Treatment Issues

A major goal of treatment is to help the victim make sense of the crime and start the healing process (Cheng, 2004; Craig-Henderson & Sloan, 2003). There are many issues that are important to all victims of crime that support workers should also assess in victims of hate crimes. These include history of previous victimizations/revictimizations, history of trauma, issues around mental health, normal coping mechanisms, healthy behaviours, issues around the current victimization, access to support networks, and so forth. As noted above, it is important to take a trauma-informed approach that acknowledges that victims may have multiple trauma experiences and, if we are not careful, we can trigger and retraumatize them, and this includes looking at how our systems might cause trauma (Hansen et al., 2018).

The following issues are those that may arise when working with victims from marginalized identity groups or victims of hate crimes.