IIt is customary to state that the progress of the rule of law is defined in terms of the attention that the nation pays to vulnerable people.
In the name of national solidarity and the principle of fraternity, the cement of our Republic, it is imperative to listen to the victims who sometimes feel a feeling of abandonment, even neglect on the part of public authorities, even though they are more and more people are speaking out; all the more so since certain offenses and victims receive more media coverage than others and become the object of attention of public policies.
Support solutions have existed for almost forty years. Pillars of our penal system, help and support for victims have never been more necessary than today.
7 euros per year per victim
Indeed, the need for victim assistance continues to grow. In France, the increase in the types and categories of violence, as well as the precise identification of the psychological trauma that results from it, makes it essential today to ensure long-term multidisciplinary support for all victims of criminal offenses, and this without discontinuity.
At the same time, each victim deserves compensation for their harm commensurate with the trauma experienced: for the sake of fairness, we must promote the universality, equality and effectiveness of their support. Access to information remains too poor: the development of skills and resources must guide a modern vision of helping victims. This issue constitutes a daily challenge for victim assistance associations, placed in particular under the aegis of the France Victimes federation.
To fulfill these monitoring and support missions, a significant increase in the number of professionals and therefore in allocated subsidies is necessary. Today, the budget allocated to prison establishments amounts to 100 euros per day per inmate, which is clearly insufficient.
But that dedicated to victim support associations amounts to 7 euros per year per victim, which is just as clearly insufficient. It seems more than imperative to significantly increase the resources allocated to helping victims to ensure aid missions while taking the same action with regard to the prison administration.
Ambition and kindness
Even if support from the public authorities has already been beneficially initiated, it is nonetheless essential that a new impetus for action be achieved through appropriate financial envelopes.
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