U.S. Senate Can Help Millions of Crime Victims with an Easy Fix
Aswad Thomas
National Director of Crime Survivors for Safety and Justice
Countless Americans donate on GoFundMe to support the victims of devastating violence. More than $2 million has been collected for the victims of the recent Atlanta shootings, and over $500,000 after the Boulder shooting. Whether it’s an act of mass violence, like these, or the more frequent daily occurrences of violence in communities, it’s become its own cycle — after trauma, grieving families are left with little support and unsure of where to turn, so they post their stories online and hope donations will pour in.
Yet as someone who has personally survived bullet wounds, I know all too well that for every well-funded GoFundMe, there are at least thousands more survivors who aren’t getting the help they need. It shouldn’t be this way.
In the 1980s, Congress created the Victim of Crime Act (VOCA) to support survivors of crime who need access to mental health and other resources to heal after trauma. VOCA grants are the main source of federal funding for victim service providers, trauma recovery centers, and state victim compensation programs that directly help survivors. Yet, funding has been depleted, leading to devastating budget cuts and less help for crime victims.
A significant part of the problem is that monetary penalties from federal criminal prosecutions are a major source of the funding. They have declined, due to an increasing reliance on deferred-prosecution agreements for white collar crimes that has diverted money from victims to the General Treasury. Among 2020’s many examples: the federal $2 billion settlement with Goldman Sachs completely bypassed the victims fund.
Existing federal requirements of VOCA grantees have also created barriers for community-based victim service providers to access the grants. Traditionally, service providers — regardless of their budgets — have been required to produce the funds to match their grant. This remains a major obstacle for too many community-based providers that serve victims in hardest hit communities.
The consequences are an uneven system that has left the nation’s crime survivors in greatest need without support, something highlighted in our recently released National Crime Victims Agenda.
That’s why crime victims’ advocacy groups, like Crime Survivors for Safety and Justice, are urging the U.S. Senate to follow the House of Representatives by passing the VOCA Fix Act. It would create consistent, strong funding to help crime victims. By redirecting the monetary civil penalties from non-criminal settlements into the VOCA funding, an additional $4 to $7 billion would be available to support victims. Along with new guidelines to remove burdensome requirements, this would allow more crime victims to get the help they need and put communities disproportionately harmed by violence on a path towards healing.
For too long, the people most harmed by violence have been the least helped by our broken public safety system that relies on the criminal justice and fails to support them. Victims need pathways to recovery, including support to overcome the physical, emotional and financial consequences of crime, but too little is available.
In 2009, I experienced this firsthand. I was weeks away from beginning my professional basketball career when two men shot me in a botched robbery as I was leaving a store in my neighborhood. Two gunshots landed in my back, collapsing my lungs, dislocating my shoulder, and missing my spinal cord and aorta by inches. After weeks in the hospital fighting for my life, I was on the way towards recovering physically, while struggling with piecing my life back together. My family and I received no real support (except from a community-based organization founded by mothers who lost their children to violence that never received VOCA funding).
In the years since, I’ve learned from working with thousands of crime survivors across the country how my experience is frustratingly common.
Alliance for Safety and Justice’s most recent surveys of America’s crime victims has found that fewer than 1 in 3 victims report receiving help — including financial, medical and mental health assistance — during their recovery.
America is the richest nation in the world. We have the power to make sure that no crime victim suffers in isolation. We have the wealth to help every community harmed by violence recover after trauma.
Crime victims and people harmed by the justice system deserve an opportunity to heal, and that means making sure that VOCA grants help the survivors and communities in greatest need. In a year where so many people have experienced trauma, this is a practical, bipartisan step forward that can make a meaningful difference towards improving public safety.
