Victims’ Rights and Victims’ Support
Why is this a priority?
Crime, and its impact on victims, represents a significant cost to the community. Victims can also be further traumatised during the criminal justice system process. Supporting victims, and their rights, can enhance trust in the justice system, and contribute to reduced offending.
For example, victims benefit from participating in restorative justice processes through:
- being heard by the offender
- having some influence over the sentence, and
- what the offender agrees to provide in a restorative plan.
Reduced offending is effected as offenders voluntarily agree to a restorative justice plan, and therefore take accountability for the contents of a plan. This contrasts with normal sentencing, where the sentence is imposed on the offender. Evidence suggests that offenders re-offend less, and the re-offending is less serious, as a result of restorative justice processes.
How will the sector demonstrate its success?
A key measure will include ongoing analyses of groups in the population and their comparable risk of victimisation.
There is a concentration of victimisation risk among the less economically and socially well placed. Concentrated victimisation is one of the most important findings of the New Zealand Crime and Safety Survey.
- In 2005, 6% of New Zealanders were victimised five times or more.
- Offences against them accounted for half of all the offences measured in the survey.
These figures undercut the notion of there being an ‘average’ risk, which suggests a uniform distribution of risk across the population as a whole. This is far from the case. Further work being carried out by the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Social Development should contribute to addressing the needs of these population groups. This work also has the potential to provide indicators and measures to assess progress towards achieving this outcome.
Figure 1 - Risk of victimisation by population group
