Investigate How Victims Are Handled
Researchers scrutinize how victims actually are treated by the criminal justice and social service
systems that are ostensibly designed to help them. Their studies can pinpoint the sources of tension, conflict, mistreatment, and dissatisfaction that alienate victims from the agencies that are supposed to serve them. Program evaluations determine whether stated goals are being met. For instance, many victimologists have studied how well or how poorly the police, prosecutors, judges, and family therapists are responding to the plight of abused children, sexually assaulted persons, and also battered women (see Hilton, 1993; Roberts, 2002; Hines and Malley-Morrison, 2005; Roberts and Roberts, 2005; and Barnett, Miller-Perrin, and Perrin, 2005).