Last Saturday there was the Walk For Peace – a march against crime and violence – and next Saturday there will be a march and other activities in memory of those young women whose lives were taken in the Campus Trendz tragedy on September 3 last year.
So today is, so to speak, in the middle of major public displays of concern for victims. But deep concern about victims is not yet here. (By victims we are referring not only to survivors of criminal acts but also to family members who have to deal with the aftermath of dastardly deeds against their loved ones.)
It often seems that abroad in this society, until it hits home, is a dangerously diminished sense of victim. When track star Marion Jones pleaded guilty in 2007 to lying to federal agents about her drug use, many people in Barbados seemed outraged that she would be punished.
They were apparently of the view that the shame, the forced premature end to her career and the loss of her medals were enough punishment since, the claim was, she only did it to herself.
But it should not have taken an awareness of the nightmare that another steroid user Regina Jacobs brought to “clean” fellow competitor Suzy Hamilton’s life – in loss of earnings and psychological havoc, in particular – to make us realize that Jones’ transgressions were not by any stretch of the imagination victimless deeds.
It seems, too, that it is concern about a diminished sense of victim that is in the outbursts, every so often, of victims of crime, or people taking up their cause, who sometimes rage that the courts have imposed unsatisfactory punishments.
Against all this, after a heinous deed has been visited upon the innocent, society consumes itself with trying to figure out what went wrong. Or there is great busyness in trying to arrive at systems and measures to inhibit and divert potential malefactors or trying to “save” those who have already done the offending.
We seem, above all else, impelled by an imperative to rehabilitate offenders.
A wrongdoer goes to prison and we teach them a trade, counsel them, make it possible for them to do CXCs, arrange for their spiritual upliftment, and so on. In some places, they get a little something (financially) to help them after they leave prison. In others, they get organized after-prison help. In some places they have gone so far as to study perpetrators – yet no society can boast that these things have paid dividends in significant reduction in the same kinds of crime.
Like the poor, who, according to Jesus, will always be with us, offenders – it seems – will always be with us too. And therefore, so will victims. So what have we set up for victims that is the equivalent of what we do to rehabilitate offenders?
Generally speaking, only victims of domestic abuse have had concrete, focused support. We must do that more broadly. Material support, financial support, organizations set up for the specific purpose of “rehabilitating” victims, perhaps along the lines of Alcoholics Anonymous, and other things designed to truly partner the victims on the hard journey onwards.
It is true that we commiserate.
But we must do much more.
