IMPLEMENTATION OF FAILURE MODE AND EFFECT ANALYSIS (FMEA) ON SOCIETAL FRAMEWORK: A CASE STUDY OF FAILURES IN RESTRAINING ORDERS IN TURKEY

Domestic violence against women in Turkey is a multi-layered phenomenon affecting almost half of its female population. To fight this devastating subject, women in Turkey rely heavily on restraining orders for violators, supplemented by an inclusive law of 6284. However, even with the law in usage, the system fails to protect its citizens where an increasing trend for femicides is observed each year. In this context, systematically elaborating and understanding the institutional system's deficiencies of restraining order implementation, stand as an urgent research topic. Since engineering management frameworks can offer valuable tools for systemic analysis and interpretation of regulative system failures, this study discusses how engineering management approaches like Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) can provide insights into social problems. By adapting FMEA on a critical social issue, namely domestic violence, and scoring each of the failure causes according to their “occurrence”, “detectability” and also “severity of their adverse effects”, the requirements framework for domestic violence prevention policy and action design processes are determined after a ranking process. Findings from FMEA revealed no established detection system exists for most of the systemic failure causes in Turkey. The majority of system deficiencies, in other words, improvement points, occur during the operational phase. Hence, the study points out an emergent need to establish an effective risk assessment system and enhance communication channels among stakeholders. Also, it shows how engineering management approaches such as FMEA could provide an overall and integrated view of the social problem and institutional practices' pitfalls.