The Violence Prevention Center is advocating for our community to center victims’ voices by practicing a victim-centered approach. A victim-centered approach prioritizes the rights and dignity of victims of abuse. Abuse is a general term used within this article that encompasses intimate partner physical, emotional and sexual abuse, sexual assault, rape, harassment, stalking, child physical and sexual abuse, and gender and sexuality based bullying. To eliminate abuse, we must cultivate a community where violence is not tolerated, and where victims’ voices, agency, safety, and healing is prioritized above all else. 

Personal agency is important to a victim's healing process and to their ability to protect themselves from further harm. Personal agency means that victims have the authority and the ability to make decisions for their safety, wellbeing, and healing without fear of retaliation. Victims are experts in the abuse they survived, and we should center their voices by prioritizing their wants and needs. However, society and many protective systems often make decisions for victims without taking their input into consideration. Denying victims’ agency in this way can prioritize abusers’ preferences, which comprises victims’ safety and healing. 

Only victims can determine what their healing will look like, what they will need to feel safe, and how they want to move forward. Pressuring, forcing, or judging a victim through this process gravely underestimates the immense trauma and lifelong effects of abuse. To center victims’ voices and needs, we must allow every victim the time, safety, and support they need to heal. 

Victims may need a variety of therapeutic interventions to process emotions. This could include working with a trained domestic and sexual violence advocate in order to safety plan, find resources, receive criminal justice support, or apply for protection orders. Victims may also need to set boundaries to protect themselves. For example, a victim might say no to activities that involve the perpetrator or that would put them in a situation where they may be re-victimized. Victims may need to end relationships with or distance themselves from those that support the abuser, take the abuser’s side, or ignore the abuser’s problematic behavior. Honoring one’s boundaries can help rebuild a sense of control and self-respect, which is often stripped from victims by the abuse they were subjected to. 

It can be especially difficult for victims to find safety and healing in small communities because of the proximity to the perpetrator. And a victim may feel like they have no choice but to quit a job, change schools, end their involvement in community and school activities, or avoid certain places where the perpetrator is present. Victims in small communities may wish that their abuser would move away so they can feel safe again, but this rarely happens, leading some victims to move away themselves. Those who remain in their communities may end up feeling isolated by all the things they have to do to avoid the person who harmed them. These feelings of isolation are only made worse when friends, family, and community members are unsupportive of victims or pressure them to “move on,” interact with, or forgive the perpetrator. 

Abuse does incomprehensible damage to victims and their children, who often witness the abuse or are subjected to it themselves. Understanding this severe impact means understanding and accepting that some adult and child victims will never feel safe enough to

want to have contact with the abuser ever again. A victim’s desire to have no contact may remain even if the perpetrator successfully completes abuse rehabilitation and demonstrates changed behavior. This desire to have no contact is a normal and healthy reaction and should be granted and respected. Perpetrators not having access to victims is a natural consequence of their abusive actions and the responsibility for grappling with this consequence rests solely on the perpetrator. 

Any interaction with the abuser should always be a victim's choice, never something that victims are forced or pressured to do, whether by friends and family or the court system. Imagine if we asked victims of a random assault, attempted murder, or kidnapping to interact with or co-parent with their attacker! That would be absurd, yet victims of even the most extreme cases of abuse are routinely pressured, expected, and required to do this. For example, consider that family court may not consider children who witnessed domestic abuse to be victims themselves, and therefore may see no reason to limit parenting time with the offending parent The impacts on children who have witnessed acts of domestic assault are overlooked, as children are often expected by family court and by society to continue on in their relationship with the offending parent without addressing the trauma they endured. In addition, in instances like this, the victimized parent may also be pressured and required to co-parent with the person who harmed them. A perpetrator’s desire to have contact with those they have abused should never negate the safety, needs, and healing of the victim.