The effectiveness and functionality of the justice
system in Turkey has been discussed for many years. Violent acts, especially
against women and children, and issues like robbery, fraud, and terrorism on
the other hand, are not falling from the public agenda and they bring along the
questioning of the mechanism itself. Moreover, it is observed that penalties
imposed on the offenders are far from the society's expectation. Within this
perspective, a variety of sexual crimes committed against children were discussed
in the research. Accordingly, this study aims to determine if the decisions
made by the existing justice system are the formal legal processes which are
intersecting with or differentiating from the individual expectations of
justice, through an analysis of the participants’ reflections on the decisions
of eight cases approved by the Supreme Court of Appeals. By doing so, the
research puts forward the causes for the society’s punishment behavior. The
research was conducted in three neighbourhoods of Antalya which have different
socioeconomic levels, with 381 participants, who were defined through the
"stratified simple random sample" method. Percentage and frequency
distributions of the obtained statistical data were given and chi-square test
was applied in order to measure the relation between the variables. As a
consequence, it is determined that participants demand punishments in form of
death penalty, castration and disclosure for the criminal conducts within the
scope of child sexual abuse which are not present in the existing Turkish
Criminal Code; that the criminal discounts applied by the courts for
perpetrator(s) do not gain acceptance from the participants. Furthermore, it is
registered that penalties deemed suitable by participants for the perpetrator(s)
do not differ according to the socio-demographic variables and the participants
do not have sufficient knowledge about the sexual crimes committed against
children.
Primary Language | Turkish |
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Subjects | Sociology |
Journal Section | Sociology |
Authors | |
Publication Date | April 1, 2018 |
Submission Date | January 26, 2018 |
Acceptance Date | March 28, 2018 |
Published in Issue | Year 2018 Volume: 17 Issue: 2 |