote one article for Kaos GL.”
Nevertheless, the Ankara 6th Criminal Judgeship of Peace ordered her detention pending trial. Her case therefore raises a question extending beyond LGBTQ+ rights: when can reporting about a targeted community itself become grounds for criminal investigation?
The Committee to Protect Journalists has called for Tekerek’s immediate and unconditional release, arguing that Turkish authorities should stop detaining and intimidating journalists for carrying out their professional work. It is a question that belongs to the much wider struggle over press freedom documented by ChannelDraw, where individual cases repeatedly show how attacks on journalism often begin by transforming reporting itself into evidence of wrongdoing.
Tekerek’s imprisonment cannot be understood as an isolated case. It occurred during a vast nationwide operation called “Ailem Güvende” — “My Family is Safe.”
Beginning in mid-September, Turkish authorities carried out coordinated raids involving LGBTQ+ organisations, activists and other individuals across numerous provinces. According to Justice Minister Akın Gürlek, investigations coordinated by prosecutors in Istanbul, Ankara, İzmir, Aydın and Mersin involved 162 suspects, nine associations and 13 businesses across 15 provinces.
The accusations vary and include alleged obscenity and prostitution-related offences. Authorities have said that the investigations are intended to protect children, family values and public order, and prosecutors have alleged that minors were being improperly influenced on questions of sexual orientation and gender identity. Rights organisations contest that interpretation, describing the operation as an attack on LGBTQ+ people, freedom of association and civil society.
By September 22, Reuters reported that 82 people had been jailed pending trial as part of the broader crackdown. More than 100 protesters had also been detained during demonstrations opposing the raids.
It is important to distinguish between the different groups caught up in the operation: the 82 people held on remand were not all detained simply for LGBTQ+ activism, and some investigations involve allegations of other offences. But LGBTQ+ organisations, activists and their communications infrastructure have clearly been among the principal targets of the campaign.
One of the organisations most directly affected is Kaos GL, founded in 1994 and one of Turkey’s longest-established LGBTQ+ rights organisations. Tekerek was detained in the same investigation as members of the organisation. Seven members of Kaos GL’s management and supervisory bodies were imprisoned pending trial alongside her, while seven substitute board members were released under judicial-control measures.
Court documents cited by Reuters state that prosecutors accused suspects of facilitating the publication of obscene material, including content allegedly accessible to children. Prosecutors pointed to organisational roles, social-media posts and evidence gathered during the police investigation. Kaos GL rejects the accusations and has characterised the investigation as a political operation against fundamental rights and freedoms.
Turkish authorities also blocked access to the websites of Kaos GL and its news outlet. The broader crackdown resulted in restrictions on numerous websites and social-media accounts connected to LGBTQ+ organisations, activists and rights defenders. The operation therefore extends beyond physical arrests. It also affects the spaces in which information about LGBTQ+ lives can be published, shared and preserved.
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Explore the yearbooks →This mechanism is familiar in the history of censorship and attacks on freedom of expression documented by ChannelDraw: repression does not necessarily stop with the arrest of an individual. It can extend to publications, archives, associations and the digital spaces through which communities make themselves visible.
Tekerek is not the only identifiable person whose story deserves attention. Among those imprisoned were Janset Kalan and Umut Derin, both trans activists, as well as Nedime Erdoğan, a member of Gökkuşağı Aileleri Derneği (GALADER), an organisation bringing together families of LGBTQ+ people.
Nedime Erdoğan’s testimony is particularly revealing because it challenges the very opposition between “family” and LGBTQ+ people on which much of the government rhetoric rests.
According to her statement reported by Medyascope, she became involved in advocacy after learning that her child was gay. She described initially experiencing difficulties, then reading scientific information, understanding her child better and strengthening their relationship. Her stated purpose, she told the authorities, was precisely to help keep families together.
Yet she was arrested during an operation called “My Family is Safe.”
The contradiction is striking: a mother who says her activism grew from an attempt to preserve the relationship with her LGBTQ+ child finds herself imprisoned by a campaign presented by the state as a defence of the family.
The operation is unfolding within a much broader political programme. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has launched Turkey’s “Decade of Family and Population 2026–2035,” an initiative officially presented as a response to falling birth rates, demographic ageing and transformations affecting family life.
The Turkish government argues that strengthening the family is necessary for the country’s demographic and social future. Erdoğan and other government figures have repeatedly connected this objective with opposition to what they describe as gender-neutral ideologies and policies. This political language belongs to a longer authoritarian transformation of Turkey that intersects with the cases of artists, journalists, activists and political prisoners documented by ChannelDraw.
On September 22, only days after the arrests, Erdoğan carried this argument to the podium of the United Nations General Assembly. He denounced what he called global “gender-neutralisation policies,” describing them as part of a campaign threatening families and children, and argued for the protection of a traditional family formed by a man and a woman.
The timing matters. While the Turkish president was presenting the defence of the family as an international political question at the United Nations, people arrested under an operation called “My Family is Safe” were sitting in Turkish prisons awaiting trial.
Among them was Tuğba Tekerek.
There is an unsettling symmetry at the centre of her story.
In October 2024 she travelled through journalism into another country’s political crisis. She described how LGBTQ+ people in Georgia were being transformed into symbols of supposed moral decline, how “family values” and the protection of minors were entering legislation, and how an activist had begun organising her daily life around the possibility of violence.
The title of Tekerek’s article borrowed Tamar Jakeli’s description of that experience: “I feel both like a hero and like I’m in a dystopia.”
In September 2026, that article became evidence in a case that resulted in Tekerek being placed behind bars in her own country.
The circumstances in Georgia and Turkey are not identical, and the judicial proceedings against Tekerek and the other detainees have not yet concluded. Turkish prosecutors maintain that their investigations concern offences defined in law and the protection of children and public morality.
But Tekerek’s detention makes the broader stakes unusually visible.
This is no longer only a conflict over Pride marches, LGBTQ+ organisations or political rhetoric. It touches journalism itself: who can document a marginalised community, what language can be used to describe it, which stories can remain online and whether reporting about LGBTQ+ lives can expose a journalist to prosecution.
These are the same questions running through many of the stories collected by ChannelDraw about journalists imprisoned around the world: behind every statistic about repression there is a name, a face and an individual story that risks disappearing inside the numbers.
That is why Tuğba Tekerek’s name matters.
Behind the statistics — 162 suspects, nine associations, 13 businesses, 15 provinces and at least 82 people jailed pending trial — there are individual lives.
There is Janset Kalan.
There is Umut Derin.
There is Nedime Erdoğan, a mother who says she became an activist in order to understand and remain close to her child.
And there is Tuğba Tekerek, a journalist who wrote about someone else living inside what felt like a dystopia — and who, two years later, found herself imprisoned because of that reporting.
As of late September 2026, Tuğba Tekerek remains in prison in Ankara awaiting indictment and trial.
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