An international comparison of victim support services

This paper was written by Rachelle Morris, University of York and Jody Audley from Catch22

Main findings

• Despite legislation across different countries providing similar rights to victims of crime, England and Wales are the only jurisdictions to explicitly recognise that an individual’s status and rights as a victim are not dependent on whether the crime has been reported.
• There remains a gap between the availability and uptake of victim support, with many victims not accessing services even where established provision exists. Underreporting and limited trust in the justice system can further restrict access.
• Strong links between victim services and the police improve reach and engagement, particularly through direct referrals, while a single point of contact can reduce re-traumatisation by limiting the need for victims to repeatedly recount their experiences. However, greater service reach can create significant capacity pressures, as proactive referrals increase caseworker workloads at a time when many victim services face funding constraints.
• Even within countries with relatively developed victim-support systems, victim support remains geographically inconsistent. Across the UK and other countries examined, services are often delivered by different organisations rather than through a single national provider, resulting in variations in the type and availability of support depending on where victims live. Consistency of provision therefore emerges as a key consideration for effective victim support, highlighting the need to balance locally commissioned and specialised services with ensuring that all victims can access comparable standards of support regardless of location.

Introduction

Formal victim services were implemented internationally in the 1970s (Sims et al., 2005) and have been an area of growing interest ever since. Victim services are complex to measure and research due to a lack of standardisation of outcomes. Unlike with prison leavers, where the main outcome measure is re-offending, for victims there is not necessarily a black and white parameter that can be measured to demonstrate that one has been “unvictimised”. Victim services vary from country to country due to differing systems adopted by individual governments and organisations, however a lot of similarities can also be identified.

Catch22 is a third sector organisation that supports victims of crime, reported or unreported, in six UK regions: Hertfordshire, Leicestershire, Greater London, Norfolk, Suffolk and Greater Manchester. This review is going to explore how victim services in England compare to victim services internationally. The review will firstly define what a victim is and what their rights are, and how this differs internationally.

It will then explore differing definitions of “victimisation” before comparing and contrasting victim services in Catch22 and in other countries, to identify whether there are any key learnings from other countries that could be adopted.

Victim’s rights

There are many different definitions of victims. Christie’s (1986) definition, which states that a victim is “someone who is weak, who was engaged in respectable activity at the time of the crime, is beyond reproach and with a perpetrator who was dominant over the victim and had no relation to them”.

This is a highly inaccurate definition, as victimhood is not defined by one’s strength, personal history, or relationship with the offender. The modern-day definition of victim, as defined in the Collins English dictionary at time of writing, is “someone who has suffered as a result of someone else’s actions or beliefs, or as a result of unpleasant circumstances.”

The importance of the modern definition is that the onus is completely removed from the victim, and no conditions are attached to the occurrence of the crime, only that someone was harmed after.

Rights can be supplemented by definitions and are determined by governmental legislation. They also have the possibility of changing regularly. As we will explore below, different countries offer different rights to victims of crime.