What Victims of Crime Need

The need to find answers to questions: To find healing victims must find answers to six basic questions:

1. What happened?
2. Why did it happen to me?
3. Why did I act as I did at the time?
4. Why have I acted as I have since that time?
5. What if it happens again?
6. What does this mean for me and for my outlook (my faith, my vision of the world, my future)?

Some of these questions can be answered only by the victims themselves.  They must, for example, find their own explanations for their behavior at the time and since that time.  And they must decide how they will respond to similar situations in the future.  However, the first two questions have to do with the facts of the offense.  What actually happened?  Why did it happen to me?  Information can be very important to victims, and answers to such questions may provide an entrance on the road to recovery.   Without answers to such questions, recovery may be difficult.

The need to tell their story: In addition to restitution and answers, victims need opportunities to express and validate their emotions: their anger, their fear, their pain….  Victims need opportunities and arenas to express their feelings and their suffering, but also to tell their stories.  They need to have their “truth” heard and validated by others.

The need for a return of personal control: Victims also need to be empowered.  Their sense of personal autonomy has been stolen from them by an offender, and they need to have this sense of personal power returned to them.  This includes a sense of control over their environment.  Thus new locks and other security devices may be important to them, or they may change their lifestyle as a means of reducing risks.  Similarly, they need a sense of control or involvement in the resolution of their own cases.  They need to fee l that they have choices, and that these choices are real.

The need for a sense of justice: A common thread throughout may be described as the need for an experience of justice.  For some victims, this may take the form of a demand for vengeance.  However, a demand for retribution may itself grow out of a victim’s failure to have a more positive experience of justice. Indeed, an experience of justice is so basic that without it, healing may be will impossible.  As part of this experience of justice, victims need to know that steps are being taken to rectify the wrong and to reduce the opportunities for it to recur.  Justice must be experienced as real.  They want to be informed and, at least at certain points, to be consulted and involved.

DOES THE PRESENT SYSTEM OF RETRIBUTIVE JUSTICE MEET THESE NEEDS?  RESTORATIVE JUSTICE PROMISES TO DO THAT!

Text quoted from Changing Lenses by Howard Zehr.  Copyright © 1990, 1995, 2005 by Herald Press, Scottdale, PA 15683. All Rights reserved.  Used by Permission.