Victims

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I watched the aftermath of the report on the Hillsborough Disaster and like many people could only think about the dignity of the victims through the many years of adversary they have faced. It brought memories of victim issues closer to home be they victims of State or the various Armed Group violence; there emerges a very clear picture of the commonalities shared by victims. I don’t mean to categorise all victims for we must recognise victims are individuals with individual responses to their own personal loss or injury. However what does emerge for me around these issues are victim needs rooted in their quest for acknowledgement, apology and accountability. I could give a list of the cases that are recognizable not by the individual victims but by place or geography and that list would be quite extensive.

How does this connect with the work of CRJI you might be asking? CRJI has worked with countless victims down through the years, from people who are affected by low-level ASB issues through to the victims of serious crime including murder. Our experience is victims have very often-different sets of questions to ask about what has just occurred than those asked from the perspective of a police or criminal justice view. Why me? Does the offender know what they have done? Will they acknowledge that? Will I be safe in the future? Will they do it to me again? This is all underpinned by the need to know,  be known and recognised. These common themes are universal and in a restorative manner are the questions that we feel are part of a process when working with victims. We acknowledge that the criminal justice system does what it does but in the area of victims the victims needs and concerns should be central to the overall process of resolution.

Our work in the community has witnessed the power of dialogue in the most extreme of cases, I have written previously on this, the powerful empowerment for a victim to see and hear their concerns being dealt with not only unlocks a pathway forward for the victim but equally for an offender who will be faced with the hard questions, recognition of hurt but more importantly the difficult potential to change. This potential in our view is in need of support, for the achievement of change for an offender not only benefits them but also the wider community and ensures no other victims from that quarter.

The other common theme around victims that I’ve seen is that victims can very often be stereotyped as people so badly injured that they appear frail and fearful, almost intimidated in submission by what has occurred. While this may be true in some cases, our experience of victims that having been frightened, hurt and injured is that they also display a remarkable level of endurance to seek both the answers they need while also demanding the acknowledgement of their situation. It is this for me, that join the burglary victim, the elderly who suffer so much from ASB with the high publicity victims who have displayed so much courage and integrity in their search for justice.

This brings me to what for many is the real issue, does society have the tools to deal with victims?  From a restorative perspective I would say no. This position derives from the knowledge that victims aren’t viewed as key in the criminal justice process; rather what is important is what law has been broken, by whom and what is the result of the criminal justice process. This is of course is a simplified version of a complex system but it is vital for the system to adopt and develop a restorative approach which will give victims a role in the justice process, which will also create the potential for offenders to face the consequences of their actions and above all create a threshold for both, victim and offender to cross and begin to see events from another place.