Abstract:

Child crime is a social problem that needs to be studied from an ecological perspective. In Turkey, the age of criminal liability for children is between 12 and 18 years, and the institutions where the convicted children will complete the processes of jurisdiction are called children’s educational facilities. The general purpose of this study is to identify the general characteristics of the convicted children left in children’s educational houses and the risk factors that drive them to crime. A total of 124 men sentenced children were executed in Ankara (82) and Istanbul Children's Education House (42) related to the Ministry of Justice. This study, which is in the Nicel research model, analyzed the data using SPSS 21.0 program. According to the frequency analysis, the economic status of the children’s families and the educational level of their parents is quite low. In the study that the crimes against Mala are major, there is also a crime story around the family and co-workers of the convicted children. The children think that the surrounding environment is most influenced by the crime. Many of them have had experience of living in the street and working in the industry prior to the crime. The children who were imprisoned said they felt the lack of their families as long as they stayed in the institution. It should be prevented that children have quite a lot of crime stories in their neighboring environments and the risk of returning back to the same environment after leaving the institution should be increased by the post-government supervision services to prevent them from becoming criminals. It also requires multidisciplinary research projects to determine their relationships with systems by understanding the risk factors that criminalize children.

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