Who's the victim?

I keep on hearing calls for courts to be more focused on the victims of crime, and I agree completely - they shouldn't cause these victims even more suffering.

But who's the victim? I've come across a couple of cases recently that have put this question into perspective.

Firstly two people with severe learning disabilities and a high level of support have been having problems in their shared tenancy for quite a few months. Some plans to address the problem by moving one of them were dropped a while ago. Now one of them has attacked the other and all sorts of emergency procedures are being invoked. I'm not so interested in the details of the case, only that one of the two is currently in the classical position of the victim (of an assault), while the other therefore becomes a perpetrator.

Secondly a person I know with a high level of support needs, but not quite enough of the right kinds of problems to enable him to access certain key services immediately. As time goes on he is increasingly presenting with additional problems, and there are 'rumours' that these include a return to some of the violence that he has been involved in in the past. Violence again implies a perpetrator and a victim.

It's clear that the perpetrators of violence in both these cases are also victims. Like all the stories I'm trying to tell I don't think there's anything particularly unusual or newsworthy about these situations - similar things happen to hundreds or even thousands of people in the UK each week. I don't want to start accusing statutory services of neglect, because again I think this is in a way a violent approach to solving the problem, which often results in violent defensiveness and doesn't get anywhere.

What I would like to think about is that if we are to take a more person-centred approach to working with people in general, then we also need to take a person-centred approach to people who are violent towards others and to all the people who are victims of this violence. At the same time I think there are some natural developments towards taking a more holistic approach to our understanding and responses to violence.

Some examples of this would be:

• protecting people who suffer from, say domestic violence or sexual crimes from the added violence that can come in the investigative and judicial processes that current legal systems still tend to impose (there are already many initiatives that address these issues, and they are linked to this agenda in diverse ways);
• recognising that people who behave in violent ways are usually victims of violence and abuse themselves, that they may suffer from the multiple effects of poverty, or that they may well have low level mental health problems for example that would be amenable to community based approaches to support and rehabilitation (all sorts of people are doing this);
• questioning the value of punitive approaches including imprisoning people or stigmatising them with criminal convictions and making it harder for them to find work or access other services;
• supporting more informal preventative and community-based approaches to avoid reaching crisis situations, including recognising some of the violence still inherent in our education system and incorporating a more ethical and community based approach to teaching and education from an early age (see the Steiner schools for one approach to this);
• recognising that violence means restricting action, that sometimes violence is necessary, but we should be able to see it for what it is, discuss it properly and act on our conclusions, including a recognition that bureaucratic processes are inherently violent and that while they are necessary in some ways we need to recognise this violence and develop more effective ways of dealing with it;
• the list goes on...