INTRODUCTION
Researchers have documented the personal meaning of being criminally victimized. Fischer and Wertz (1979) were among the first to observe that criminal victims undergo a transformation in their lives as they are forced to develop new understandings and behaviours in the aftermath of crime. According to Young (1991), crime victims can pass through as many as three stages of adjustment to their trauma. Immediately after a crime it is common for victims to experience an ‘acute crisis stage’ involving shock and sometimes rage. This acute crisis is often followed by a second stage which Young calls the ‘emotional effort to survive’, involving grief, guilt and depression. Although the evidence suggests that the majority of victims of most types of crimes recover from the psychological effects of these two stages, Young claims that a substantial minority of crime victims enter a third stage of adjustment during which they experience lasting changes in their thinking, feeling and behaviour (Maguire & Corbett, 1987). This third stage, ‘living after death’, entails a lingering and heightened sense of vulnerability leading to increased vigilance, social cautiousness, and avoidance of others.
Less is known about the impact of crimes on those close to victims. It is speculated that there is a ripple effect of crime on these ‘indirect’ (Morgan, 1988) or ‘secondary’ victims (Knudten et al., 1976), causing them some of the same distress as that experienced by primary victims. One can easily imagine the common thread running across all victimizations – the emotional upheaval that results from the shattering of assumptions we generally hold about ourselves and the world – being empathically shared by those close to the primary victims of crime (Janoff-Bulman, 1985).
Psychologists have provided support for the idea of secondary victimization. ‘Vicarious traumatization’ or ‘secondary catastrophic stress response’ has been observed among those close to victims of highly stressful but not necessarily criminal experiences (Figley, 1983). In the process of attending to the victimization of a family member, supportive family members themselves are touched emotionally, albeit indirectly (Figley, 1989), as are disaster workers by the victims they help (e.g. McCammon et al., 1988) and mental health professionals by their patients (e.g. McCann & Pearlman, 1990).