Lost in transition? The changing face of Victim Support

Abstract

This article examines how Victim Support in the UK has developed over time, from its early beginnings as a voluntary sector organization operating in a less formal manner than is the case today, to becoming ‘the’ major professional key agency working for and on behalf of victims of crime. Victim Support began life as a developing network of support schemes, essentially responding to victims on the basis of local ‘need’. Whilst by 1979 a national office had been created, its role was to act more as an umbrella body rather than as a regulating and standardizing agent. Local schemes were affiliated to this body, but continued to work and be managed independently within their own geographical areas. This situation changed over time as the managerialism that was introduced originally into the public sector pervaded the voluntary sector also. Thus, for Victim Support, services became increasingly more centrally ‘managed’, professionalized and standardized. In this sense it may be argued that Victim Support has undergone a ‘transition’, transporting the agency beyond all recognition from its early beginnings as a more generalist victims’ service to an increasingly targeted one. Part of the transition also has been the shift to a more case-managed approach whereby there is much greater emphasis upon the role of professional staff in assessing victims’ needs, and the filtering of work to volunteers. These shifts have taken place against a changing political backdrop wherein the voluntary sector has been drawn much more into the work of the state, and where for agencies such as Victim Support there have been tremendous rewards in taking on this role.