Agricultural crime fact in rural communities: The Denizli Bozkurt sample

The purpose of this study, which deals with the issue of agricultural crime victimization, is to understand why farmers do not implement security measures before being subjected to crime by creating a sociological model regarding the agricultural crime victimization process. In order to achieve this goal, one of the qualitative research methods, grounded theory, was preferred and the principles of the constructivist perspective of Kathy Charmaz were followed. The study was conducted in Bozkurt district of Denizli. Semi-structured interviews with twenty-one farmers who were victims of eighteen different agricultural crimes that occurred between 2017 and 2019 formed the basic data set. The data were analyzed in two stages: pre-victimization and post-victimization. As a result of the analysis, it was determined that the farmers experienced two different agricultural crime victimization processes: sudden agricultural crime victimization and conflict-based agricultural crime victimization. Farmers practically do not apply any security measures prior to the victimization. Farmers who have been subjected to conflict-based agricultural crime describe these crimes as individual events that do not adversely affect their general sense of security of where they live. Among the farmers who were exposed to sudden agricultural crime, the majority of those who were born and raised in the village do not have the opportunity to implement and maintain the security measures after being subjected to crime due to the economic, cultural and geographical situation in the countryside. The few farmers with opportunities do not want to declare their villages unreliable, which they consider reflecting their identities. Urban-based farmers, who think that the only place where they can escape from the feeling of restriction they are exposed to in the city is the rural, do not want the image of the rural idyll in their dreams to be damaged. In line with these findings, it was concluded that the imprudent farmer behavior, which researchers had difficulty in interpreting and understanding from an urban-centered perspective, was due to the farmers' need to construct social reality about rural as a crime-free place. This result once again proved that the crime phenomenon in the rural is different from the urban one and should be addressed with a rural perspective.