In a hard-hitting speech at a fund-raising breakfast for Pillars, a charity that supports the children of prisoners, Kim Workman urged the Christchurch business community to resist playing the ‘good victims –bad offenders’ game.

“You end up with a simplistic ‘us and them’ perspective – the world is much more complex than that. “When Verna McFelin founded Pillars over 25 years ago, no one recognised that the children of prisoners were victims of crime – ten times more likely to end up in prison than the children of non-prisoners. Social services made no special provision for them. Verna changed that view through her advocacy work, and developing a team of mentors to support the children.”

After the Justice Summit, National’s Justice spokesperson Mark Mitchell, unfairly claimed that Andrew Little was firmly on the side of offenders and didn’t want to know about victims of crime. It is a political tactic that has served successive governments well over the last thirty years. It is critical to the ‘tough on crime’ rhetoric – but it needs to stop.

Back in 1987, both parties had a genuine concern to address the needs of victims. By 2000, the political message changed. Those people and organisations that worked with offenders, were described as having a ‘strange morality’ – the ‘dangerous crims vs upright citizens ‘mantra was born – you were either for victims or for offenders.

Politicians promised to ‘correct the balance between victim’s rights and offender’s rights’. It resulted in in a massive increase in punitive legislation which reduced the rights of offenders and services to prisoners, but did almost nothing to meet the underlying needs of victims.

The reality is that about 50% of all victims come from the same low socio-economic circumstances as offenders, a group which represents about 6% of all New Zealand communities. The lives of these victims and offenders are woven together, and often they are the same people.
If we are to more forward, we must reject attempts by politicians to divide us. some of us dealt with offenders and some with victims, and many work with both. To rate one activity above the other is both unhelpful and counter-productive.

You can read the full speech at:

https://www.criminologycollective.nz/2018/08/29/who-are-the-victims/

https://www.facebook.com/CriminologyCollective/

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