Essay on the Rehabilitation of the Victims of Crime!
The concepts of social responsibility and natural justice have gained importance with increase in violence and crime in the society. But public apathy is evident from many incidents where the passive on lookers do not object the violent social acts like rape, murder and assaults.
Examples are plenty where hundred of villagers witness social injustice against women, minority groups, children and poor people. They are probably not aware of such a value called “social responsibility”.
Mann describes the story of the murder of Catherine Genovese a young woman of Queens, New York. New York, times reported in this regard. “For more than half an hour, 38 respectable, law abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stabs a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens. Not one person telephoned the police during the assault.
One witness called after the woman was dead. Why all the thirty eight witnesses did not report the matter to police? Only a single phone call would have been enough to save a woman’s life. Different witnesses gave different reasons starting from “I did not want to get involved”, to “We thought it was a lover’s quarrel or frankly we were afraid.”
A few social scientists say that the psychological withdrawal and resignation, sadistic and aggressive impulses in large mobs, and isolation and depersonalization found in city people may be the cause, others believe the attitude of members towards group norms, i.e., each of the 38 witnesses might have thought others were watching also and so let them report to police.
This reduces individual responsibility as the responsibility has been diffused and shared among all the onlookers. A study conducted by Darley and Latane (1968) indicated that 60 percent of the fifty two subjects came out of their room to help the victim. They further said the greater the number of by standers at an emergency, the less likely or the more slowly any one by stander will intervene or provide help.
Further in discussion groups consisting only the real subject and the victim, eighty five percent of subjects quickly came to the victim’s aid. But in groups consisting of the subject, the victim and four others only 31 percent intervened quickly.
Thus indifference towards the victim’s plight may lie in other observers than in the personality of an individual by stander who failed to intervene. But never the less a selfish, sadistic depersonalized and a sociopathic individual may show indifference towards the plight of others and is less likely to come to their rescue.
Thus social responsibility may decrease when the responsibility is shifted to others, when the victim is a stranger and when the victim is not clearly visible. In many cases also, not apathy, but indecision produced by conflicting pressure and social motive may be the reason of not coming to the victims rescue.
The victims of a crime like murder, physical assault, rape, attempted rape and child abuse suffer mentally, physically, socially and economically. The mental agony and economic difficulties faced by a widow and a child whose husband or father has been murdered by a criminal is unimaginable.
They become the victims of suffering and hardship in the absence of their husband and father who was also the bread earner of the family. Similarly, a victim raped or gang raped not only suffers from mental agony, but also social stigma is attacked to her. She is looked down by the society without any fault of hers.
A young adult son is killed and the family starves. Daily hundreds and thousands of such victims are found in the society with mental agony and socio-economic hardships. Some of them even do not have two meals a day after the bread earner of the family is killed.
Nobody in our society likes to marry a raped girl. What will happen to them if they do not get any help from the social and government bodies? It is therefore the prime responsibility of the society to help and rehabilitate them.