Sexual offence victims' perception of support mechanisms and attitude toward the help-seeking process in Turkey

Sexual victimization is a phenomenon that might create feelings such as shame, guilt, alienation. These feelings may also cause mental and physical traumas on victims. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a common condition after traumatic experiences and shows its effects in both personal and social areas. It is crucial for the post-traumatic period how the victims are treated in the process of seeking help. In the light of literature review, reporting behaviour analysed as a process, social support that victims perceive and reach before support is effective in characterizing the event they have experienced and applying to both professional and official support mechanisms. For this reason, this sub-theme was also focused on in the interviews conducted within the scope of the thesis. It is known that PTSD-related complaints are long-lasting and become more severe as delayed-support. On the other hand, the trauma victim can be negatively affected by the responses she receives from official institutions. These unsupportive responses may originate from officers WHO are not trained in PTSD or who accept rape myths. In this case, it may be observed that the victim has not received sufficient support but experienced secondary victimization. In addition, the victim may have myth beliefs about this issue. Therefore, it is possible to exacerbate the phenomena such as self-blame and inability, which are expected to observe after a sexual victimization trauma. Furthermore, it is also possible victims, who have rape or sexual abuse myths beliefs, are more likely not to label the incident as a crime. The aim of this study is to reveal the attitudes of the victims toward their experiences in the institutions (e.g. police station, health centre, court, prosecution office) and their perceptions of the institutions. In this way, as mentioned above, it was aimed both to eliminate the deficiencies in the regulations and to reveal the practices that did not comply with the regulations, and then, by examining of the literature, policy recommendations were presented following the needs of the victims. The study is qualitative research. Purposeful sampling technique is used, and in-depth interview is chosen as a method of data collection, to obtain data semi-structured interview form is used. The gathered data is identified in four central themes: how the victim defines the sexual offence; their experiences in the aftermath of the incident, their perceptions of the institutions, the problems that they are faced within the process.