Abstract:

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. 

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