NCJ Number
132293
Date Published
1990
Length
452 pages
Annotation
This examination of the evolution of British Government policies toward crime victims in England and Wales focuses on the events that influenced the progress of relations between the National Association of Victims Support Schemes and the Home Office as they moved toward the Government's decision to provide massive funding for the National Association in October 1986.
Abstract
The book begins with a description of the Home Office, the center and arbiter of the criminal justice system, because the Home Office dominated most of the activity. Two early and formative campaigns to aid crime victims are then discussed. One campaign led to the establishment of the Criminal Injuries Compensation Scheme in 1964; and the other, a National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders Victims-Offenders Discussion Group, led to two progeny. One was the National Victims Association which lobbied and experimented with victim projects in the early 1970's. The other was a victims support scheme which became the prototype and nucleus of a great web of schemes that coalesced into the National Association of Victims Support Schemes (NAVSS) in 1980. Other topics covered in the book are how the Home Office reconstructed the manner in which it viewed and received the achievements of the NAVSS, how the NAVSS approached the Home Office for money, and how the Home Office decided to award millions of pounds sterling and major recognition to what had become a new institution in the criminal justice system. Chapter footnotes and a subject index