Help-Seeking for Victims
In addition to the victims’ rights movement, which has expanded the role of victims in the cases around their victimization, the body of knowledge is growing about how victims seek help, including triggering their rights within the CJS. Help-seeking is when a victim reaches out to others in order to get help after a victimization. The help-seeking literature breaks help-seeking into either formal or informal help-seeking. Due to the high rates of crime victimization linking to mental health and medical problems, help-seeking among crime victims represents an important area of study (McCart, Smith, & Sawyer, 2010).
Who is likely to seek help, and why, varies across crime type, gender, race, sexual orientation, legal status, and many other factors. McCart, Smith, and Sawyer (2010) identify the following as factors that would determine whether someone would seek help:
• Predisposing characteristics—at the individual level (e.g., age, gender, ethnicity, education, income, marital status)
• Enabling—resources at the individual and community level that can either facilitate or impede service use (e.g., insurance coverage, transportation, social support, awareness of services)
• Need—the individual’s subjective perception of a need or an evaluated need provided by a professional
Generally, we know that men are less likely than women to seek help, but when men do seek help, they are more likely to call the police than family or friends. Women are more likely to use both formal and informal help-seeking but tend to seek help from friends and family before seeking help from the police or some other formal source of help (Kaukinen, 2002). In addition, according to Kaukinen (2004), victims seek help at differing degrees of intensity. They either engage in (1) minimal or no help-seeking, (2) seek help from family and friends, or (3) seek substantial help (family, friends, social and mental health service providers, and police). Much of the research on help-seeking has focused on intimate partner violence and sexual violence, which with be talked about in-depth in future modules.