ABSTRACT

Almost all western liberal democracies make financial provision for the compensation of victims of violent crime. Largely the product of initiatives taken during the 1960s and 1970s, such arrangements now exist in Australia, Canada, the United States of America, and throughout the European Union. 2 Those initiatives were particular to their jurisdictions but they display some common originating features, and, as will be discussed below, common defining features. Many derived from their governments’ desire to respond to an increasingly vocal victims’ lobby that repeatedly drew attention to the perceived secondary victimization that victims suffered at the hands of criminal justice systems whose objectives and values were focused upon offenders. This critical response to the liberal ideology that informed criminal justice policy during the 1960s and 1970s politicized the experience of personal victimization as a means of questioning that policy’s integrity and credibility. The perceived discrepancies between the state’s treatment of offenders and of victims was, and continues to be, a powerful and persistent strand in the politics of criminal justice reform, a rhetoric which demands that it be ‘rebalanced’ in favour of the victim. This demand does not inevitably constitute a zero-sum game, though many of its most vocal supporters have also sought to curtail offenders’ rights while arguing for an increase in victims’ entitlements, for example, to be routinely informed about the investigation of the offence or to be heard at the trial via a victim impact statement. Many jurisdictions do now incorporate these and other rights for victims, though their scope and implementation remain controversial or incomplete. The allocation of public funds to compensate victims of crime thus constitutes one of the principal means by which governments can demonstrate their commitment to the amelioration of the victim’s experience of crime and of contact with the criminal justice system. Of more recent significance are the responses of national and international agencies to provide or recommend the provision of compensation for the victims of terrorist violence.