This study examines the role of structural disadvantage in the non-terrorist violent and terrorism-related crimes. The objectives of the current research are to find answers to the questions regarding why and how crime rates vary across the provinces.
The present study uses macro-level analyses to examine relationships between structural disadvantage variables and crime. The current study will use provinces of Turkey as units of analysis, and will look at the effects of different structural characteristics of provinces in connection with violent and terrorism-related crime rates. Unemployment, residential instability, poverty, economic inequality, family disruption, and low education are employed as structural disadvantage factors and their correlations with crimes are examined. Additionally, percent youth, population density, and region (only in terrorism-related crimes) are used as control variables.
In the current research, total violent, homicide, aggravated assault, rape, robbery, and terrorism-related crimes in 81 provinces of Turkey are examined for a three year period ranging from 2006 to 2008. Crime data is obtained from Turkish National Police. Measures of structural disadvantage data are obtained from Turkish Statistical Institute, Census, Ministry of National Education, and Ministry of Health.
Multivariate OLS and negative binomial regression results for non-terrorist violent crimes in general reveal statistically significant correlations between three structural disadvantage variables and rates of total violence, homicide, aggravated assault, rape, and robbery. Study results indicate that unemployment and family disruption have a significant positive impact on all types of non-terrorist violent crime rates. Lastly, low education is other structural disadvantage variable that is significantly and positively associated with total violent, homicide, aggravated assault, and robbery crime rates in present study.
Zero inflated negative binomial analyses of terrorism-related crimes in Turkey show a number of important findings. Results indicate that among the structural disadvantage variables, poverty and residential instability have significant positive effects on terrorism-related crimes.
This study reveals important nuances to overall general findings, with completely different indicators of disadvantage predicting non-terrorist versus terrorist violence. There are important differences between the nature of terrorism versus non-terrorist violence that might account for the differences in significance of specific indicators of disadvantage across these two categories. Non-terrorist and terrorism-related violent crimes have several differences in terms of motivation, opportunity structure, methods, and ideology. Additionally, non-terrorist violence crimes are usually preceded by social interaction. Many of these violent crime victims know their assailants and are involved in a dispute of some sort with their assailants. As such, from a macro viewpoint, they are most likely to be triggered by structural conditions that provide or indicate relational stressors.
On the other hand, in terrorism-related crimes, generally there is no social interaction between offender(s) and victim(s), so relational stress is not an issue. In contrast, political ideology is a typical motivation. Thus, dimensions of disadvantage that tap into social change and social injustice are logically more likely to be related to terrorist violence.