From Victimless Crime to Habitual Victim: An Empirical Study on Food Victimization

Abstract

Food is the fundamental and most indispensable need for growth and survival of living beings. In the present days, one of the biggest challenges of human beings as consumers remains isolated from food victimization. Food victimization is rampantly pushing human beings into serious health hazards and economic losses. In Bangladesh, there is limited published data on the extent and trends of food adulteration, as well as consumers’ knowledge, attitudes, and practices related to this issue. The main objective of this study is to measure the perceptions and attitude of people about food adulteration including the extent of fear among people about food victimization, the extent of awareness and their roles and positions as consumers in food adulteration. This study is conducted based on quantitative approach where survey method is administered here to extract data. Sample are selected from Tangail Sadar Upazilla following purposive sampling strategy based on non-probability sampling mechanism. Finding of this study shows that, 65% respondents have victimized by food adulteration. . Besides, 72% of the respondents have confessed that there have been prevailing less awareness among the mass people about food adulteration in compare to any other crime. 35% respondents feel fear in purchasing certain foods in keeping fear in mind. Again, 51.70% of the respondents have witnessed to food adulteration in their life time but that most of the respondents (74%) did not take any action. However, 83% of the respondents believe that performing the roles as consumer like defensive possible counter action is necessary if we want to execute the elimination project of food adulteration fruitfully. While the findings provide valuable insights into consumer perceptions and attitudes in this area, they may not be fully representative of the entire population of Bangladesh. Further research with larger and more diverse samples from different regions of the country is needed to generalize the findings to a broader context.