Empowering the victims of crime: A real goal of the criminal justice system or no more than a pipe dream?

Abstract

This chapter discusses victim empowerment from a victimological perspective on three levels. The first concerns legislative issues. Selected Polish statutes aimed at giving greater protection to victims of crime are analyzed, along with their most recent amendments. The justifications for these amendments (i.e., the aims and assumptions that guided the legislature), which include compensation for victims of crime, the rights and safeguards for victims in criminal proceedings, and the situation regarding victims of domestic violence, are the main object of this study. The second level involves verifying how these legislative assumptions actually work in practice in the justice system. Assessing whether, and to what extent, victims of crime have been able to exercise their rights, i.e., the extent to which the justice system takes the interests of victims of crime into consideration and ensures that they are supported and protected and not subjected to secondary victimization, has been made possible by analyzing a variety of victimological studies. The third level involves analyzing discourse. Some of the public debate on signing the Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence, which was recently held in Poland, is elucidated and explained. The sometimes heated arguments that broke out among those both for and against show that the attitude to victims of crime and the necessity of ensuring them legal protection is a difficult subject in Poland. The very question of protecting and assisting victims is often pushed aside in favor of ideological contentions. The issues raised allow for an evaluation as to whether the rights of victims have been incorporated into the real aims of the Polish justice system or whether they remain no more than a pipe dream.