ABSTRACT
During the 1970s, awareness of the impact of crime on victims, their need for support in dealing with that impact, and their rights to freedom from further victimisation began to emerge. This growing awareness is reflected, in the UK, by the establishment of Victim Support in 1974, the opening of the first women’s refuge in London in 1972, and first Rape Crisis centre in 1976. It is also evident in a range of criminal justice reforms in the past three decades that the current UK government now describes as putting victims at the heart of the criminal justice system. But the stimuli behind these initiatives were very different. The establishment of Victim Support was prompted by concerns of people working in offender-focused organisations such as NACRO, the police and the probation service that very little was being done to help victims. They saw that victims were adversely affected by their victimisation, and that they needed help in recovering. Rape Crisis and the start of the women’s aid movement reflected more radical feminist concerns about the oppression of women and the complicity of the state in that process. It was based less on concepts of needs, and more on the notion that victims had rights to receive redress and protection from further victimisation (Mawby 1988).
