No abstract

Victims' experiences in the justice system may help or hinder their healing process. Restorative justice aims to heal the suffering caused by victimization (Zehr 2002). However, some victim advocates have expressed concern that restorative justice may augment victims' suffering. This article presents the results of an evaluation of the experiences of crime victims who were invited to participate in a mediation program. Using therapeutic jurisprudence as a framework, the study looks at how victims' fear was affected by the program and whether their participation in the program helped with their recovery.

To document extrafamily victimization, exposure to community violence and polyvictimization in a child welfare sample of children and youths. Method: Telephone interviews were conducted among 138 adolescents aged 12 to 17 years and 82 caregivers of children aged 2 to 11 years followed by child welfare agencies in Quebec to document the victimization experienced by children during the past year. Results: The vast majority (90%) of young people were the target of direct or indirect past-year victimizations, with the majority of these victims (93%) being the target of more than one form of victimization. More than half of the sample (54%) experienced at least four forms of victimization in the past year. Conclusions: This first study documenting polyvictimization in a child welfare sample outlines that practitioners should inquire about a wide range of victimization experiences. Focusing intervention on a single form of victimization (maltreatment) does not address the specific service needs of children chronically victimized and fails to address their high risk of victimization in the community. Further research is needed to understand the mechanisms linked to the increased victimization risk among maltreated children in order to develop effective intervention and prevention programs.

This study sought to document lifetime experiences of individual categories of victimizations and polyvictimization using the Juvenile Victimization Questionnaire among children from the province of Quebec (Canada) to examine whether polyvictimization predicts mental health symptoms and to assess whether categories of victimization still contribute to mental health symptoms after considering polyvictimization. Polyvictimization accounted for the most variability in scores for depression, anxiety, and anger/aggression compared with individual victimization categories. None of the individual categories of victimization made an independent contribution to the prediction of trauma scores, once polyvictimization was considered.