Hold Team Meetings . Monitor and Evaluate Your Efforts . Sustain Your SART . Know Your Team . Critical Issues
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Know Your Team
When a person is harmed by a criminal act, the agencies that make up our criminal and juvenile justice systems have a moral and legal obligation to respond. It is their responsibility not only to seek swift justice for victims, but to ease their suffering in a time of great need.1
SARTs that develop collaborative partnerships to meet multiple and long-term needs must be prepared to coordinate those services. Consider that victims may go to a hospital for a forensic medical exam, speak with a detective at a law enforcement agency, interview with a prosecuting attorney at another office, and obtain counseling and support services at yet another facility. From the victim's perspective, this flurry of activity is about one event, yet the response is spread out among many organizations and agencies.
Build Your SART briefly reviewed the roles of possible core team members. This section reviews some of those roles in more detail to help you integrate victims' issues and criminal justice objectives into your SART and make the treatment of and response to victims as seamless as possible:
- Advocates.
- Health care providers.
- Civil justice practitioners.
- Law enforcement officials.
- Forensic scientists.
- Prosecutors.
- Probation, corrections, and parole officers.
- Sex offender management professionals.
A few tips are provided on the way to help you strengthen your SART in these fields.
Our level of kindness to people courageous enough to seek justice is a matter of fundamental decency. We need to raise our standards for the skill levels, dedication and effectiveness of all sex crimes' responders . . . from the first 911 operator to the post-conviction appeals bureau prosecutor. We owe victims more than systems that are nice to them. We owe them systems that work. Victims should not have to trade compassion for competence.
Source: Alice Vachss.
