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This paper evaluates the federal reparations program for fatal victims of political violence in Brazil. The Brazilian reparations program was born of an amnesty movement for political prisoners, followed by the discovery of mass graves exposing atrocities of the State. In response to pressure from civil society groups and the media, President Cardoso signed the 1995 Law of Victims of Political Assassination and Disappearance. The paper explores the limitations of the law, its exclusion of many victims of political violence, and the charge that the law transferred the burden of proof to victims’ families. It examines the Commission’s structure and operation, as well as the voting patterns of its members. It provides data concerning the cost of the entire reparations process, and sheds light on the surprising truth-telling function the Commission acquired in a country in which official truth-telling about the years of the dictatorship has yet to take place.

The September 11th Victims Compensation Fund can only hesitatingly find its place within a comprehensive study of reparation programs. While the origin of the Fund lies in the political exigencies surrounding a perceived threat to the security of the United States, it more accurately reflects the desire by the U.S. Congress to ensure the viability of its nation’s air carriers. Unlike traditional reparations which are closely related to a process of social reintegration of the victim, fostering civic trust and social solidarity, the Fund was not established to bring justice to the victims of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Also, unlike traditional reparations, the Fund did not seek to serve as a mechanism of corrective or distributive justice as a result of an authoritarian domestic regime or internal conflict. It was initially created out of fear that recourse to the U.S. courts would threaten the precarious financial health of the airline industry. Implicitly, however, such pragmatism reflected a desire by lawmakers that the government be seen as doing all it could to ease the pain of those who suffered so greatly on September 11, 2001. Initial motivations for the program aside, there is no question that the compensation scheme has since taken on a life of its own. Ultimately, the Fund’s contribution to any reparations case-study lies in its cautionary tale about the creation of elaborate administrative schemes that try to individualize recoveries as the mechanisms through which to compensate victims.

This final chapter of the book presents reflections on the ubiquitousness and destructiveness of the social process of mobbing in all of the major institutions and organizations of human life—school, work, religious organizations, the legal system, and in communities where people live, such as condominium and homeowners’ associations. The reflections on mobbing include recognition of its significant health impact on adult workers and on children and adolescents, and suggest that these negative health consequences are of an order of magnitude that cannot ethically be ignored. Examples of mobbing introduced earlier in the book are revisited and reimagined in terms of how things might have turned out for the victims if the organizations involved had accepted responsibility for the development and resolution of the mobbing and responded differently.

Feeling vindictive is one thing, but seeking vengeance personally or through the law is completely different. This is the subject of this chapter. It explores the idea of victim vindictiveness and the degree to which it can be considered as a legitimate purpose of criminal punishment. At present, the area of the law that permits vindictiveness is through the use of victim impact statements in criminal sentencing. The purpose of these is to create an influence to those with discretionary sentencing authority. Also given in this chapter are arguments against vindictiveness. The chapter ends by suggesting that even if it is neither inherently irrational nor immoral, it may create dramatic dangers that should impose severe cautions on the willingness of a person to be led by this passion.

This introductory chapter synthesises the structure of the book that is subdivided into five chapters. The first chapter examines trafficking in persons in the light of the recent definition of the phenomenon given by the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons and identifies the most common forms of exploitation related to it. The second reviews the most important international instruments against slavery and the slave trade, the white slave traffic and trafficking in persons. The third discusses States' obligations under international human rights, criminal and labour law. The last two chapters deal with the contribution made to this field by the most important regional organizations in Europe, namely the Council of Europe and the European Union. Finally, it concludes by explaining that notwithstanding the many efforts already made to fight against trafficking in persons, improvements to the international protection standards for trafficking victims need to be made.

This chapter explores in more detail the nature and quality of interaction citizen groups have with the policy process in the two urban locales studied. In particular, the chapter addresses the two major questions left unanswered by the empirical analyses of the previous chapters: First, are the broad citizen groups that are active at the local level participating meaningfully in the policy process? Second, are they contributing anything substantially different from other groups? This chapter offers a more in-depth analysis of the local data in an effort to answer these complicated and underexplored questions and argues that the groups mobilized locally around urban crime problems frequently present policy frames that are substantially different from those promulgated by criminal justice agencies, professional associations, and highly active single-issue groups. Indeed, the deep connection urban dwellers have to crime, its causes, and its consequences makes their perspective unique and highly practical. Most notably, the policy environment for responding to crime at the local level is considerably more focused on victims—specifically on harm reduction—than is the environment at the state and national levels, where criminal justice agencies and narrow victims' groups dominate and focus much attention on punishing offenders.

Various treaty-based bodies of the United Nations Human Rights System offer avenues of communication through which individuals or groups of individuals, who claim to be victims of human rights violations, may lodge a complaint against their state. This chapter presents a list of the available communications.

This chapter discusses the importance of the clarity of affective communication. It describes the case of Safra, a psychologist who had chosen to work with support groups for cancer victims, and who had come to the author for supervision. The chapter discusses the author's realization of Safra's message through her body language. It explains that paying attention to body language can offer an invaluable window into what a person is really communicating.

The previous chapters have offered a comprehensive analysis of forgiveness that provides a religious framework on its related issues. This chapter summarizes the message that the book advocates. Choosing between forgiveness and vindictiveness is not a choice between reason and compulsion. Hasty forgiveness may sometimes entail danger both on the victim and the wrongdoer. Though the virtue of forgiveness should be highly regarded, we should also acknowledge that victims deserve to have their vindictive passions valued as well rather than judging and giving sermons to them.

This chapter examines the role of constitutional amendments in American legal culture. Amendments that have already been approved – such as those that instituted the income tax, the popular election of senators, various forms of suffrage, and Prohibition – and those now being proposed, such as the victims’ rights amendment and a proposed amendment to outlaw flag‐burning – are discussed. The tension between the concept of a “civil society” and such values as freedom of speech and freedom of religion is also examined in a comparative context.

In all processes of political change the emerging regime must face the difficult task of deciding what to do with the legacies of the former dictatorship, which people were working for the previous civil and military administration preserve, and whether or not to put on trial those responsible for having violated human rights under the previous regime. This chapter analyses what was done, and what was deliberately put aside in the Spanish case. The Spanish transition to democracy has been praised as mainly exemplary, and as demonstrating success in the stabilization of the new democratic regime. However, the final positive result should not obscure the fact that, because of the correlation of forces of the transitional period, and also because of the traumatic collective memory of the Spanish civil war, the victims of the Francoist repression were not properly rehabilitated and the dictatorship was not condemned in the Spanish parliament until 2002. In fact, a very broad Amnesty Law was passed in 1977 that not only allowed all ETA prisoners to get out of jail, but also impeded the judicial revision of the dictatorial past. None of these limitations have impeded the consolidation of democracy in Spain, but some important sectors of society feel that justice has not been done, which explains the very recent political, social and even cultural initiatives to face the authoritarian past.

Gives an account of the final decision of the US Supreme Court on the Florida vote in the (Bush vs Gore) US presidential election of 2000. Includes discussion of the deliberations and decisions of the Florida Supreme Court in the case of the recount in that state. The main sections of the chapter are: Imperfect Ballots and the Misuse of the Equal‐Protection Clause; Discerning Intent; The Majority's Curious Use of Precedent to Reach Its Result — the inability of the majority of the Supreme Court to point to any case that supported its questionable interpretation of the equal‐protection clause; Of Fundamental Rights, Equal Protection, and Victims; Limited Circumstances — the statement by the Supreme Court that their consideration was limited to the 2000 US presidential election; The Article II Argument — by the US Supreme Court that the Florida Supreme Court had usurped the constitutional authority of the legislature; and Justification by National Crisis.

A major federal anticrime agency had its roots in an Office of Law Enforcement Assistance established in the presidency of Lyndon Johnson. The agency was enacted into law in a wide‐ranging crime law enacted in 1968. Its name was changed to the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA); its purpose was to distribute federal aid to state and local criminal justice programs. But Congress ordered the agency to be headed by an unwieldy troika of administrators. A succession of leaders over a decade frequently changed policy directions, setting an erratic course while spending almost $1 billion annually in some years. The agency funded some pioneering programs, such as units in prosecutors’ offices to help crime victims and witnesses. Eventually, however, its programs lacked sufficient proof of significant impact on the crime problem or the justice system. President Jimmy Carter proposed its elimination in 1980 and Congress agreed.

By 1980, the violence rate had reached its highest level in memory, including a modern record of more than 23,000 homicides. The victor in the presidential race that year, Ronald Reagan, was surrounded by key supporters and advisers who wanted to make crime a high administration priority. The administration named a violent crime task force that called in August 1981 for a stronger federal role and changes in the law to favor the prosecution side. Three years later, a coalition of Republicans and moderate Democrats used a parliamentary maneuver to enact the most far‐ranging federal anticrime law in 16 years. Key players in pushing the anticrime agenda included Republicans like Edwin Meese, a longtime Reagan aide who later became Attorney General; Representative Dan Lungren of California, and prosecutor/crime victims advocate Lois Herrington; on the Democratic side were Senators Joseph Biden of Delaware and Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, and Representative William Hughes of New Jersey. An important provision of the law was a requirement that “sentencing guidelines” restrict federal judges’ power to set penalties in criminal cases. Others created a federal fund to support programs that aided crime victims and set up a “forfeiture” procedure by which law enforcers could seize the assets of suspects and convicts.

Victims were the forgotten piece of the criminal act, largely ignored by the police and prosecutors unless they were viewed as valuable tools in the apprehension or prosecution of offenders. This trivialization led victims to become more reluctant to seek help from the criminal justice system or participate in criminal proceedings. The 1960s and especially the 1970s saw a growing recognition that victims were erased or denigrated by representatives of the criminal justice system, which ignited a national victims' rights movement to create more balance between crime victims' needs and offenders' rights. This chapter traces the different images of victims and discusses how these images relate to our understandings of victimization and victim blaming. It explores the competing ideological positions about the status and reality of victims and victims' issues and the ensuing victim backlash that occurred after the “successes” of the contemporary victims' rights movement. It also discusses the commodification of victimhood, victim culture, victim culturists/social commentators versus “radical” feminists, and victim empowerment.

For most Americans, intense sectarian commitments embodied in congregations were central and helped to fuel the penchant for political liberty. The replacement of citizenship with a state-sanctioned, consumerist-driven, perpetual childhood also explains our willingness, even eagerness, to orient our politics according to the dictates of pity–that is, the uncritical embrace of the victim. What we are seeing in this child-mindedness, this domestication of political imagery, is the reversal of the old standard in loco parentis: in the arenas of mental health, sexuality, values, we are all at sea, it seems, until others have clarified matters for us. As the epistemological status of civic claims has declined, it has become ever more difficult to counter the ethos of the “neutral” state; unless we can say that we understand that the good we seek reflects a truth, and that the grounds for that belief are universally accessible to all persons of good will, then there are no grounds for avoiding the counter-charge of coercion. Even the most ardent defenders of the procedural republic accept that democratic government requires a modicum of what is usually labeled civic virtue, but can one celebrate the idea of freedom as self-government without claiming that self-government and its exercise is good for its own sake?