How Should Victim Service Providers be Evaluated? Janet Lauritsen - 3 of 3

In this interview, Janet Lauritsen, Ph.D., professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Missouri—St. Louis, explains why victim service...

I think one thing that would be a mistake is for victim service providers who provide mental health services to do so with the expectation that it will necessarily reduce the risk of revictimization. I don’t think such programs should be judged on that basis. I think they should be judged on the basis of the quality of the mental health services they deliver and not on anything else. What we’ve learned from the research on prevention programs, is that it’s very difficult to prevent revictimization, because, typically, it’s the case that the victim, and all the predictive factors that went into the first victimization, are still present and almost a constant in their life. So we’ve had difficulty making large dents in revictimization. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t continue to provide victim services, and those victim services should not be judged on their ability to reduce revictimization. They should be judged on their ability to provide good mental health services to victims who are suffering the consequences of victimization.