What To Read This Week
1. “96% of victims of violent crime did not receive victim compensation to help recover,” according to the latest national survey of crime victims from the Alliance for Safety and Justice commissioned David Binder Research.
Their results underscore how the violent crime itself is often only the beginning of the pain and trauma that crime victims endure. For example, the poll found that most crime victims reported having “difficulty with work or school”, “difficulty sleeping”, and “felt unsafe or scared.” The full research report is worth a read, but here are two of the most illuminating charts on the gap between what support crime victims need and what support they actually receive :
2. “A one-stop shop for anybody impacted by [violent] intentional crime.”
In Chicago, “a trauma recovery center is helping victims of violent crimes put their lives back together.” As Dane Placko reports for the local Fox news affiliate:
“Paul Robinson, 33, was playing with his son in Morgan Park in 2017 when a stray bullet severed his spinal cord, paralyzing him from the chest down … Even after months of physical recovery, Robinson continued to slide into depression … Now, Robinson is putting his life back together with help from the Advocate Trauma Recovery Center, which opened four years ago at Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn … The idea behind the program is to help victims of violent crime by getting their lives back on track by finding them a place to live, a job or financial and legal resources.”
The University of Southern California also launched a Trauma Recovery Center late last year, which offers “no-cost victim support services, including both virtual and in-person mental health care services as well as wraparound services to support victims in every area of their lives impacted by their experience, from medical care to food and housing to attending court appearances with them.” The Center also has a budget to provide victims with flexible emergency cash assistance. Professor Ruth Supranovich, who directs the center and is based in USC’s social work department, explains why crime victims need these services:
“When a violent crime is involved, you may be dealing with a lot of different things … Maybe I got assaulted and I’m in therapy. But I've got a court hearing coming up and I've got to do a deposition. I've got medical appointments. I may also be suffering from a lot of grief or loss because someone else may have died. And I'm in shock and not necessarily functioning that well. It’s a lot of complicated emotions, so people need extra support and handholding. We can help them identify their priorities right now and get them into a position where they're ready to get some counseling.”
Stay Tuned: Travis County, Texas, poised to greenlight the first trauma recovery center in the state later this year. The city of Austin already budgeted $1,000,000 to launch the center, and county commissioners recently passed a resolution to determine how best to sustainably fund it. Austin City Council Member Vanessa Fuentes told the local NBC affiliate that “the creation of a [Trauma Recovery Center] in Austin reaffirms our commitment to public safety and will create new avenues for survivors of violent crime to receive the resources needed to recover from traumatic experiences. This TRC would be the first in Texas and provide individualized case management, therapy, legal assistance, and more to our region’s most vulnerable communities.”
3. “What do survivors actually need and want?”
That’s a question that The Guardian’s Sam Levin asked Lenore Anderson, founder of the nationally-acclaimed crime survivor organization, Alliance For Safety and Justice, during a wide-ranging interview revolving around her new book, In Their Names, which tells the story of a crime-survivor led movement for a new vision of public safety that’s gaining traction across the country. Here’s the exchange:
SL: What do survivors actually need and want?
LA: It’s shocking in its basic-ness. My organization surveys survivors regularly and the calls that come in to us are so consistent: my loved one was shot and is about to be discharged from the hospital; they don’t want to be released into the same neighborhood; they’re now in a wheelchair and need an accessible home; they’re no longer able to do their job; they’re suffering extreme panic attacks; they can’t make ends meet any more. One would think if you were hurt by violence, the government would do everything possible to give you a lifeline. People need “crisis assistance”. That means repairing bullet holes, cleaning up bloodstains, making sure children who witnessed violence get support immediately. It means accommodations for school, housing and work and adequate time off to heal. You have to give people the opportunity to find a new life in the aftermath of such horrific loss. As a general matter, our safety systems do very little of that, but that is where safety starts.
And here’s another of our favorite excerpts from the interview that captures the thesis of Ms. Anderson’s book: “What if instead, we say the most important thing we can do is help victims on a path to recovery. If we actually want to stop the cycle of violence, then we start with people who were hurt and offer a genuine, attainable pathway to recovery. Not only is that the moral thing to do, it also reduces the likelihood that those very survivors or their loved ones fall into crime. If alleviating unaddressed trauma was at the center of our public safety strategies, we would go so much further to stop the cycle of harm than mass incarceration ever could.”
