The Right To Heal
The Right to Heal policy platform is built on the belief that every survivor deserves access to services, protection, safety, and the opportunity to heal. As crime victims, there are two things we want the most: what happened to us never to happen again and what happened to us never to happen to someone else. We also want victims’ rights but with a different approach.
For too long, popular use of the phrase “victim rights” has been synonymous with punishment and systems that most victims not only do not use but that too often contribute to more harm and trauma. More than half of violent victimizations are never reported to law enforcement, yet systems and laws supposedly designed to help victims are too often bound up by the criminal justice system – leaving the majority of victims out.
People turn to trusted community-based local support services in times of crisis. Yet, these programs struggle to stay open and meet the needs for services. Community-serving programs, rooted in neighborhoods that experience concentrated violence, must be supported with multiyear flexible funding from local, state, and federal government funding sources. Policymakers must also take action to fill gaps and reverse cuts in existing funding for victim services.
To provide support in the wake of violence, fifty-two TRCs nationwide deliver a transformational model of care for survivors. This innovative and evidence-based model includes assertive outreach, clinical case management, and evidence-based mental healthcare. But most survivors live in communities without a TRC. All survivors deserve help, and local, state and Federal policymakers must provide more funding to scale up access to TRCs.
Many survivors lack basic protections to ensure they can remain safely housed in the wake of violence, take time off work, and access accommodations related to violence in their schools and workplaces. Some states have adopted trailblazing policies that allow survivors of gender-based violence to end a lease early if they need to move, stay safe from eviction, and take time off work to recover. Increasingly, legislators are considering policies that include survivors of other violent victimization in these protections. Lawmakers must adopt and expand these protections and fund comprehensive civil legal services to make protections real.
Experiencing recurring trauma without protection (such as domestic violence, trafficking, chronic violent victimization in home or community) can lead to devastating consequences, including being arrested and convicted for being a part of or committing crimes that arose in direct response to being victimized. Lawmakers must adopt and strengthen critical protections to prevent survivors from being criminalized when they attempt to escape violence or protect themselves. These include policies that articulate defenses to prosecution that consider immediate and directly related trauma histories, ensure courts take recurring trauma into account in sentencing, and create pathways for resentencing and record clearance for survivors whose convictions stemmed from victimization. Incarceration is also itself inherently violent and contributes to cycles of harm. Legislators must act to prevent more trauma and victimization by reducing incarceration and pursuing safety solutions that counter rather than cause violence.
Without financial help, violence can wreak havoc on survivors’ financial stability, making recovery near impossible. Victim compensation programs have the potential to serve as lifelines to crime survivors facing life-altering victimization debt and long-term physical and emotional consequences. But overwhelming red tape and discriminatory eligibility restrictions prevent too many survivors from getting help from these programs. Survivors across the country are successfully advocating for long-overdue changes to make victim compensation programs more accessible, fair, responsive and useful. And, the federal government has proposed transformative new rules that reflect the calls of survivors who have been left out. But change is needed at the state level to fulfill the promise of these proposals and get help to survivors.
Victims and families affected by violence have urgent costs, including funeral and burial expenses, moving costs, meals, and other basic needs. Survivors need this help in the immediate aftermath of victimization, and can’t wait for a victim compensation application to be approved. Restitution is also frequently ineffective and counterproductive – few people who owe restitution have the ability to pay (keeping them trapped in poverty, too) and even when it is paid, it rarely reaches victims, and if it does, it comes far too late. Local flexible financial victim assistance funds can provide real help quickly. The community-based organizations closest to survivors should have resources to provide flexible, fast, and immediate emergency financial assistance. Survivors also need legal protections offering relief from medical debt, and to be able to repair damaged credit.
In the aftermath of victimization, immigrant survivors can face deportation threats from perpetrators or others. There are some existing pathways to help immigrant victims stabilize and receive protection from deportation, including U-Visas and T-Visas. But determinations are inconsistent, and red tape in the application processes and long waiting lists leave too many survivors in limbo or without any protection. Eligibility also depends on inconsistent law enforcement agency decisions about whether to support survivor’s applications – fueling inequitable access to relief. Survivors seeking asylum as a direct result of victimization also face unjust hurdles and are often denied. Lawmakers must take action to strengthen relief for immigrant survivors.
Despite popular tropes of vengeful victims always preferring the toughest punishments available, survivors consistently report a more nuanced and diverse perspective. The most common aim is to prevent what happened to them from happening again. For most survivors, the traditional sentencing option, incarceration alone, is woefully inadequate to achieve that. Survivors more often support a range of options beyond imprisonment to ensure accountability, repair and an end to the cycle of harm. Options for accountability, like restorative justice are growing increasingly available in some communities. Studies show that survivors who choose restorative justice over traditional prosecution are overwhelmingly more satisfied with the process and benefit from it. Rarely are survivors even given a choice to pursue restorative justice or other alternative sanctions (such as community service, diversion to treatment or cognitive behavioral therapy, trauma therapy, facilitated victim/perpetrator dialogues, and others) if they wish to. Survivors deserve to know their options and to have the choice to engage in alternative approaches to accountability instead of traditional prosecution if they wish to. These processes also require confidentiality protections to protect their integrity.
Survivors overwhelmingly support violence prevention and community-based services to keep crime from happening in the first place and also support prioritizing rehabilitation over punishment to break cycles of crime. Lawmakers can advance these safety goals by funding local infrastructure for violence prevention, crisis assistance, and mental health treatment, advancing policies that reduce incarceration and strengthen release mechanisms, and growing reentry support for people coming home.
Old criminal records can create significant barriers to employment, stable housing, access to health care, and people’s ability to care for their families, all of which reduce the chances that they will return to the criminal justice system in the future. Lawmakers should ensure broad access to record change and, where possible, automate record change laws to maximize intended impact. In preventing repeat crime, survivors want policies that hold people accountable – and allow them to return to work and care for their families.
Survivor-serving programs like victim compensation and VOCA assistance have historically received funding from unstable revenue streams. Instability has prevented programs from scaling up and lawmakers from adopting critical changes to truly meet the needs of survivors. And without federal and state action, victim services providers across the country are currently facing devastating cuts that will mean less support for survivors. State victim compensation programs also largely rely on fines and fees levied on low-income people in the criminal justice system, an unjust system that fails to deliver stable help to survivors and traps people in the justice system in cycles of impossible debt and poverty. Lawmakers must commit to fully funding victim services at the level of actual need through stable funding sources that do not cause more harm.