Listening to victims of violent crime

A woman, who had been sexually assaulted in a South London park, came to visit me recently at the Suzy Lamplugh Trust’s National Centre for Personal Centre. She was still gradually putting her life back together after the trauma of the attack. One thing that was clearly not helping her recovery was that, in her view, a series of bureaucratic bungles between the police, the Crown Prosecution Service and the Courts had meant that the perpetrator had remained free and had subsequently attacked other women.

So what is she to do? What is any victim to do in similar circumstances? She doesn’t seem to have very many options. The criminal justice system will carry on doing its best no doubt to bring offenders to justice, but seems unlikely to benefit from her experience. 

In many other walks of public life there are checks and balances to make sure that public bodies learn from their mistakes. There are ombudsmen who can review cases of maladministration, make judgements and recommendations and produce annual reports that can lead to changes in policy and practice. There are ombudsmen for children, local government, pensions, prisoners and the health service. There are even ombudsmen for estate agents and the removals industry.

Yet when someone is sexually assaulted and feels that the legal system as a whole has failed there is no-one who can do anything about it for her. No one is empowered to review the case, highlight any mistakes, and embarrass the criminal justice system into sharpening up its act.

There is a police complaints authority, but its role would seem to be mostly about hearing complaints from people wrongly arrested or shot etc. There is a legal services ombudsman but its role is to hear complaints about poor administration of complaints to the solicitors’ self-regulatory bodies. No one can challenge the Crown Prosecution Service and once something gets to court, the victim can make an impact statement but again has no way of challenging the decision or the process.

Sadly the people who often know the most about what has gone wrong in a case are the ones who are listened to least. They will be dismissed as irrational or emotional yet their vested interest in the outcome will mean that they will very closely follow the twists and turns of the process. If anyone can spot a crack in the criminal justice system it will be someone seeking justice for a crime committed against them.

Most victims I have encountered so far, in my role as Chief Executive of the Suzy Lamplugh Trust, just want to make sure that what happened to them doesn’t happen to anyone else. When they have done everything they could and the system fails someone else needs to pick that up.

A Victims’ Ombudsman could review cases that have collapses somewhere in the system and work out why. It would need to be independent of the police and the courts and the crown prosecution service. It would be able to pin the blame properly and prevent bureaucratic buck passing. Once a year it could report and recommend changes to the structure to speed up justice and prevent those other miscarriages that leave. That is why I believe we need a Victims’ Ombudsman to speak up for the over 2 million people every year who are victims of a violent crime and the 750 people who are murdered every year. Perhaps then gradually we would see a criminal justice system emerge that had the confidence of the people it is there to serve.

Over twenty years ago, the disappearance of a 24 year-old Estate Agent called Suzy Lamplugh was big news. Her death led to the establishment of a charity and a wealth of initiatives to improve the personal safety of women at work. The trust rapidly grew to take on personal safety for everyone, everywhere. Today, the story is of a seemingly endless stream of teenagers being murdered at play. With every new funeral there is a chorus of appeals for “Something to be done,” but there is no consensus around what that “something” should be.

Young people don’t feel safe. The average age of homicide victims is getting younger each year so an increased fear amongst the young is hardly surprising. The Suzy Lamplugh Trust is regularly asked to go into schools and youth clubs to teach young people what they need to do to stay safe.

There are things that young people can do to improve their personal safety and carrying a knife is not one of them. They can learn how to avoid potentially violent situations. They can develop skills for diffusing tension and looking out for their friends. Sometimes, young people need to learn that their own actions can make things worse and turn a minor dispute into a dreadful tragedy.

So there are things that young people can do for themselves to stay safe but surely we have a responsibility as adults to create a safer world for them to grow up in. Knee jerk reactions are not enough.

750 people of all ages are murdered every year in this country. Two and a half million are victims of violent crime. If those figures were associated with a medical disease, millions of pounds would be raised for research and awareness raising campaigns. Celebrities would be seen wearing delightful t-shirts and auctioning off their underwear to raise money. Violence and aggression is a social disease and it is now beginning to affect younger and younger children. There will not be a great deal of profit to be made by the pharmaceutical industry developing a vaccine. No new wonder drug will be able to cure being stabbed.

There is an urgent need for more robust research into the causes of violence and aggression in society. An evidence-based approach to policy making in this area has to be adopted. Millions have been spent preparing a response to bird flu, which hasn’t mutated yet into the form we need to worry about. Yet precious little is being done to cure the social disease of violence and aggression, which is wiping out young lives almost every weekend.

Perhaps tougher sentencing might work. I personally doubt it, but no one appears to be testing that hypothesis in a remotely systematic way. Some evidence suggests that offenders believe that sentences are higher than they really are. So they have clearly not been deterred by the higher sentences they thought existed.

The statistics on stabbings being collected are pitiful. To monitor knife crime researchers have to use the proxy of measuring admissions to hospital of people injured with a sharp instrument. If we are relying on the NHS to provide the raw data perhaps we should involve them in developing the cure. What would NICE say about the cost effectiveness of the latest government initiatives to reduce knife crime? Does anyone have the faintest idea what really works?

I suspect there are probably strong links between social infrastructure and violence in societies. Communities where people know their neighbours, and know their neighbours’ children probably are safer. They will certainly feel safer. Quaker Social Action ran a successful programme of street parties in East London last year and the Suzy Lamplugh Trust was invited to participate by providing personal safety workshops. People on the same floor of a council block, who had never spoken to each other before, got to know each other, understand a little more about their different cultures and began to look out for each other. More research into the benefits of these and other initiatives might indicate other effective ways to spend public money.

Communities where people feel that they are a valued part of society are probably safer too. When we glorify celebrity we undervalue everything else. Every time one of those reality talent shows talks about the dream of changing someone from "Just" a housewife, plumber, bin man, nurse etc. into someone allowed to sing on the telly, they insult and degrade every hardworking "Ordinary" person. Recognising and celebrating wider range of lifestyles and occupations might go some way to reducing the alienation felt by young people and might in turn lead to lower levels of violence.

As the property markets and the banking industry collapse, perhaps a few newly redundant analysts and economists could turn their number crunching brains to the more pressing social need of reversing the spread of violent crime.