The Sur district of Diyarbakır province is under curfew these days. Security forces are trying to take down barricades in the streets, often “manned” by mere teenagers. As important as it is to resolve the security problem, our questions cannot stop there.

I was reading UNICEF’s Children of Recession report when my train of thought drifted to the Children of Sur. “The tongue can’t stop touching the aching tooth” a Turkish saying goes. It may be that. Let me elaborate a little bit.

The UNICEF report was published in late 2014. It is about the impact of the 2008 global crisis on child well-being in 41 countries, mostly the developed ones. The main finding is that child poverty - that is the percentage of children living in households that are below the poverty line - has increased due to the global crisis. In 2008, only a handful of countries had child poverty rates at or above 30 percent. Only five, to be exact. This number increased to 11 with the global crisis. Turkey had the second highest child poverty rate in 2008. In 2012, Turkey had become the country with the 9th highest child poverty rate among the 41 selected for analysis.

That is an abysmal performance. Turkey’s drop in the charts has not been due to a significant decline in child poverty rate in Turkey, but rather due to the significant surge in child poverty in other countries. Child poverty has increased considerably in Spain, Iceland and Greece, the countries hit hardest by the great recession. Hence the title of the report – the “children of recession” have become significantly poorer.

How is all this related to Diyarbakır’s Sur district? Well, it’s important to understand that there are two Turkeys. TURKSTAT figures note that child poverty intensifies with regional inequality and its consequent social problems. Child poverty is much more prevalent in eastern Turkey than it is in the west of the country. There are two key reasons. First, income levels are relatively low in the east. Second, the average number of children per household is significantly higher in the east. Child poverty ratios are markedly lower in the Eastern Marmara and Aegean region, or certainly in Istanbul. Those are the parts of Turkey that are already integrated to the EU.

A TEPAV study makes the issue crystal clear, if you ask me. In the Sur district of Diyarbakır, 60 percent of households are composed of more than 6 members. Again in the Sur district of Diyarbakır, 58.4 percent of household leaders have no formal employment, and struggle to put food to the table. So, as you go to the east, household sizes increase and incomes decline. Here is a storyline for child poverty in Turkey.

This is another way of thinking about the barricades, if you ask me.

This commentary was published in Hürriyet Daily News on 02.01.2016