Narrating Injustice Survival: Willem de Lint and Marinella Marmo

NARRATING
INJUSTICE
SURVIVAL
Self-medication by
Victims of Crime
Willem de Lint
and Marinella Marmo
Palgrave Studies in Victims and Victimology
Series Editors
Matthew Hall
University of Lincoln
Lincoln, UK
Pamela Davies
Department of Social Sciences
Northumbria University
Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
In recent decades, a growing emphasis on meeting the needs and rights
of victims of crime in criminal justice policy and practice has fuelled the
development of research, theory, policy and practice outcomes stretch-
ing across the globe. This growth of interest in the victim of crime has
seen victimology move from being a distinct subset of criminology in
academia to a specialist area of study and research in its own right.
Palgrave Studies in Victims and Victimology showcases the work of
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the highest-quality research in the field. The series reflects the range and
depth of research and scholarship in this burgeoning area, combining
contributions from both established scholars who have helped to shape
the field and more recent entrants. It also reflects both the global nature
of many of the issues surrounding justice for victims of crime and social
harm and the international span of scholarship researching and writing
about them.
Editorial Board
Antony Pemberton, Tilburg University, Netherlands
Jo-Anne Wemmers, Montreal University, Canada
Joanna Shapland, Sheffield University, UK
Jonathan Doak, Durham University, UK
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Willem de Lint · Marinella Marmo
Narrating Injustice
Survival
Self-medication by Victims of Crime
Willem de Lint Marinella Marmo
College of Business, Government and Law College of Business, Government and Law
Flinders University Flinders University
Adelaide, SA, Australia Adelaide, SA, Australia
Palgrave Studies in Victims and Victimology

ISBN 978-3-319-93493-8 ISBN 978-3-319-93494-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93494-5
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Preface
We are indebted to the many people who have participated in the study
on which this book is based. Across the world, the trauma produced
by predatory crimes is largely uncounted. Only some of the victims
come forward to state their case and seek some form of justice or clo-
sure. Some of these brave people have offered to share in this publica-
tion their words and stories from their journey toward recovery, and we
are grateful. To many others who have not enjoyed the circumstances
or been able to muster the strength to tell their story, we hope that this
book may resonate.
We are also indebted to Dr. Andrew Groves of Deakin University and
his work on the self-medication study; his contribution to background
research for this book is immense. This work also owes much to the
support of Victoria Laughton, who began with us as an honours stu-
dent and research assistant before her appointment at Victim Support
Services. Our gratitude also goes to Dr. Adam Pocrnic for his contribu-
tion, especially for the quantitative data analysis aspect of the project.
We are grateful to both Dr. David Kerr and Tony Waters, who both
acted as CEO of Victim Support Services (VSS) over the past few years
and initially approached us with the concept. They both had identified
v
vi
Preface
the issue of self-medication in the VSS clients during their every-

day routine and were keen to support a reliable study in this area. We
also would like to thank everyone at VSS for their help for the entire
duration of the project (2011–2016): you are important to the South
Australian community, and hopefully with the help of this book, your
contribution in the field can reach other audiences as well.
The project was funded by an internal grant of Flinders University,
without which we would have not been able to set up the fieldwork.
We are also indebted to the interviewees’ transcribers, for their excellent
job. It was certainly not easy to listen to some parts of the interview
exchange as an external party.
We hope the book can address partially the gap in the literature of
self-medication of crime victims. We are aware that this is just one con-
tribution to this field. We are interested in similar studies and would
like to discuss any aspect of this project with other researchers who may
share similar projects.
Adelaide, Australia Willem de Lint

Marinella Marmo
Contents
1 Victims of Crimes, Self-Medication and Narratives

of (In)Justice 1
2 Methods, Collaboration with VSS and Victim Reflexivity 27
3 Self-Medication and Avoidance Coping 53
4 Validation—Informal and Formal Support in Narratives

of Recovery 91
5 Adaptations in Recovery 131
6 Meaning Work and Chance 175
7 Validation, Chance and Justice 205
vii
viii
Contents
Afterword 219
Appendix 221
Index 223
Acronyms
AA Alcoholics Anonymous
ABC Australian Broadcasting Corporation
ABS Australian Bureau of Statistics
AOD Alcohol and other drug
CBT Cognitive behavioural therapy
CJS Criminal justice system
CSA Child sexual assault
DASSA Drug and Alcohol Services South Australia
DPP Director of Public Prosecutions
DV Domestic violence
GP General practitioner
IPV Intimate partner violence
NA Narcotics Anonymous
PTG Post-traumatic growth
PTSD Post-traumatic stress disorder
SAPOL South Australian Police
VIS Victim impact statement
VSS Victim Support Services
ix
List of Figures
Fig. 1.1 Type of victimisation and AOD use in simple victimisation,

simple poly victimisation and complex poly-victimisation 8
Fig. 2.1 New clients in Adelaide and regions (based on VSS 2011) 31
Fig. 2.2 Source of VSS referrals in 2011 (based on VSS 2011) 31
Fig. 2.3 New clients by type of crime 32
Fig. 2.4 Victimisation by type of crime 37
Fig. 2.5 Simple, simple poly- and complex poly-victimisation 37
Fig. 3.1 Overall patterns of consumption 76
Fig. 3.2 Patterns of consumption before and after crime
by AOD type 77
Fig. 3.3 Patterns of consumption before and after crime by frequency 78
Fig. 4.1 Support sought by victims 95
Fig. 4.2 Perceived response to type of support 96
Fig. 5.1 Recovery adaptations 143
xi
1
Victims of Crimes, Self-Medication
and Narratives of (In)Justice
Narratives of (In)Justice
How victims1 review their self-medication using alcohol and other
drugs (AOD), whether licit or illicit, is a significant feature of their—
and our—understanding of recovery. Victimology2 is concerned with
exploring the reflexive experience of the victim; and there is a growing
body of work that is focused on how people who have experienced var-
ious types and incidents of victimisation develop strategies or remedies
that may assist their progression from victimhood. In this regard, the
relationship between AOD use and victimisation is a matter of long-
standing criminological interest (Jacobsen et al. 2001; Logan et al.
2002). However, the role of self-medication in shaping or influencing
reflexive responses to victimhood, victim recovery and the survivor
narrative is ripe for investigation (Morrison et al. 2011). Much schol-
arly interest in this matter is focused on a simple binary approach that
more or less assumes that self-medication is indicative of non-recovery,
and therefore the less consumption, the more recovery. Thus, if victims
are not improving themselves sufficiently or constructively, they are
self-medicating and failing to build the necessary tools for recovery.
© The Author(s) 2018 1

W. de Lint and M. Marmo, Narrating Injustice Survival, Palgrave Studies in Victims
and Victimology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93494-5_1
2
W. de Lint and M. Marmo
This book addresses this issue and adds new nuances to this
iscourse. The survey research carried out for this book shows that
d
there is indeed an increase in AOD consumption after victimisation.
However, this book also draws upon interviews with victims and two
focus groups with counsellors to explore and link the victim’s reflexive
engagement with active and passive recovery and validation in its many
forms. As revealed through our analysis of these interviews and case
studies, the binary does not reflect the reality of victims; the assumption
that the use of AOD is delaying of or destructive to recovery is not uni-
versally correct.
In this book, we are distinguishing the victim narrative from a vic-
tim careers perspective. What do we mean by narrative? As explored in
Chapter 6, everyone is involved in what Giddens (1991) describes as
a ‘reflexive project of the self.’ Every project is unique, comprised of a
relation with significant events and the charting of a course that per-
mits engagement with and/or a reappropriation of desires, interests and
aspirations. As Giddens and others have pointed out, the way people
engage in this reflexive work involves some standard tropes or formulaic
storylines concerning how events are plotted and thematised or given
meaning.
As is well-known, self-medication is often an adaptive measure taken
by victim-survivors in temporary or indefinite support of onto-exis-
tential necessities. Giddens (1991, p. 180) notes that ‘therapy is an
expert system deeply implicated in the reflexive project of the self.’ He
adds that it is ‘a methodology of life planning’ that may either ‘pro-
mote dependence or passivity’ or ‘permit engagement and re-appro-
priation’ (p. 180). In turning to AOD use after trauma, individuals
may qualify or amend the view of their own recovery narrative or way
forward. Taking note of what Giddens (1986) maintains about active
agents—that is, that people are situated actors who try to manipulate
affordances, or structural ladders, in response to their situation—our
approach is to provide a nuanced account of victim-survivor careers by
way of the subject’s reflection.
The tools and pace of recovery are those chosen by each individual.
Self-medication may serve the purpose of dulling or displacing engage-
ment, akin to taking time out from the work of recovery. It may be
1 Victims of Crimes, Self-Medication and Narratives of (In)Justice
3
instrumental and a necessary antecedent or co-requisite of a unique

recovery path, and thus ought not to be dismissed. That is to say, and as
we shall see in Chapters 5 and 6, self-medication is a strategy deployed
by victim-survivors that at turns engages and disengages them in their
proactive efforts to integrate their daily habits on a pathway according
to an affirmative belief. Unpacking their partaking of a recovery narra-
tive is of particular importance for our understanding of their recovery.
In sum, an assessment of the views of both victims and counsellors on
AOD self-medication suggests the need for this more nuanced account.
Narratives of survival emerge from the accounts captured in this
research.
The Self-Medicating Victim

AOD use and misuse has been of longstanding interest to criminolo-
gists and policymakers because it is concurrent with crime, delinquent
behaviour and ‘disorderly’ conduct (Goldstein 1985; Dingwall 2005;
AIC 2006; Bennett and Holloway 2009; SAPOL 2010). AOD use may
well be directly linked to thrill-seeking or other behaviours that are
criminalised (Hovarth and Zuckerman 1993). In turn, early childhood
trauma is related to thrill-seeking and this is related to AOD consump-
tion. Early trauma predicts not only possible transit to the criminal jus-
tice system as an offender, but also future victimisation (Smith 2017).
There has been far less investigation of AOD consumption in vic-
timology, but the picture emerges as follows. It is well known that
self-medication, whether through alcohol, licit or illicit drugs, is linked
to victimisation, especially unresolved trauma or post-traumatic stress
disorder (PTSD) (Frieze et al. 1987; Ullman 2003; Morrison et al.
2011; Jordan 2013). A handful of empirical studies internationally have
examined the experiences of victims in relation to their substance or
alcohol use or abuse (Jacobsen et al. 2001; Logan et al. 2002; Grayson
and Nolen-Hoeksema 2005; Schuck and Widom 2001; Ullman 2003;
Ullman et al. 2007). There is a link between victimisation, mental
health problems and AOD use (Dore et al. 2012; Kaysen et al. 2007;
Morrison et al. 2011; Resnick et al. 2007). AOD use is associated with
4
a range of concurrent risks related to the health, safety and security of

victims (Morrison et al. 2011). For instance, victims of trauma will
experience greater vulnerability to drug crime deprivations (Laslett et al.
2015; see also Kaysen et al. 2007; Morrison et al. 2011).
We are beginning to learn more about the use of AOD as a cop-
ing strategy. Including AOD use, victims of crime cope with PTSD
by turning to a variety of mechanisms. As self-medication, AOD is
explored as a means of disengagement (Flynn and Graham 2010;
Guggisberg 2010; Morrison et al. 2011). To dull or defer engage-
ment or in the modulation of vulnerabilities (Khantzian 2009),
self-medication is adopted by traumatised individuals to manage their
daily routines and goals. Through our fieldwork, we have collected data
that suggests that AOD consumption following victimisation increases
and is more frequent (de Lint et al. 2017).
It is known that, as with many social problems, the nature of the
social support and specialised community support networks is crucial
to victim assistance (Budde and Schene 2004; Latta and Goodman
2011; Liang et al. 2005; Lugton 1997).3 There is a positive link between
social support networks and violence and victimisation (see Budde and
Schene 2004; Murray and Graybeal 2007). How formal and informal
support networks function to reduce the prevalence of behaviour that
leads to victimisation, revictimisation or future criminal behaviour
(Latta and Goodman 2011; Murray and Graybeal 2007) is a matter of
some importance on which current research hopes to shed light (de Lint
et al. 2017). The validation received through formal and informal sup-
ports is linked to real, potential or perceived benefits and consequences
for victims (Kunst et al. 2015). The evidence collected in this book sug-
gests that reliable and consistent support is most likely to be found in
the victim’s informal network.
At the same time, we need to know more about how victims per-
ceive AOD in response to their victimisation (see also Gray et al. 2008;
Lurigio 1987; Skogan 1987). While various victimology studies have
identified the importance of the attribution of responsibility in this
context (including victim-blaming), a close look at the literature in
this area reveals that only a handful of empirical studies internationally
have examined reflexive responses in relation to substance abuse and
5
victimisation (Morrison et al. 2011; Flynn and Graham 2010; Ullman

2003; Smith 2017). There has been little examination of actual vic-
tims’ experiences with and reflections on AOD use (of relevance, see
Guggisberg 2010, 2012), and certainly not enough attention on this
matter from a criminological viewpoint.
In this regard, the recovery narrative is a relevant but under-researched
aspect of self-medication by victims of crime. Recovery depends upon
engagement with formal and informal social support networks as part
of a reflexive engagement that shifts from retrospection (concerning
injustice) to prospection (concerning dignified survival). The analysis
presented in this book is intended to augment the recognised but still
empirically under-unexplored association between self-medication, vic-
timhood and victim self-reflection. It will also consider victim support
services as an augmentation of victims’ support networks.
Identifying features of the recovery pathway through an analy-
sis of the accounts of a variety of victims requires dedicated time and
resources. Victim support services may assist in enhancing under-
standing of victim motivation for AOD use and its impact on future
behaviour. They may play a role in non-judgmentally alerting victims
to milestones in their recovery pathways. In this, they may be assisted
by the refinement of this conceptual terrain that the present work seeks
to provide. In 2011, Victim Support Services (VSS) of South Australia
approached the researchers at Flinders University to explore ways to
access evidence-based knowledge that could help their everyday inter-
action with crime victims. In the appendix of this book, we provide the
text of a brochure that we believe may be of value in reaching out to
potential clients of victim support services.
Simple Victimisation, Simple Poly-victimisation

and Complex Poly-victimisation
It is known that, as with offending, victimisation is skewed so that a
relatively small group of recidivists accounts for a disproportion of all
incidence (Farrell and Pease 1993). As is also well-known, prior victi-
misation is a good predictor of future victimisation. Victim ‘proneness’
6
(Hindelang et al. 1978) has been conceived in terms of this ‘risk

heterogeneity.’ Thus, as per ‘flag theory,’ victim routines (including

guardianship, exposure), lifestyles (involvement in risk activities) or
even anxieties (fear of crime) may be correlated to increased proneness
to criminal predation (Eck 2001). In support, Murphy (2008) identi-
fied that youth who reported being physically abused before grade 6 had
a significantly greater chance of being subject to violent victimisation
and intimate partner violence (IPV) in early adulthood. This is distin-
guished from ‘boost theory,’ by which it is hypothesised that previous
victimisation increases the risk of subsequent victimisation primarily
because the victim is objectively or externally perceived as a vulnerable
target (Farrell 1995). This suggests that not only must victim-survivors
navigate through or around significant obstacles or events, but also that
these obstacles or events will tend to transfer victimological properties
to the victim, making the person more victim-prone.
Although recent work by Tillyer (2014; see also Ousey et al. 2008)
has provided confirmation (cf. Farrell 1995) of the factors driving repeat
violent victimisation, it is still fair to say, as per Farrell et al. (2001),
that ‘the study of victim careers is in its infancy.’ The study of victimi-
sation over the life course is, as Farrell et al. suggest, important to crim-
inological understanding. These authors affirm that it can support (and
has supported) improved crime prevention practices. Indeed, there is
a strong correlation between victimisation and offending, referred to
as the ‘victim–offender overlap’ (Schreck et al. 2008). Tillyer (2014,
p. 563) has found that ‘violent victimization prevalence, onset, and
persistence during earlier stages of the life course can predict violent
victimization risk in adulthood, and whether these relationships are
observed independent of current violent offending.’
Menard (2000, p. 568) has found that repeat victimisation may not
be captured unless a long time span is used to capture the events. In our
survey and interviews we asked victims about their experience of victi-
misation over the whole of their remembered history.
As noted above, while we pay attention to agency, and review AOD
use as expressive of agentic properties, we do so also paying heed to the
weight of the burden of historical or childhood trauma. This burden of
7
trauma is, as is now known, also physiological. Knowing that childhood

trauma impacts the frontal lobe and self-management means that these
impacts also shape a victim’s reflexive recovery. In providing a ‘thick’
account of victims’ reflections on their AOD use in the context of a
recovery narrative, we hope to contribute to and support the quantita-
tive findings of others in this area.
In this regard, we are distinguishing simple victimisation from sim-
ple poly-victimisation and complex poly-victimisation. A person who
has been the object of a criminal depredation is a victim. However, as
is well understood there is a subjective component to the concept that
is of utmost importance. Many people have been the object of theft
or burglary, but most people who experience such events will quickly
recover from the shock and feeling of violation and experience few if
any enduring traumatic disorders. However, when we consider crime
against the person involving violence or the threat of violence, it
is understood that the trauma may be more severe, depending on its
viciousness, randomness and abuse of trust, to name some prominent
factors (Guma and Henda 2004). Although we do acknowledge that for
the victim this may be subjectively devastating, where a person experi-
ences the trauma of interpersonal violence for the first time as a mature
adult, this is referred to as simple victimisation. In this regard, our survey
and interview samples included people who have reported to VSS as a
consequence of a single episode of criminal predation, usually a physical
assault.
In addition to simple victims, poly-victims are people who have
been subjected to more than one episode and type of victimisation
(Finkelhor et al. 2007). As per flag and boost theory, it is an interest-
ing observation that people who have been subjected to one type of vic-
timisation are prone to repeated victimisation, and of a different type
as well. However, in assessing our sample, we found that the most sig-
nificant distinguishing factor in the recovery and recovery narrative is
whether a victim has been subjected to criminal physical and/or sexual
abuse in childhood. Trauma, including childhood sexual and physical
abuse, has psychological and physiological and developmental impacts.
The latter includes that stemming from impairment of the frontal lobe
8
(Glaser 2000; Andersen et al. 2008). In general, this and other literature
(Finkelhor et al. 2011; Ford et al. 2010; Teicher et al. 2003) suggests the
value of designating as a complex poly-victim someone who experiences
repeat victimisation of a different type after childhood abuse.
As per Fig. 1.1 (simple victimisation, simple poly-victimisation and
complex poly-victimisation), there is a pathway from sexual and physi-
cal assault trauma experienced in childhood that produces developmen-
tal and physiological impairments. Since, as we also know, such research
connects a relative lack of self-management with a greater predilection
towards thrill-seeking and instant gratification (Choy et al. 2017),
this tends to produce a pathway to AOD use that we see in complex
poly-victims.
This is not to make an argument in favour of a biological determi-
nation of victimhood. Although there is current research that revivi-
fies a positivist view of criminogenesis (see, for example, Choy et al.
2017), we wish simply to point out that the obstacles to recovery are
many and various. The attraction to self-medication by victims of crime
may be partially explained by reference to biology and psychology and
it is important not to discount the biological as presenting obstacles to
recovery adaptations. That said, we have elected to focus on reflexive
work that occurs to overcome disadvantage, especially for the complex
poly-victim.
Fig. 1.1 Type of victimisation and AOD use in simple victimisation, simple poly
victimisation and complex poly-victimisation
9
Victimhood and Validation
It is on some form of validation that both justice and recovery depends
and it is what victims primarily want from criminal justice (Daly 2005;
Clark 2010; Daly and Stubbs 2006). However, as we shall further
explore in this book, the methods of criminal justice are unlikely to sat-
isfy this quest for validation. It is true that in the ideal justice and vali-
dation can be almost synonymous (see, for instance, Durkheim 1982).
Research on victims’ experiences of criminal justice tell us that the
interaction with the criminal justice system is likely to conflict with the
quest for a manageable survivor identity. In practice the retrospective
standpoint of criminal justice revivifies not the resilience of the survivor
but the shame and stripping of the victim. Victims of crime are stripped
of the veneer of protective privacy that supports civic engagement or the
relations between the individual with others in society. The breach of
individual inviolability by criminal predation challenges the connection
between an individual and a civilised order, so the failure to suture the
rent has consequences for the community and society, and its moral
and ideological supports. Where the criminal justice process proceeds
by instrumentalising the victim as a more or less compliant, reliable and
credible complainant and witness, there is a stripping of dignity in what
is known as secondary victimisation. As we shall see, many victims view
the quest for justice as linked or enjoined and implicated with the nurs-
ing of the wounded identity. Validation with justice thus represents a
need and concept that exceeds what the criminal process can deliver
except in rare occasions. The individual victim is forced into the unen-
viable position of having to work to re-embed into and re-validate a just
social world.
The quest for validation through engagement with the formal net-
works of the criminal process is perilous. The obtainment of some
version of post-victimisation equanimity in the survivor identity
depends upon a positive, prospective view of a future and a comple-
mentary adoption of the means to achieve milestones. It is most reli-
ant on the social support networks and interventions of the therapeutic
community.
10
Dignity and Resilience
When victimologists refer to the transition from victim to survivor,
it is the self-identity of the traumatised person that is being reconfig-
ured. The work undertaken to achieve this transformation (recovery
or discovery of identity) has been thoroughly analysed by the thera-
peutic community, but one aspect of it that may benefit from further
exploration is the reflection on ‘big ideas’, including self-identity nar-
ratives. It is understood that this process requires prescriptive defini-
tions which can be stultifying or misleading, as well as affirming. In
this regard, how ‘dignity’ and ‘resilience’ modify these prescriptions is
instructive.
Many people today speak about the importance of resilience.
According to Holling’s (1973, p. 17) influential work, resilience is, in
ecological terms, ‘the persistence of relationship within a system and is
the measure of the ability of these systems to absorb changes of state
variables, driving variables, and parameters, and still persist.’ It has
also been defined as ‘the ability to persist in the face of challenges and
to bounce back from adversity’ (Reivich et al. 2011, p. 25), and as ‘a
dynamic process encompassing positive adaptation within the context
of significant adversity’ (Luthar et al. 2000, p. 543). It ‘involves the
ability of something or someone to recover and return to equilibrium
after being confronted with an unexpected, perhaps existential, threat’
(de Lint and Chazal 2013, p. 160).
As de Lint and Chazal (2013, p. 163) point out, at the ‘low altitude’
of the street and its potential criminality the concept of resilience sup-
ports a universally adaptive template of self-identity, one that is con-
sistent with or aligned to neoliberalism. As an ‘entrepreneur of oneself ’
(Cruickshank 1993; Rose 1999 in O’Malley 2010, p. 505) the resilient
individual is self-sufficient, calculating, responsible, autonomous and
unencumbered (Isin 2004, p. 217). Resilience is popular within neolib-
eral discourses because it places the onus on effected subjects ‘for their
experiences of adversity and encourages them to adapt to the unpre-
dictability of neoliberalism and become entrepreneurs of themselves’
(de Lint and Chazal 2013, p. 161). Entrepreneurial resilience is also
found in positive psychology and cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT),
11
which seeks to optimise the psychological flexibility of patients or cli-

ents in response to adversity and change (Reivich and Shatte 2002). As
O’Malley (2010, p. 503) states, resilient employees have a set of capac-
ities that includes ‘being adaptable, intuitive, innovative, independ-
ent, skilled, confident and optimistic.’ But as Cruikshank highlights,
‘techniques to enhance subjectivity are also practical techniques for the
subjection of individuals’ (Cruikshank 1993, p. 327). Citizens ‘make
themselves governable’ (p. 327) by ‘quietly plac[ing] themselves in the
hands of society and [by mobilising] themselves in society’s interest.’
If a resilient self-identity is attached to a version of self-reliance that
is consistent with the biopolitics of neoliberal subjectivity and places
the onus for change on the affected individual, dignity4 draws from
the discourse of inalienable rights to place the onus on social structures
and processes. As per Leon Kass (2002), dignity is ‘what is common to
all humans in terms of what gives them moral status.’ Human dignity
provides that individuals are ‘not to be perceived or treated merely as
instruments or objects of the will of others’ (Schachter 1983, p. 849).
They are ‘ends in themselves rather than ... means to extraneous ends’
(Kelman 1977, p. 531). Accordingly, every individual has intrinsic
worth, and ‘inherent dignity’ is the capacity not to be deployed as use-
value for others (Schachter 1983, p. 849). In the present research, we
are interested in the intersection of dignity with ‘capabilities, function-
ings and social interactions’ (Ashcroft 2005, p. 279).
The concept of the dignified subject may be simplified by high-
lighting two dimensions of agency: inviolability or autonomy, and the
protections that promote conditions of autonomy or distributive inter-
dependence (Beyleveld 2001; Kelman 1977). The first dimension gives
priority to individual choice and distinct personal identity, reflecting
the importance of autonomy and responsibility for achieving human
dignity (Schachter 1983, p. 851). A dignified subject derives from a
continuous and stable sense of identity (Kelman 1977, p. 532). This
requires inviolability, which is what is threatened or lost with victimi-
sation. By inviolability, we refer to a person’s freedom from coercive
or unwanted interference by another person or actor. Proponents of
human dignity argue that individual freedom is interdependent with
community, social equality and membership among a group of equals.
12
It is on distributive justice and equality that an individual may gain a

sense of self-worth (Schachter 1983). As Kelman (1977, p. 533) high-
lights, ‘individual freedom and social justice are inseparable and inter-
dependent conditions for realizing human dignity and each of its
components, identity and community.’
Applied to the victim-survivor, the discourse of resilience is dou-
ble-edged. As noted, and as we shall see in the victims’ accounts in
subsequent chapters, the desire not to adopt too retrospective a view-
point is consistent with the ethic of resilience. However, a strong ten-
sion arises insofar as the quest for validation involves recounting and
re-experiencing. Likewise, it is acknowledged that the transition from
victim to survivor involves a ‘letting go’ of a self-identity; the restorative
justice work implied where there is a reference to a dignified subject’s
relation with a community of social equals is also in this way arguably
too retrospective. As we noted above, the requirement of justice is often
at loggerheads with the therapeutic agency of victimhood. A dignified
identity is threatened where a person, instead of serving one’s own ends,
is forced into deployment as use-value for others (such as the ends of a
justice system, neoliberalism) (Schachter 1983, p. 849).
What this brief exploration of dignity suggests to us is that there is a
fragility to human life that is too easily pushed aside in the talk of resil-
ient subjects, and perhaps even in the presumptive world of relations that
ought to be built on ascribed dignity. In victimology generally and in
this work particularly, researchers can only interview the survivors who
volunteer—those, as we acknowledge, who are sufficiently resilient and
dignified to be available to share their stories. As we shall see, survivors
narrate that survival any way they can, sometimes drawing upon a store
of self-respect, at other times drawing upon a fragile determination.
Prospective, Retrospective and Restorative

Justice
As mooted above, justice is largely retrospective. Most systems of jus-
tice rely upon the victim as a complainant who plays an essential role
by making representations as a wronged party. As is well understood,
13
by wronging them offenders place a double burden on victims of crime.

First, and as we will explore in this book, they often push victims off their
anticipated life course. Second, they place victims in an unenviable posi-
tion regarding the function of justice and a justice system. Victims are
expected to come forward and assist the prosecution, but often are not
adequately supported to do so and face challenges (sometimes in a public
courtroom) to their account of events. As per Zehr and Mika (2003, p.
41), alongside affected communities, primary victims are key stakehold-
ers in justice, and the ‘search for restoration, healing, responsibility and
prevention’ cannot take place with their exclusion. Ideally, as per Zehr
and Mika (2003, p. 41), victims ought to be supported by a system that
restores and empowers them to define the obligations of offenders and
the community at large, but practice most often falls short of this ideal.
Institutionally, the justice community is often at loggerheads with
the therapeutic community. First, in the justice system, police and pros-
ecutor practitioners will often measure success by rates of conviction.
Yet, as Daly and Bouhours (2010) found in a comparison of rape cases
across Australia, Canada, England and Wales, Scotland, and the United
States, only 30% of cases went to prosecution and only 6.5% of cases
resulted in a conviction on the original crime. Much pressure is placed
on police and prosecutors to present strong cases based on reliable wit-
ness testimony, but most cases result in outcomes that are unsatisfactory
to victims. According to Konradi (2007) and Campbell et al. (2001),
up to half of women report being revictimised after presenting as wit-
ness, as well as experiencing anxiety, fear and anger. Second, the style
of truth determination (which includes open court and cross-examina-
tion) is daunting to many trauma victims. Yet defence barristers make
the reasonable argument that physical barriers aimed at concealing the
defendant from the complainant or victim may be prejudicial to the
defendant (Temkin 2000). And many claims to protect the complainant
as a witness may be viewed as an attempt by the prosecution to conceal
the weakness of evidence and prevent the witness from a robust cred
ibility probing. Third, the pace of justice may not be attuned to the
pace of victim recovery. Furthermore, Ellison and Munro (2008) found
that reporting that is delayed by as little as three days seriously weak-
ens a prosecution’s case. Public prosecutors have been found to believe
14
that a ‘genuine’ rape victim would report to police sooner than is the
experience of most victims (Stewart et al. 1996). Where the prosecution
does reach the stage of sentencing, it has been found that the victim
impact statement (VIS) may be more beneficial for the prosecution than
the victim. Some studies (Lens et al. 2015; Pemberton and Reynaers
2011; Sanders et al. 2001) have found that the exercise of completing
a VIS may be experienced by the victim as counter-productive to recov-
ery. A study by Lievore (2005) sampling sexually assault victim satisfac-
tion with experiences with the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP)
identified predominantly negative perceptions of information needs,
outcome, treatment by the DPP staff, court and case preparation. This
is not to say that for victims, the institutional interests of the criminal
justice process will always prove deleterious. As per the findings of Daly
and Sarre (2017), even where their case was discontinued or finalised on
a lesser charge, some victims still held a favourable view of the prosecu-
tion process.
Yet even when a legal remedy or court victory does occur, it may only
be partial, may not include an apology and may fail to meet the expec-
tation built up for it. It can revivify ‘victim’ and stultify ‘survivor.’ For
victim-survivors who have not been able to heal from the psychologi-
cal trauma caused by criminal predation, formal adjudication can and
often does serve to arrest the development of prospection, and some-
times dignified survival. As we shall see, victim-survivors are on a path-
way that is more or less linked to daily routines and a belief system.
The victim who maintains the view of a trauma caused by a crime as an
obstacle that must but cannot be removed from their pathway has been
impacted by the event and also is stymied in the ongoing response to
it. They may linger on the bittersweet nostalgia over a lost innocence
rather than decamp for a new view on themselves.
In contrast, often because they have had many positive early child-
hood experiences on which to build their self-regard, some people are
able to use, as Allen and Leary (2010, p. 107) put it, ‘positive cogni-
tive restructuring’ to provide themselves with the ‘self-compassion’
needed to overcome traumatic events. As per Neff (2003, p. 224),
self-compassion refers to ‘being open to and moved by one’s own
15
suffering, experiencing feelings of caring and kindness toward oneself,

taking an understanding, nonjudgmental attitude toward one’s inade-
quacies and failures, and recognizing that one’s experience is part of the
common human experience.’
As discussed by Allen and Leary (2010), people with self-compassion
are able to maintain an attitude of self-caring or non-self-denigration
even after things go wrong. Importantly, they are also able to see the
event in light of the play of humanity—that is to say, in the context of
the sometimes arbitrary distribution of hardship that challenges the will
and resolve and for which there is no extrinsic metric by which to eval-
uate proper balance or compensation. This ties into another feature of
self-compassion—mindfulness—interpreted as a ‘balanced perspective’
on one’s emotions and situation, such that one does not ‘dwell on the
negativity of the situation and wallow’ (Allen and Leary 2010, p. 108).
In this regard, too much retrospection may be associated with dwell-
ing on negativity and wallowing or being stuck with or by the trau-
matic event. The matter is complicated where the victim does not
receive adequate validation from informal and/or formal networks of
support (Maercker and Muller 2004, p. 345—refer to ‘social acknowl-
edgement’). As per Conroy and O’Leary-Kelly (2014, p. 67), a stabi-
lisation of identity requires a ‘validated narrative around both the lost
self and emerging self.’ Where validation has not been forthcoming or
experienced, the pathway to recovery may be more arduous. Where the
emerging self is stymied by the need to attend to the lost self, the recov-
ery arc may be flat.
The victim-survivor is confronted by challenging conditions when
seeking to find a balanced perspective. As indicated by the term ‘restor-
ative,’ in restorative justice (and it is almost impossible to imagine crim-
inal justice without an element of restoration) the victim is invited to
provide an account of their self-identity that supports an action against
an offender, which may in turn demonstrate the operation of a system
of justice. Despite the use of the term ‘restorative justice,’ the interven-
tion will not restore the status quo ante, as whatever innocence (that is,
lack of experience of corrupting influences) the victim may once have
possessed can never be brought back or returned.
16
A therapeutic narrative is in this way inconsistent with at least a good

part of the justice narrative, as practised in most places, most of the time.
As above, a therapeutic narrative requires that the survivor pushes for-
ward after a period of mourning, accepting the loss of a self-identity too
innocent or un-resilient. The justice narrative requires the positing of an
adversarial condition in which the victim is subject to open scrutiny and
their account is given as a contested version of an official record.
This Book
This first chapter has introduced this book’s self-medication and cop-
ing devices, self-identity in validation and dignity and linked this to
self-identity. A preliminary account of the concepts or themes that are
used to understand these phenomena has been offered. In the remainder
of this book, we explore the intersection of victim self-medication (as a
coping device), dignified identity and recovery narratives. We follow the
argument that a view of dignity is intimately connected to the victim
or survivor identity. Additionally, an understanding of both retrospec-
tive and prospective justice is further developed’ through analysis of the
dimensions of the recovery narrative. In this regard, we look closely at
coping devices, means of validation and the management of a dignified
identity. We also look at how these coping strategies interact with for-
mal and informal networks, understanding that the victim/survivor as
more or less networked across agencies that are loosely coupled and pur-
sue distinct mandates that depart more or less from a holistic pursuit of
justice. We take up the issue of how victims do meaning work or reflect
on their existence as victim-survivors, with a particular focus on how
they use reflexive interpretation to come to grips with their victimhood.
Victim narratives are investigated as a series of ideal type adaptations of
the victim narrative.
The remaining chapters are organised as follows.
In Chapter 2 we provide an account of data collection and meth-
ods, and our approach to victim reflexivity. The empirical data was col-
lected in South Australia from 2012 to 2015 in collaboration with VSS.
Alongside providing a description of our collaboration with VSS, we
17
also offer a snapshot of the VSS clients who agreed to participate in this
project. Further, we address the triangulation researcher-VSS-victims,
and the areas of learning for the Flinders University researchers involved
in the project on how victim-researcher reciprocities are viewed,
expected or applied.
Chapter 3 investigates the coping mechanisms victims adopt in in the
process of managing their chosen identity that aligns with their recovery
narrative. The individual and social defence strategies adopted by victims
are explored, with an emphasis on the connection between the avoidance
coping strategy and the use of AOD (Jordan 2013). Yet, we acknowledge
that self-medication plays a complex role within an unfolding victim-sur-
vivor narrative and that some form of avoidance or detachment may be
adaptive (as opposed to maladaptive) for the negotiation of a survivor
identity and for the achievement of short and long term goals.
Chapter 4 reviews the impact of institutional, formal and informal
attachments or supports and validations. Bearing witness to a victim
offering and developing their narrative is key to validation, yet those
receiving a victim’s testimony must be ‘suitable listeners’ (Bal et al.
1999) to allow the victim to find their personhood. The links between
such validation and the construction of a recovery narrative have been
less explored in the literature (Kunst et al. 2015). We address opportu-
nities for or obstacles to validation and consider such reflection central
to understanding the recovery process.
In Chapter 5 we conceptualise crime victim narratives. Building on
the work of Barnes (2013) and Jirek (2017) and relying on the distinc-
tion between complex poly- and simple victims that is revealed in our
data, we seek to develop understanding of distinct narratives ideal types.
Charting recovery pathways using empirical findings builds on under-
standing of victim ‘self-identity’ between the poles represented by resil-
ience and dignity. They assume a retrospective or prospective view to
greater or lesser extent.
Chapter 6 addresses the concept of meaningfulness in the recov-
ery trajectory. We explore how vulnerability and victimisation is also a
product of two types of chances, social and casino chance. This helps
to underline the problem of meaningfulness and meaning work, as
recovering victims seek to tease some sense from their predicament.
18
In this light, recovery is understood as meaning work, involving the

person’s adaptation to conditions that are mostly inherited.
In Chapter 7 we offer some concluding remarks on the relation
between victim narratives and formal processes and quixotic manifes-
tations of justice. Starting with our self-reflection on the project under-
taken, we take an opportunity to consider validation and chance in
relation to justice. For us, the validation (or lack of ) from the criminal
justice system, is a critical point for reflection in relation to the recovery
narrative progress.
Final Considerations
In supporting our analysis, we make liberal use of the interview and
focus group transcripts. In order to convey the ideographic inclusive of
the nuances of victims’ and counsellors’ narratives, we have chosen to
provide extensive quotes.
We are grateful for the time victims and counsellors have offered to
this project remain respectful of their chosen individual paths to and
pace of recovery. Those victims who met with us have already found,
one way or another, and perhaps rationalised to an extent, a coping
mechanism or set of tools to support recovery. We are acutely aware of
the meaningful silence of those who did not want to meet with us.
This book uses a mixed methods approach that consists of analysis
from surveys of victims (N = 102), qualitative interviews with victims
(N = 15) and focus groups (N = 2) with VSS counsellors. In relation
to this dataset, there is a sequence in which the quantitative data has
been augmented by qualitative data. We have deliberately aimed to pro-
vide a strong representation of our interviewees voices and hope that by
doing so we have captured their unique voices. We aimed to effect a
rebalancing of power and knowledge between victims, researchers and
practitioners, but an evaluation of our success at doing this we leave
with the reader.
Finally, we also would like to acknowledge that AOD substances
are not the only means used by victims of crime to cope with trauma.
19
We encountered victim-survivors who mentioned food and sex, among

others, in their narratives. The book has not got the space and the meth-
odological tools to explore these other areas in a meaningful manner.
Notes
1. This book uses the terms ‘victim,’ ‘survivor’ and ‘victim-survivor’ accord-
ing to the fluidity in the standpoint. We believe that a variable denota-
tion best reflects relative dynamic properties in a given context. We are
aware that there is varied usage of these terms within victimology (for a
brief summary, see Walklate 2005, pp. 98–100). We address this point
in more details in the conclusion and we hope the reader will consider
the choice of designation when drawing meaning from sections of this
work.
2. Victimisation is defined as ‘subjecting or threatening to subject a per-
son to some form of detriment’ (Australian Human Rights Commission
2018 unpaginated). The attribution of ‘victim’ depends upon a contex-
tualisation of these terms. Has someone been subjected to or threatened
with some form of detriment? Which forms of detriment are sufficient?
Who validates their sufficiency? Does a person need to believe they have
been victimised in order to qualify, or is the designation objective, pro-
vided by a third party?
3. Some of this knowledge is produced in a multidisciplinary work (see
Mitchell and Trickett 1980; Uehara 1990).
4. There are a number of distinctive groupings in the scholarly work on
dignity (Ashcroft 2005, p. 679).
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2
Methods, Collaboration with VSS
and Victim Reflexivity
Introduction
To prompt a broad understanding of the use of alcohol and other drugs
(AOD—including licit and illicit drugs) as self-medication among vic-
tims, this research utilised the mixed methods approach to data collec-
tion and analysis (Creswell and Zhang 2009), which included a survey
instrument, interviews with victims and focus groups with counsellors.
The research was conceived through collaboration between victim advo-
cates and academics aimed at enhancing support for victims and their
relatives. The project was aimed at building knowledge around victims
of crime as well as providing a platform for reflection on victimisation
outside the criminal justice system or health practitioners’ circles.
The research project started in 2011 and received ethics clearance in
2012 by the Flinders University Social and Behavioural Research Ethics
Committee. The data collection was conducted over a number of years,
from the end of 2012 to the end of 2015. All the empirical methods—
the survey, interviews and focus groups—took place at the Victim Support
Services (VSS) premises in Adelaide’s central business district. The choice of
setting for the survey and interviews was particularly important—they were

28
conducted in an environment already familiar to victims and where they

had ready and immediate access to a counsellor, in case they requested one.
The aim of the initial quantitative survey was to explore the self-medi-
cating behaviour of victims who had presented at VSS, and were selected
based on a random sample strategy for the survey (de Lint et al. 2017).
The survey instrument tested two hypotheses: first, we aimed to iden-
tify whether self-medication increases post victimisation; and, second,
we tested the relationship between receiving formal or informal support
and AOD self-medication. In the case of the first hypothesis, the results
suggest that poly-substance consumption did increase after the crime for
the victims surveyed. The results also showed a taking-up of substances
by half of those respondents who declared that they had consumed no
AOD substance prior to the crime event. Further, among those who had
previously consumed AOD, the frequency of consumption increased
noticeably as a daily experience after the crime event.
The marginal findings of the survey were then deepened with a second
data set deriving from our interviews with victims. In this regard, McGarry
and Walklate (2015) encourage academics to study victims’ experiences
through victims’ own narratives (see also Walklate 2018). Encouraging
victims to reflect on their experience and trajectory allows a subjective
viewpoint to take shape. When the interview is loosely structured, the vic-
tim can take control of the narrative; the pace, level and type of disclo-
sure; and the construction of their own victimisation. For the purposes of
this study, we were interested in hearing the victims’ self-reflective account
of their experience of crime, self-medication and network support. We
had in mind the tension between the ideographic, or historically particu-
lar, approach and the nomothetic, or generalisable, approach. Briefly, we
wanted to permit the individual elements of the victim experience to be a
source and ground of a recounting of a unique journey, but we also sought
to place the resultant varied biographical accounts within extant templates,
as per previous work by Barnes (2013) and Jirek (2017).
The third method of data collection was the use of focus groups. We
organised two focus group sessions with VSS counsellors at the VSS
offices (one conducted on site, the other by teleconference). At these focus
groups we explored some of our preliminary observations concerning the
two major themes of the study: how VSS clients use AOD substances and
their formal or informal support networks in response to or in the context
2 Methods, Collaboration with VSS and Victim Reflexivity
29
of victimisation trauma; and how they report changes in their reflexivity

or self-understanding around coping with trauma and AOD use.
Based on interviews and focus groups, we also explored the tensions
between the various institutional discourses (therapeutic and academic)
as revealed in the unpacking of victims’ narrative accounts.
Overall, the main limitation of this study rests in the number of
respondents. Initially, the survey—which is an entry point to the pres-
ent study—was regarded by the VSS as an ongoing mechanism to col-
lect data across a number of years. Unfortunately, repeated changes at
the senior level of the VSS structure together with losing staff in their
research unit, which at the time of writing is still non-existent, has
not allowed the VSS to continue their independent data collection.
As much as being not ideal (as it would have produced interested data
on the issue at hand), this is the reality of many governmental and
non-governmental agencies. As discussed by Sridharan and Gillespie
(2004), sustaining connections with any organisations is a difficult task
due to a number of constraints. In this case, the VSS capacity to collab-
orate cross-institutionally or to sustain the planned ongoing mechanism
was not dependent on financial constraints but on fast turnover of staff.
We find however an opportunity towards the end of this chapter to
reflect on how studies on victimhood need not to be reduced to a pas-
sive concept of numbers to fix dimensions of pain. We respect that each
single victim we met is going through a unique journey in search for
(more) validation. They negotiate on a daily base the reality of their lives
and how they see themselves into that reality. We entered briefly in the
victims’ lives and were offered a snapshot of their routine and self-med-
ication consumption. We are aware that we can only offer to this book’s
reader glimpses into the reality of the victim-survivor’s world.
Collaboration with VSS
In 2011, VSS invited Flinders University researchers to collaborate on
research into self-medication by victims of crime. The agency had iden-
tified the problem anecdotally and decided to ask scholars to explore
the issue in more depth. On the basis of an initial literature review
undertaken by the Flinders University team in 2011, it was clear that
30
the relationship between victims and substance use/misuse as a coping

mechanism had not been established empirically in Australia, with the
exception of a PhD thesis submitted in 2010 by Marika Guggisberg
(see also Guggisberg 2012). This underscored the need for locally based
empirical research that might enhance understanding of the victims’
motivations for AOD use. Further, it was established that only a hand-
ful of empirical studies internationally had examined the experiences
of victims in relation to substance abuse following their victimisation.
While there had been some interest in this area (Morrison et al. 2011;
Flynn and Graham 2010; Ullman 2003), prior to this research there
had been little or no examination of victims’ experiences of AOD use
as described by victims themselves. Much of the previous literature had
focused on causal and temporal analyses of violence perpetration and
AOD use. Information regarding the relationship between victimisation
and AOD use as a coping strategy is limited. For example, a Canadian
research project conducted by Morrison et al. (2011) examined the
circumstances faced by victims experiencing substance use problems;
however, this information was provided by ‘key informants’ who were
human service providers (counsellors and social workers). At the time
when this research began, no analyses focusing on the experiences of
actual victims had been undertaken; and at the time of writing very lit-
tle new research can be found on this subject.
VSS is a state-wide, not-for-profit organisation in South Australia,
founded in 1979 to assist victims and witnesses of crime (for a detailed
history, see Robinson 2004). Each year the organisation reaches out to
as many victims as possible, offering services such as information and
advocacy, counselling, practical assistance and support. VSS operates in
urban Adelaide and rural South Australia, with seven offices distributed
across a vast territory (984,377 km2). The population of South Australia
currently stands at over 1,600,000 (out of over 23 million people living
in Australia—Australian Bureau of Statistics [ABS] 2018). Over 75% of
the population is concentrated in the metropolitan area of Adelaide (over
1.3 million). Hence, most resources, including services for victims, are
concentrated in the city. Still, VSS makes a big effort to provide services
to rural areas, with the VSS staffer working in the rural offices often ful-
filling a number of roles, such as counselling and administration.
31
According to data collected by VSS and discussed in detail with the

Flinders University research team before the beginning of the study, in
2010 an average of 150 new clients per month were serviced in metro-
politan areas, and an average of 50 new clients a month were seen in
rural areas (see Fig. 2.1). In 2011, the South Australian Police (SAPOL)
was the organisation that provided the highest number of VSS referrals
(see Fig. 2.2).1
200
169 168 173
150 150 154 150 155 146 148
141 143 141 135
133
100 110
60 63 64 60 69
50 59 56 58 56 50 51
42 39 47 47
0
Jan-10 Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec-10Jan-11 Feb Mar
New Clients - Adelaide New Clients - Regions
Fig. 2.1 New clients in Adelaide and regions (based on VSS 2011)
ϴ ϱ
^ŽƵƌĐĞŽĨZĞĨĞƌƌĂůƐ
ϭϯ ϭƐƚYƵĂƌƚĞƌϮϬϭϭ
ϰ
ϭϴ Ϯϲ
ϰ
Police
Ϯϭ Family/Friend/Self
Criminal Legal System
Ϯϰϭ Counsellor/Psych
Govt Agency nes
ϭϬϲ Other
Work
Medical
WEB/Email
Internal VSS
Community Agency
ϭϬϰ
Media
Fig. 2.2 Source of VSS referrals in 2011 (based on VSS 2011)

32
In more recent years, VSS new clients reached a peak of 3191

in 2014–2015, with an increase of over 60% (de Lint et al. 2017).
This was partially the result of the creation of a Memorandum of
Understanding with SAPOL and of a free state-wide helpline in 2014
(VSS 2016). By 2015, however, the collection of empirical data for the
present project had come to an end.
At the beginning of the study, in 2011, we also reviewed a snapshot
of new clients against type of offence (see Fig. 2.3), categorised by:
property crimes (extortion and theft); simple crimes (harassment, stalk-
ing and physical assault); sexual crimes (all types of sexual assaults); and
serious crimes (home invasion, aggravated assault and homicide).
26
103 151
229
Serious crime Simple crime
All sexual assault Property crime

Fig. 2.3 New clients by type of crime
33
Surveys
To gather information from victims about their experience of self-med-
ication and network support, a questionnaire was developed by the
research team in consultation with VSS (paid and voluntary) staff mem-
bers. The role of VSS in shaping the survey was crucial in ensuring that
the questions were appropriate for their clients and within the scope of
what was agreed in the preliminary meetings held between the research-
ers and VSS. The VSS presence also allowed for cross-institutional input
(therapeutic and academic) into the framing of questions. From a ther-
apeutic input, VSS counsellors offered feedback which ensured that the
questions would not re-traumatise or fatigue victims. Further, a pres-
ence of a counsellor as a stand-by procedure for immediate intervention
was injected into the practical aspects of the project.
From an academic input, the designed aims and objectives of the
study were synchronised with VSS’ expectation of the project’s outputs.
Further, academics held a training program with those VSS person-
nel who would contribute to the project. For example, VSS volunteers
functioned as the intermediary in the collection of survey data, being
responsible for contacting victims via telephone and assisting them with
the completion of the survey either over the phone or face-to-face,2
between the end of 2012 and 2015 (de Lint et al. 2017). Therefore, the
training program aimed at sharing appropriate knowledge and skills
relevant to the research content, method and ethical parameters. The
training session which aimed to unpack the meanings of questions and
their rationale was also important to the legitimacy of the research pro-
cess, ensuring that those delivering the survey and the respondents had
confidence in the survey instrument and its implementation (Saunders
2006; Creswell and Plano Clark 2007).
The survey was aimed at eliciting self-reporting of experiences of
victimisation. The structure of the survey followed the content-or-
der-response choices sequence (Bachman and Schutt 2008) and was
comprised of open questions to encourage the respondents to provide
detailed explanations of their experiences. The survey included Likert
scales (Creswell 2003) to allow for numeric evaluation of statements.
For the analysis component, we used Chi-squared tests and a series of
McNemar’s and McNemar-Bowker’s tests.
34
The questionnaire contained 41 questions designed to collect informa-

tion on demographics, present and past experiences of crime victimisa-
tion, self-medication consumption behaviours before and after the crime
event, and access to formal and informal support networks. The ques-
tionnaire was constructed to collect data on the trigger crime event, or
the crime for which the victim had been referred or self-referred to VSS,
and also to ascertain whether the individual had experienced victimisa-
tion prior to that event. For a number of reasons, including that some
respondents did not give the VSS volunteer enough time to address that
part of the questionnaire, the historical section presented incomplete data.
The agreement with VSS included that the Flinders University
researchers be given access to their records in order to draw a sample of
respondents from their client pool. In total, 102 individuals completed
the survey. Eligibility to complete the survey was determined based on
whether the VSS client had completed a new Client Registration Form.
Completion of the VSS Client Registration Form by VSS clients was
crucial for recruiting these clients, as without these forms contact was
deemed in breach of client confidentiality. Unfortunately, this provi-
sion was only put in place in December 2012, with the inclusion on the
form of a statement asking explicitly whether clients gave their consent
to be contacted for research purposes. Previous to this change, VSS had
no mechanism for using their pool of clients to collect research data.
This modification thus impacted on the number of victims the research
team was able to contact. In total, 411 clients gave their consent to be
contacted for research between 2009 and 2015. We therefore surveyed
one in four eligible VSS clients.
As VSS proceeded to contact the eligible clients to enquiry whether
they were available for this study, it was immediately apparent that most
VSS clients were untraceable. Despite the fact that they had consented
to VSS contacting them in future as needed, their contact information
had changed, without which we had to exclude them. ‘Moving on’ or
changing the address and phone number are not uncommon for crime
victims (Zorza 1995), and this was the single highest cause of missed con-
tacts, followed by unavailability to participate in the survey. Those who
declined to participate did so for reasons about which we can only spec-
ulate; but invariably these reasons will be significant, and may vary pro-
foundly (for example avoiding emotional upset, shame, safety, and/or
35
loss of anonymity), as has been established in previous studies of trauma

research (Baker et al. 2005; Rosenbaum and Langhinrichsen-Rohling
2006; Campbell and Adams 2008). As this research has also experienced,
the window for talking about trauma is sometimes open only narrowly
and briefly. Considering all the above points, it is therefore common for
crime victims to become untraceable by service providers, and this repre-
sents an ongoing challenge for VSS and other victim support agencies.
Parallel to the recruitment process, the local newspaper (The Advertiser )
published a story on the problem of self-medication among crime victims
and the project run by Flinders University and VSS (Hegarty 2013). This
was followed up in 2015 by a story on this issue run by the Australian
Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) TV national news (Founten 2015).
As a result of this publicity, some former VSS clients contacted VSS and
asked to meet with the research team. However, these former clients
could not be contacted for research purposes if they had not completed
the relevant VSS paperwork. In a few cases, VSS staff was prompt in ask-
ing the former clients to complete a form to provide their consent.
The cohort that took part in the survey consisted of 59 females and
43 males. Their ages varied from 20 years to 72 years, with a mean of
44.7 years (the median age in South Australia is 39.9—ABS 2018).
The vast majority identified themselves as Australian (81.4%), includ-
ing four respondents who classified themselves as Aboriginal or Torres
Strait Islander. The remaining were of European heritage (9.9%), or
from South-East Asian (2%), Middle Eastern (2%) or African (2%)
background. This more or less mirrors the population in Adelaide, since
the 2011 ABS census reported that 25.7% of the residents of Adelaide
are foreign born, but that the numbers in rural South Australia are far
smaller than this. In terms of education level, a third of the sample
group had completed at least secondary school (30.3%), if not higher
to include undergraduate degree at 26.5%, vocational/trade qual-
ification at 24.5% and postgraduate degree at 11.8%. Seven respond-
ents declared having completed only primary education (6.9%). In
relation to occupation, a third of the respondents declared that they
were working full-time (30.4%), and a fifth were working part-time
(16.7%). Of the remaining respondents, they were unable to work due
to disability (9.8%), studying (7.9%), engaged in casual work (5.9%),
retired (6.9%), or volunteering or caring for a dependant (9.8%). Both
36
the educational and occupational figures suggest that the sample of

respondents was a comparatively heterogeneous group, according to the
ABS data (ABS 2016). However, among the respondents the rates of
full- and part-time employment were lower than those of the total 2016
South Australian population aged 15 + (55% and 37%, respectively).
The type of crime victimisation depended on the trigger crime or the
reason for the victim’s referral to VSS. The data on crimes and referrals
was analysed and the crimes were grouped into four broad categories:
property crimes (extortion and theft); simple crimes (harassment, stalk-
ing and physical assault); sexual crimes (all types of sexual assault); and
serious crimes (home invasion, aggravated assault and homicide). Each
respondent was assigned to one of the four categories, even if they were
not the direct victim of a crime—for instance, where the respondent
was a relative of a murdered victim. Five respondents reported victimi-
sation to property crimes (4.9%), in contrast with 49% of the sam-
ple who reported victimisation from simple crimes. A further third of
respondents reported a serious crime (32.4%), while more than 1 in 10
(13.7%) experienced sexual assault (see Fig. 2.4).3
When comparing type of victimisation across demographic charac-
teristics, not surprisingly it was found that respondents’ victimisation
was gendered, with a greater proportion of females experiencing sexual
assault and serious crime, compared with males who were more likely to
experience simple crime and property crime victimisation. This is in line
with the common patterns of offending and victimisation reported in
the literature (Davies 2007).
In case of multiple crimes, the most recent and serious offence was
used to classify the primary victimisation, as that was the motivation for
the referral to VSS. Historical victimisation emerging from the survey
was not used to classify the respondents into categories.
For the majority of respondents, the trigger crime was also the first
experience of victimisation (simple victimisation). Only 1 in 5 respond-
ents (19.6%) reported complex poly-victimisation (multiple, differ-
ent forms of victimisation). However, a third (34.3%) had experienced
repeat victimisation of the same type (simple poly-victimisation), with
two respondents experiencing the same type of victimisation more than
four times (see Fig. 2.5).
37
Property crimes (extortion and theft)

Simple crimes (harassment, stalking and physical assault)
Serious crimes (home invasion, aggravated assault and homicide)
Sexual assault (all types of sexual assaults)
Fig. 2.4 Victimisation by type of crime
Complex poly-victimisation Simple Poly-victimisation Simple victimisation
100% 56.1
50% 34.3
19.6
0%
Fig. 2.5 Simple, simple poly- and complex poly-victimisation

38
We also cross-checked the data on multiple and/or repeat victimisa-

tion with demographic characteristics, which revealed no clear associ-
ation between these types of victimisation and gender, employment or
living arrangements (that is, whether they lived alone). However, those
who were younger at the time of victimisation and who had a lower edu-
cation level were significantly more likely to experience multiple and/or
repeat victimisation. Almost three-quarters (72%) of the cohort was vic-
timised more than a year prior to their referral, including 1 in 5 (21.5%)
who were victimised more than three years prior to their presentation.
The frequency of AOD consumption and type of substance con-
sumed were analysed, both before and after the trigger crime. In
relation to substance, a four-part scale was used comprising doctor-pre-
scribed drugs, non-doctor-prescribed drugs, alcohol, and illegal drugs.
The frequency was calculated to include weekly (once a day to every
2–7 days), fortnightly (8–14 days to once a month), sporadic (a few
times a year) and non-consumption responses.
To measure the respondents’ perception of support they were able to
access after the crime experience, the type of network support was catego-
rised as either formal or informal. Formal support referred to that provided
by government and non-government agencies that offer help, including
police, generic and specialised doctors, counselling services and victim sup-
port services; informal support included that provided by family, friends
and work colleagues. The results of the survey are discussed in Chapters 3
and 4. However, considering the number of respondents in the survey, and
the resultant lack of statistical power, it was believed that a more nuanced
approach had to be sought in the second part of the study, by focusing on
validation and informal or formal support during the interviews.
Interviews
Drawn from the respondents who gave their permission to be contacted
for this purpose, a sample of the surveyed victims was interviewed. As
with studies of other hard-to-reach populations (Creswell and Plano
Clark 2007; Lord and Cowan 2011), in victim research a funnelling of
numbers between surveys and interviews is common. While more than
two-thirds (71 out of 102, or 69.6%) of the respondents ticked ‘yes’ to
39
the survey question indicating that they agreed to be contacted for a fol-
low-up interview, when we sought to re-engage them in 2014–2015, a
high percentage were reluctant to have a one-to-one session, resulting in
only 15 interviews in total being conducted by the end of the project.
As we did with the survey, we gathered feedback from VSS counsel-
lors and social workers on the interview structure and questions, as part
of the therapeutic and academic cross-institutional input, to determine
the strength and impact of the proposed line of enquiry. The aim of
involving the partner industry in this way was to create an interview
instrument that would enable the victim to ease into the encounter as
the interview progressed. We believe that there is much to be gained
from creating an environment where the respondents want to engage
more actively with the project: this has supported an approach that
capitalises on knowledge exchange. In this regard, in-depth interviews
permit access to the complexity of victims’ narrative accounts of their
victimisation and treatment history.
In support of this, we embraced a responsive interviewing model, as
per Rubin and Rubin (2012), which allowed a degree of flexibility in
following the narrative and pace set by the interviewee. This flexibility
in the design of the interviews permitted questions to be changed and
pace to be altered. Interviewers thus made adjustments to pace, struc-
ture and depth of probe according to the perceived demeanour and level
of engagement of the interviewee. Further to this, the interviews were
conducted in a face-to-face format at the VSS premises so the respond-
ents would find themselves in an environment perceived familiar and
safe. A counsellor was organised to be on a stand-by. On three occa-
sions, after the interviews, this mechanism of support was used. In
all of the three cases, the victims were women with a history of severe
physical and sexual forms of abuse, and heavy AOD consumption over
many years. In one of these cases, the interviewee had never disclosed
her childhood history of abuse. Interviews were conducted by three
Flinders University researchers, which included a female member. On
a number of occasions, the female member was specifically requested by
some male and female respondents. Drawing from trauma research on
victims’ reflections about their reasons to participate in research studies
(Campbell and Adams 2008), we offered AU$50 compensation voucher
to each respondent plus reimbursement of travel expenses.
40
The interview questions were divided into three parts, reflecting the
three focal themes: recent and past victimisation, self-medication and
network support. The aim of this structure was to collect more nuanced
evidence of the extent and nature of the problem of self-medication. In
particular, we aimed to explore the causal, motivational and situational
determinants surrounding self-medication. We also sought to probe why
network support did not appear to have a correlation to self-medication.
We felt that it was likely that the survey instrument did not capture the
connection between feelings of attachment and alienation or isolation.
Out of the 15 interviewees, 8 were males and 7 females. Table 2.1 offers
a summary of their victimisation. Based on their disclosure, their victimi-
sation is divided into: simple victimisation (one-off incidence of crime);
simple poly-victimisation (repeat and different victimisation); and com-
plex poly-victimisation (repeat and different, with historical ramification).
In the process of conducting these interviews, we realised that, for at
least some of the respondents, the interviewer was placed in their reflex-
ive understanding of their own recovery narrative as discussed at more
lengths at the end of this chapter.
Focus Groups
The third data collection method was to hold two focus groups with
VSS counsellors. At the time of writing, there are eight operative coun-
sellors in the VSS metropolitan office, and seven regional counsellors in
rural locations (metro = 8, rural = 7). This proportion was represented in
the composition of the focus groups. For the metropolitan group, eight
counsellors met with researchers face-to-face in the VSS office, while the
seven rural counsellors joined us via a conference call from their various
locations. The structure of the counsellor team in the metro office dif-
fers from that used in the rural areas. In the metro office, the counsel-
ling team meets on a fortnightly basis, and each counsellor is formally
supervised on a monthly basis. Thus, counsellors work independently
but also engage in peer group supervision. The regional team is organ-
ised differently, such that each counsellor works as a single unit in each
of the seven rural offices. The frequency of counselling sessions depends
Table 2.1 Summary of interviewees’ case studies
ID Gender Type Victimisation summary AOD use
ID001 Male, 30 Simple Attempted murder—warehouse floor man- Social, not increased; painkill-
ager stabbed multiple times by wife and ers during rehab only
declared dead
ID002 Male, 57 Simple Simple assault—healthcare executive sprayed Moderate, increased slightly
with capsicum spray by stranger in public (14 per week)
street
ID003 Female, 50s Complex poly Domestic assault (burglary [multiple], child Mild, no increase; prescrip-
abuse)—by family member tion anti-anxiety, increase
ID004 Male, 50s Simple Murder—daughter killed by her boyfriend Increased intake of alcohol
(wife assaulted on wedding day)
ID005 Male, 50s Simple poly Aggravated assault, gay-bashed suddenly Little to no alcohol; anti-anx-
in a shopping centre. Previously a victim iety prescription (seven or
of a road accident (bad recovery mentally eight years)
and physically) and bullying (probably also
linked to sexuality)
ID006 Female, 43 Complex poly Simple assault by stranger on a public street; No alcohol or prescription;
previous history of abuse increase in marijuana use
(20/day)
ID007 Male, 50s Simple Murder, brother killed in a home invasion Increased alcohol use, no
(two other brothers had died), remaining other drugs
sister heavy drug user, sister’s daughter and
granddaughter living with interviewee
ID008 Male, late 20s Simple Simple assault; knockout punch in public Minimum to moderate alcohol,
place no increase; no other drugs
ID009 Male, 50s Simple poly Assaulted by known person twice, who also Increased use of alcohol, can-
home invaded the victim, had previously nabis and other medicines
long history of abuse (forgetful, lost job, like Panadol
41
disengaged)
(continued)
Table 2.1 (continued)
ID Gender Type Victimisation summary AOD use
ID010 Female, 55 Complex poly Child sex abuse by family, family friends, Heavy AOD consumption for
42
catholic priests and nuns. Took heavy drugs. prolonged periods

Gave birth at 16, child given away (and still
suffering for this) to what became an abu-
sive family. Currently not working
ID011 Female, 60s Simple Abduction and murder of nephew many Heavily dependent on pre-
decades ago, sister (and mum of kid) still in scribed drugs
denial so no conversation on it
ID012 Female, 70 Complex poly Workplace sexual abuse; long history of Heavy AOD consumption for
abuse (physical and sexual) and drug use prolonged periods
(all sorts of drugs)

ID013 Male, 58 Complex poly Assaulted by known person (lodger) resulting Moderate to heavy alco-
in severe injury (50 bones broken) and add- hol (three or four drinks
ing to a difficult family situation (feeling per day) and two pipes
isolated); history of neglect and sexually of marijuana, down from
exploited previously (self-described as
alcoholic)
ID014 Female, 47 Complex poly Physically and sexually abused as child, many Heavy (including forced) AOD
years of therapy consumption for prolonged
periods
ID015 Female, 26 Complex poly Physically and sexually abused as child, diffi- Heavy AOD consumption for
cult recovery prolonged periods
43
on a range of factors, such as the recency of the crime, the client’s symp-
toms and the timing of any related court case. Counselling could involve
weekly contact, but more likely fortnightly to monthly, and occasionally
annually, according to when cases come up before the courts.
The focus groups were held after the survey and interview phases
were completed, and were designed to probe some of the insights
captured from the other data. First, we wished to further explore the
question of hidden historical trauma. From the survey and interview
findings, it had become apparent that a number of people in this study,
who were responding to a referral offer from the police or other ser-
vices following the most recent trigger crime, were primarily seeking
support: the victimisation was a triggering event, but at the time of the
referral disclosure of the antecedent trauma was only just beginning to
emerge. The focus group brought with it many years of experience in
victim counselling that could provide expert confirmation on whether
this pattern was consistent with their experience. Second, through the
focus group we sought to explore the variety of recovery narratives and
how moments of client/victim self-discovery figure in those narratives.
Both focus groups were conducted to elicit discussions, including
agreement or disagreement among counsellors through a ‘round-robin’
exercise (Clark 2009) on a number of points as emerged from surveys
and interviews. The interaction element of our focus groups allowed
for comprehensive conversation among experts of topic fed by us, and
allowed for meaningful analysis of the issues at hand, which would not
be otherwise possible to achieve in one-to-one interviews (Morgan and
Krueger 1993).
Reflexivity and Victim-Sensitive Research

The collaboration between Flinders University and VSS brought both
a therapeutic and an academic perspective to the question of victim
recovery knowledge generation (de Lint et al. 2018). VSS functioned
as the intermediary in the preliminary phase of the project set-up, and
in facilitating the collection of data. The Flinders University–VSS con-
nection, established before the beginning of the self-medication project
44
through small consultancies and students’ internships, was maintained

over the long period of data collection, despite changes in personnel at
the VSS senior levels. VSS was an intermediary trusted by the recover-
ing victims and by the research team, and represented a focal point of
reference. In this triangulation of relationships, the researcher becomes
a foil or third party in the interaction between the victim-survivor and
counsellors. And the therapeutic community has a different set of stip-
ulations for normative engagement from that of the academic research
community.
One of the areas of learning for the Flinders University researchers
involved how reciprocities are viewed, expected or applied. The research
team did not expect to play a role other than collecting and analysing
data causing as less re-traumatisation as possible. Nevertheless, some of
the recovering victims appeared to be keener to tell their story to us, an
audience or listener different than social workers, counsellors or police.
During the interviews, some victims shared with us their thoughts on
the opportunity to self-reflect on their story and recognised it as an
empowering moment, because we—differently from police or other ser-
vice providers—did not have a ‘role’ in their reality. We entered their
lives free from labels and attachments already known to them. It is
probably for this reason that one victim disclosed her historical abuse
for the first time.
The academic literature on research on marginalised community
often talks about power disparities and exploitative research to the dis-
advantage of the powerless subject (Dupont 2008; Lynch 1999), which
in this study it would be the victim population. Yet, we found our-
selves not just in a position to recognise that victims possessed power
of knowledge (regarding for example their self-medication) but also
the capacity to use the situation to self-actualise (see Deckert 2017).
Further, the researcher is often construed as the powerful party in mar-
ginalised population research (van Dijk 2001). In the triangulation
researcher-VSS-victims, the researcher did not hold more power than
VSS, who is a well-established non-governmental agency with evident
socio-political influence on these matters in South Australia. In this con-
text, if the victims had externalised doubts over the research interaction
or protocol, they would have had an immediate venue (VSS counsellors)
45
to communicate their discontent, jeopardising the remaining of the pro-

ject by tampering the trust between VSS and the research team.
Therefore, this experience allowed us to think about the involvement
of all three parties, and how, in taking note of the other party’s roles and
expectations, each confronts and sometimes adapts to a further oppor-
tunity to reflect upon how each person’s perceived role and identity con-
form to particular institutional protocols (de Lint et al. 2018).
Of course, this was also an explicit aim of the research, as it devel-
oped beyond the capture of data on victims’ experiences of self-med-
ication—we wanted to understand how victim-survivors viewed or
reviewed the formal networks they encountered as part of their recov-
ery. This meant that service professionals, including police, doctors and
therapeutic support workers, were among those whose interaction with
our subjects we wanted to know about. What we did not initially realise
was that knowledge about recovery narratives is born of an iterative pro-
cess that requires or at least benefits from repeated playback against an
audience or audiences that reflect institutional variety.
In relation to the above, the following insights need to be noted.
Learning benefits from variety, there will be a tendency within a particu-
lar type of research or institution towards insularity and self-affirming
hypotheses. Institutional knowledges surrounded by strong gate-keep-
ing practices may suffer in the same way that cultural isolation can pro-
duce a narrow view of propriety. This is perhaps an overstatement of the
importance of between-institution reflexivity, but it provides the gist of
what we came away with after the first series of interviews.
Closing Reflection: Victim-Sensitive, Institution-

Critical and Reflexively Appropriative Research
Research of any kind may involve the claiming or reclamation of some
valued social or cultural good. The protocol for appropriation is set
out in professional or university ethics standards, but to acknowledge
that work has been conducted in compliance with such bodies is not
to discount that there will be unanticipated consequences of the appro-
priation. In drawing on our interview transcripts, we are endeavouring,
46
in part, to present and explore a survivor’s journey through painful

experiences, including improbable and seemingly impossible obstacles
and jarring self-discoveries. We acknowledge that in offering this rep-
resentation, we are fetishising the ‘purity’ of this personal journey and
suggesting the conversion of the ideographic into the nomothetic. Such
scholarly work must be placed somewhere on the shelf for consump-
tion, with a label and in a section or genre, recognisable to academic
victimology. The process deliberately disguises and obscures identities,
and in so doing substitutes the ‘native’ voice for one that is represented.
In discussing the new ethnography, Denzin (1997, p. xxi) notes that
a ‘text must move the self and other into action.’ However, the power of
the text to produce action is also its power to distort. Since the narrative
turn in the social sciences, as Denzin summarises (1997, p. xx), analyses
have involved semiotic, thematic, dramaturgical, rhetorical, topologi-
cal as well as other narrative strategies, but they ‘falter at the moment
when the recorded or analysed text is taken to be an accurate (visual)
representation of the worlds and voices studied.’ Similarly, Altheide and
Johnson (2011, p. 581) argue that ‘how knowledge is acquired, organ-
ized, interpreted, and presented is relevant for the substance of those
claims.’ As these authors note (Altheide and Johnson 2011, p. 581), the
true nature of lived reality is somewhat dependent on epistemological
construction. This is because the real world with which we engage is not
mirrored but represented through the distortions of our situated, con-
ceptual frameworks. In seeking to understand the social world or social
life, it is necessary to take into account meaning work, or the situated
ways of interpreting what is experienced of the real world.
Taking these observations on board, we note that victim of crime
self-medication is a lived reality but shaped and interpreted through
institutional discourses and conceptual frameworks or the meaning
work done by victims, counsellors and researchers. In the first instance,
it is about the question of how many or how much. How much AOD?
How many of the victims? Although we come up with a representation
based on our sample, something is lost when we leave the issue with a
number. First, and most relevant to this section, we appear to uphold
a view of the victim and the significance of AOD use that probably,
all things being equal, perpetuates mainstream views of victimhood
47
and substance use. As Govier (2015) states, victimhood ought not to

be reduced to a concept that revolves around passivity, by providing
numbers intended to fix dimensions of pain and remedy and reducing
reflexive action to some sort of quantitative receptacle. Gross quantita-
tive categories do not capture how situated individuals negotiate unique
situations using the tools at hand. And those tools cannot be under-
stood without reference to the individual’s style of engagement with
their lived reality, or their interpretation of it. In asking about network
supports and traumatic events, we merely scratched the surface of this
lived reality. Beneath that, quotidian values are attached to ways of see-
ing oneself in the world.
As per Altheide and Johnson (2011), there is an ‘ethnographic ethic’
comprised of questions about the rhetorical or authorial style; the role
of the reader or audience; the assumed point of view of an observer; the
relationships between observer, observed and setting; and the relation-
ship between what is observed and the larger cultural and organisational
contexts.
In this study, particularly concerning our engagement with and
analysis of the interview and focus group data, our use of this ethno-
graphic ethic has been evolving. We take on board that we may only
offer glimpses into the reality of the victim-survivors, whose recovery
narratives and relationship with self-medication form the object of this
study. We are attempting to assume that the reader will be somewhat
indulgent regarding the shifting angles and shadows produced by the
use of multiple data sources and their assumptions. We also expect that
our attempt to provide some ideal-type constructions on the basis of
the narrative accounts will fall short, and that there are other dimen-
sions and factors that could be developed out of our material or out
of the data provided by other respondents. Finally, we are aware that
there is no certainty regarding how the interview subjects will view the
rendering of their narratives and accounts. It is likely that the distorted
representations will be too many and too deep in at least some of the
interpretations that we provide.
48
Notes
1. As background research in terms of criminalisation rate, we took notice
that according to the SAPOL annual report (SAPOL 2015), from 2011
to 2012, there was a decrease in crime of 8.6% (10,084 offences). In the
10 years from 2005–2006 to 2014–2015, the decrease in reported crime
was by 29.7% (45,180 offences). This information has not influenced
the flow of victim’s clients, in fact the number increased over the same
period of time, probably for the reasons explained in the next paragraph.
2. The literature on preferred data collection methods of victims is con-
tradictory as some claim that phone or computer data collection meth-
ods are preferred because they allow for anonymity, while others claim
that face to face contact is preferred (Campbell and Adams 2008). We
decided to let the respondents choose their preferred method.
3. We have categorised crimes differently from VSS. We categorised assault
as ‘simple/physical’ and ‘aggravated’, and placed them into two different
categories (‘simple person crimes’ for simple/physical and ‘serious person
crime’ for aggravated assault). Further, since this survey only contacted
participants above the age of eighteen, the data on sexual crimes do not
include child sexual crimes as in the VSS data.
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3
Self-Medication and Avoidance Coping
Introduction
In this chapter, we discuss coping strategies and how they contribute
to the recovery narrative, according to the reflexive responses provided
by our interviewees. Many victims develop individual and social defence
strategies or what we refer to as ‘shock absorption’ during the ‘impact
disorganisation phase’ (Frieze et al. 1987, p. 301), which is the phase
that immediately follows a crime. It is recognised within the litera-
ture (see, for example, Green and Roberts 2008) that the selection of
strategies by the victim in the aftermath of the crime and consequent
period is of vital importance for their emotional wellbeing, but that
strategies available to them are limited by their own unique situational
demands. Lazarus (2006, p. 10) refers to coping as being ‘concerned
with our efforts to manage adaptational demands and the emotions they
generate.’ Such effort can be both ‘conscious and unconscious’ and
can take the form of thoughts and actions (Green and Roberts 2008,
p. 43)—thus cognitive and behavioural efforts aimed at forming coping
strategies.

54
Therefore, coping after a crime event requires not only adapting to

a new reality for the victim involved, but also such adaptation depends
on the existence and strengths of their inner and outer social circles.
Lazarus (2006, p. 19) states that coping is a part-whole relationship—
hence the importance of the surrounding environment. This point is
touched upon in this chapter as we tackle the issue of coping strategies
and will be discussed in more depth in the next chapter on validation,
which explores the role of formal and informal support in shaping the
narrative of recovery.
The first section below discusses the mixed messages society is cur-
rently sending to victims—expecting victims to suffer in silence against
a backdrop of literature agreeing on acknowledging that the develop-
ment of positive coping strategies occurs in the immediate and with
the support of the outer social environment (Lazarus 2006; Cole 2007;
Walklate 2007; Fassin 2012). Using extracts from victim’s interviews
and counsellors’ focus groups, the second and third sections focus on
engagement strategies and disengagement strategies. The fourth sec-
tion considers self-medication as a coping method. It starts with the
analysis of the survey’s results to then move to the reflection of victims
and counsellors. In this section, it is noted that the interview find-
ings mostly support the literature on self-medication which identifies
it as a maladaptive strategy; still, our findings do not entirely support
this interpretation of alcohol and other drug (AOD) use, revealing
that the issues are far more nuanced and dependent on many factors,
such as simple victimisation, simple poly-victimisation and complex
poly-victimisation.1
From Macro-Analysis to Micro-Analysis

of Coping Strategies
In the current context of a security and control society, the victim,
argues Cole (2007), has been redefined as the one who is expected to
suffer in silence and display no weakness. This change in how we see
the ‘true victim’ is evident at the socio-political and cultural-legal levels
3 Self-Medication and Avoidance Coping
55
(Walklate 2007), as we are invited to ‘overcome a victim mentality’

(Walklate 2007, p. 2). This ‘anti-victimism’ mentality is explained fur-
ther by Cole (2007, p. 5) as embracing a ‘noble victim,’ described as
the individual who ‘suffers with dignity,’ ‘refrains from complaining’
and does not ‘display weaknesses’ (Cole 2007, p. 5). Cole (2007, p. 6)
claims that, within this view of anti-victimism, the ‘truest victims’ are
those who ‘refuse to be victims.’ The paradox of this new positioning of
the so-called ‘real’ victim is highlighted by Walklate (2007) through a
reflection on how the state has ‘embrace[d] more effective rebalancing of
the criminal justice system in favour of the (crime) victim’ (2007, p. 3).
The contradiction between the imposed silencing of the real victim and
a more prominent role for victims in the criminal justice process can be
seen as another schizophrenic act of the state, which pulls in different
directions (Garland 2001). This contradiction may lead us to question
whether the services provided by the state to crime victims are in reality
a masquerade to appease the critics and that the underlying neoliberal
concept of true victimhood is what matters most to the state. A com-
bination of personal responsibility as the key precipitating factor of the
crime event together with an expectation about displayed ‘dignity’ in
the aftermath of the crime could be indicative of a shift in the way suf-
fering is seen. The display of pain goes hand in hand with a judgement
of the individual: those who claim victim status, Cole (2007) argues,
are seen as weak, passive and/or manipulative. This is a clear departure
from what Fassin (2012, pp. 41–42) observes on the importance of
seeing collectivism and victimhood as parts of a whole: ‘suffering is no
longer something that should be hidden from others or concealed from
oneself: it is something that can be legitimately described in others and
oneself.’
This schizophrenia defining how the victim is seen through the lens
of blaming theory, and the expectation of how the victim ‘should’ react
to crime—with displayed dignity, does have an impact on the way the
crime victim traverses the different coping strategies. Coping strategies
do not occur in a vacuum. In this regard, Lazarus (2006) theorises the
importance of the interpersonal context and the immediate and larger
environment in contributing to the victim’s coping ability. Lazarus
claims that ‘coping should never be divorced from the persons who are
56
engaged in it and the environmental context in which it takes place’

(2006, p. 19). Therefore, coping strategies are dynamic and develop
through an interactive or transactional process with the surround-
ing environment. Coping is not just an internal process and cannot
be reduced to an action-reaction situation. Lazarus (2006, p. 14) talks
about emotional encounters as ‘a continuous flow of actions and reac-
tions,’ and coping as an ‘integral feature of the emotion process’ (p. 19).
Further, coping is impacted by the constant verbal and nonverbal
feedback the victim receives as she navigates the different phases of
adaptation. In this context, it is impossible to disconnect the broader
socio-cultural and legal-political environments from the victim’s imme-
diate social and emotional surroundings. Therefore, the contradic-
tion and negativity of current politics on ‘true victims’ are relevant in
that they create a duality of messages, whereby the victim is assured
that expressing their emotions and asking for help is the ‘right’ path
to recovery, yet at the same time the act of claiming victim status is
frowned upon. The absurdity of such a paradox produces a negative
environment in which the government offers services to support victim
recovery and adopts more inclusive, victim-centred criminal justice pro-
cesses, while the socio-political climate also works to silence victims.
Coping Strategies
The treatment of victims clearly has repercussions for victims’ narrative
recovery and selection of coping strategies. This is because the types of
coping strategies adopted are influenced not only by the personality
and health of the victim, but also by the types of social reactions they
experience upon disclosure of crime events and upon their admission
on own ability to manage or not (immediate coping strategy) to their
family, friends and broader society. Inevitably, a victim’s ability to man-
age the event and its aftermath are ‘judged’ by his/her inner and outer
social circle and categorised according to coping mechanism adopted.
In this context, it is noted that if the category where the victim has been
placed is ‘approved’ by the observer, more avenue for support is offered.
For example, in their study, Mitchell and Hodson (1983) highlighted
57
that those ‘seen’ as doing something to cope with their trauma, such as
problem solving and social support coping, receive more support than
those who use avoidance coping strategies. This creates a vicious circle
of maladaptive coping strategy, whereby the victim who receives less
approval for what is perceived as a ‘chosen-but-wrong’ path to recov-
ery is left more isolated. This leaves victims of particularly traumatic
events or poly-victims with less avenues to receive support. Using again
the study by Mitchell and Hodson (1983) as a way of example, it was
observed a connection between the greatest severity of intimate partner
violence (IPV) and the less support received by a victim due to their
limited attempts to make contacts with any support networks.
Understanding the dynamic relations within the coping process is
considered important as it can lead to more effective interventions and
thus contribute to the wellbeing of people in stressful situations. The
research findings agree on supporting the need for such understand-
ing when looking at the longer term recovery, while in the immediate
aftermath of the crime the literature only offers inconclusive evidence
about the impact of coping strategies on wellbeing (Green and Roberts
2008, p. 43). Also, recognising that coping strategies are shaped by the
broader socio-cultural context (Lazarus 2006; Green and Roberts 2008)
does not deny the existence of personal preferences for certain coping
strategies, which inevitably influence the ability to access more or less
effective interventions.
The literature categorises different ways of coping as a ‘process-
orienting model’ (Lazarus and Folkman 1987; Green and Roberts
2008; Wilson et al. 2012) in which, according to Iverson et al. (2013,
p. 103), two prominent coping strategies emerge: the engagement
and disengagement mechanisms of coping. The engagement strat-
egies include active methods to manage the trauma and may include
a problem-focused coping strategy or an emotion-focused coping
strategy.
In the problem-focused coping strategy, the person makes an effort to
minimise stress in a cognitive effort to reduce or remove precipitating/
stress factors. This gives the person a sense of being in control of emo-
tions and other cognitive elements. In these cases, it is expected more
positive emotional outcomes as the person focuses on small steps to
58
adopt solutions so they may find a way to move forward to a normal or

amended routine. These strategies may include planful problem solving,
cognitive restructuring, and confrontive coping (Wilson et al. 2012,
p. 590).
In the emotion-focused coping strategies, the person tries to man-
age or regulate emotions by focusing on some stressful aspects. These
strategies may include self-controlling, positive reappraisal, and
escape-avoidance (Wilson et al. 2012, p. 590). Like problem-focused
cognitive restructuring, the emotion-focused strategy rotates around
the goal setting and reinforcement concepts, to help and evolve
adaptation to a former or new routine as emotions change (Wilson
et al. 2012).
Problem-focused and constructive emotion-focused coping strategies
are considered positive and engaging ways to cope adaptively to the
trauma. Psychological interventions and counselling sessions may
encourage the adoption of such empowering tools for the purpose of
minimising stress and taking control of the situation. Techniques to
bring about these methods include self-verbalisation and active problem
solving, combined with strategies to reduce maladaptive coping behav-
iours (Wilson et al. 2012). Often, personal perception, inner and outer
social circles, and individual coping skills are key factors influencing the
victim’s reactions to stress, and not just to ‘stressors’ themselves (Wilson
et al. 2012). Wilson et al. (2012) note that as the positive strategies
replace the maladaptive ones, there is an increase in seeking social sup-
port and a reduction of escape avoidance, through an increase of planful
problem solving. Further, as the victim’s perception of self improves
so does their response to victimisation. And the more the victim self-
reflects on own improvement, a better support recovery takes place via
cognitive and/or emotional adaptive coping.
In contrast the above, the disengagement coping model includes pas-
sive strategies, such as withdrawal, self-criticism and avoidance (Iverson
et al. 2013). An avoidance-based strategy is categorised as part of the
broader emotion-focused coping strategies, yet is recognised as a mala-
daptive strategy (Parker and Endler 1992).
59
Engagement Coping Strategies

Engagement coping involves the victim taking active steps to deal with
the traumatic event, and includes strategies such as cognitive restruc-
turing and problem solving (Iverson et al. 2013). The existing literature
(Gutner et al. 2006; Iverson et al. 2013) suggests that engagement strat-
egies contribute to the development of better mental health post vic-
timisation by identifying protective factors, such as taking active steps
to reduce the risk of revictimisation. Gutner et al. (2006) in particular
point out that the use of cognitive restructuring and increased emo-
tional expression is correlated with a decrease in post-traumatic stress
disorder (PTSD) symptoms. The interview extracts presented below
illuminate the problem solving approach adopted by a number of vic-
tims. In the vast majority of one-off victimisation cases, the victim is
more prone to look ahead to the future, find solutions to small prob-
lems and reorganise their routine accordingly, in contrast to simple an
complex poly-victims, who may take longer to establish cognitive or
emotional strategies of coping. This is the case across different variables,
such as age, sexuality, education and type of crime. However, among
our pool of interviewees, it was found that the male victims who were
subjected to one-off crimes were more inclined to rationalise and strat-
egise forward in small steps, as opposed to other interviewees who were
poly-victimised.
The case of interviewee 001, who was stabbed nine times by his then
wife, may be considered an example of a problem-focused strategy.
When asked about how he coped with the trauma, the ensuing stress,
and the health and mental implications, ID001 told us that:
I have a motorcycle for that [type of coping], so I’d strap my helmet on

and go for a ride and everything seems to disappear.
However, based on further discussion with ID001, his situation and

his coping mechanisms were more complex layered than this, as the
following extract highlights. Still, to adopt an immediate mechanism
such as this one, which on the surface may appear to align with the
60
disengagement typology (‘everything seems to disappear’), would sup-

port emotional coping by allowing the victim to ‘recharge’ and refocus
on small strategies, like relearning how to swallow or how to move for-
ward with short-term goals in a problem-solving orientated approach:
I: […] how you coped with that situation, would you be able to describe
your coping mechanisms or how you dealt with that process?
ID001: Well, when I left the hospital, I was taking eight Panadeine
Forte, three blood thinners and a sleeping tablet every day. I had a
nice blood clot in my forearm, so I had to get that out. And I was
stabbed in my arm, my bicep, my cheek, multiple times through my
back and my shoulders, I had nylon string in the back of my head
where the blade went under the back of my skull and hit my brain
stem. All of the muscles were cut in my neck, I had an artery from my
leg in my neck … so every time I turned it would be tight and pull
and everything, because my throat was full of stitches … yeah, I was
always hungry because my haemoglobin count would take weeks to
get back up … I used to have to hold my hand under my chin to sup-
port my head, if I was sitting down I used to end up putting my head
on the table because I just couldn’t hold it up.
I: So how did you cope with that?
ID001: I’m the worry-about-it-when-you-get-there kind of guy, it was
just life and it’s what I had to do … I had to learn to swallow differ-
ently because my throat was a different size now, so food I would nor-
mally chew, chew, chew and swallow … I could feel my throat expand
to get it through. I applied for therapy through my doctor and a men-
tal health assessment in May and I didn’t get into see a therapist until
August and I had two sessions with the therapist, but according to
them I didn’t really need therapy. Umm … they stated that I’m one of
those lucky people that can deal with the situation on their own.
I: Do you agree with that assessment?
ID001: Yeah, I believe that I feel fine. They stated that I might not need
therapy until we are right into the trial stage of days and days of it,
being dragged through it and ripped apart. But according to here
[VSS], I believe that the court is meant to provide me with counsel-
ling for that anyway. But don’t get me wrong, this is my whole situ-
ation, my wife tried to kill me and I had to fight to get my son back
and now I’m in pain every day, drugged out of my brain just to get up
61
and walk around and then I had a lot of family on my back, and then
I got my son back … and then I thought that I needed to see some-
body, but after the eight-week period between when I applied for it
and when I got it, I was fine and I am now.
The gradual step-by-step approach displayed by interviewee ID001

as an example of engagement coping that allowed his situation to
change and be more in charge of his situation. The pinnacle was when
he mentioned that he ‘got his son back’ as a great achievement, given
the overall physical and emotional circumstances. In another example
of engagement coping, interviewee ID002 adopted a strategy of plan-
ning in small steps through pigeon-holing. He was randomly cap-
sicum-sprayed while heading to an exam and he admitted that his
initial reaction was anger—an emotion that, if not overcome, may facil-
itate maladaptive strategies. Pigeon-holing may be criticised for putting
things into categories that are too narrow, and therefore be seen as dis-
engagement strategy, but it can allow the victim to move on and get
organised and reoriented in a constructive manner, which is more typi-
cal of an engagement coping method, as suggested by ID002:
ID002: I suppose I felt that I actually coped pretty well at the time,
because part of my make-up is that I pigeon-hole things, so in a crisis
you deal with the crisis and you’ll get through. And I did exactly that,
I went to hospital and sorted it out, contacted who I had to contact
… umm … then fortunately, the people that I had to contact at the
university were able to come and meet me, and bring my gear with
them, so that was no real problem.
Engagement coping was also adopted by male interviewee ID004,

whose daughter was killed by her partner.
ID004: I’m a very structured and logical person. I’m disciplined … in

some regards, perhaps a little obsessive-compulsive … not to any
degree of needing to be medicated, but my career and my … and
the way I conduct myself as a person in society has always been very
pragmatic in that I look at the pros and I look at the cons, I look at
the relationships and I try to draw logical and intelligent conclusions
62
from that and then learn from it and move on. So, that’s how I have
been successful in my working environment and I tried to apply
a similar approach in trying to understand what the hell happened,
because I was separated from my wife at the time … I wasn’t part of
the family unit in terms of close contact with my kids, and in particu-
lar my daughter that was murdered.
ID004 goes on to identify rationalisation, evidence-gathering and com-

partmentalisation as characterising his coping mechanism:
So, from the time we got to the hospital and got ushered into a side room
and briefed on what was happening, it was very critical … to getting
upstairs to where my ex-wife had been waiting, I walked in the room just
as the doctors were telling my ex-wife that she had passed away … so, I
think I’ve gone off on a bit of a tangent there with regard to the circum-
stances, but my coping mechanism for that was that it went from cool
and casual to completely shocked and unprepared and that the following
days, weeks and months I was trying to dissect how I went from being
completely ignorant of what was leading up to how it all happened and
the various roles that people had to play in it. Umm … I was trying to
gather my own evidence from whatever sources I could, which was lim-
ited, and piece it together in terms of the timeframes because I’m actu-
ally a professional planner so timelines are everything to me in terms of
working out cause and effect and determining interactions and so on …
And I tried to dissect it, reassemble it, digest it and evaluate it and all of
those things and through some of that I got some clarity and through
some I got obsessive. And not necessarily obsessive about understanding
the event, but also obsessive about some of the other things … like, I’ve
never been involved with a funeral and I had to learn that quickly … the
etiquette, the protocols, the eulogy and paraphernalia. But I also got a bit
obsessive over a shrine … and how and what I would hold onto as far as
remembering her … I got a little bit obsessive in my work as a distrac-
tion, probably distanced myself from my girlfriend a bit. I struggled to
reconcile the differences in my approach between my two children, and
how they were dealing with it.
[…]
63
I try to compartmentalise, and that really is my coping mechanism. It is

part of me, it is something that I am comfortable with. It is something
that I do naturally and I do quite well, eventually.
Victim ID004 also talked about the importance of opening up and

vocalising thoughts as a natural aspect of engagement coping:
Because I do firmly believe it myself, that the more I talk about it the
stronger I get in processing it, you know. It is a bit like exercise, to me
anyway. The more you exercise, the stronger you get in dealing with it.
It is clear that ID004 imposed a structured, temporal order on the

crime and events surrounding it as a means of developing a sense of
control over the traumatic occurrence. This is opposite to the intrusive
and scattered flashbacks that are more commonly associated with PTSD
(Frieze et al. 1987; Ullman et al. 2013) and tend to augment fear.
Victim ID005, a man who was gay-bashed suddenly in a shopping
centre, talked about engagement coping as a better way to deal with vic-
timisation than disengaging and doing nothing. But at the same time he
referred to a problematic aspect of engagement coping—while there is a
willingness not to ‘stop’ living, there is a need for predictability:
ID005: Because as a victim … you learn to live with the victimisation,

you don’t sit in the corner crying. I mean a lot of people do obviously,
but a lot of people don’t either. A lot of people have a bit more respect
for themselves. But the weaknesses that come out of that become nat-
ural as well. You know the wanting to be aware of predictability of
life, knowing the party that you’re going to be going to, you’re going
to know everyone that’s gonna be there, you wanna know what will
happen in the next hour … you do want some kind of, um, settle-
ment in everything you do. And I still have that. I still find it hard to
go to a party and feel totally comfortable. Go to a dinner party and
feel totally comfortable. I’ve got to know what I’m going into. I’ve got
almost like reconnoitre. It sounds mad, but it’s true.
64
ID005 also spoke of ‘feeling stronger’ as his counselling sessions pro-

gressed and he increasingly focused on his studies as a way to progress
towards achieving specific aims:
Because I was studying cultural science, studies and social studies, and
um, sociology. And it made me … If I didn’t have this I wouldn’t been
objective enough to do that kind of study. So now actually, I’m stronger
as a student, doing sociology than I am … than I was because of it, which
is great. So you gotta see the good things of it … than the bad, because
then, you know, you’d just be a victim to it.
Showing a range of emotions, including sadness expressed through

crying as a way to externalise one’s feelings, was the coping strategy
adopted by interviewee ID010, representing an example of a construc-
tive emotion-focused coping adaptation. ID010 is a poly-victim with a
complicated history of abuse, who adopted a mixed approach to coping
via both engaging and disengaging strategies. For example, she acknowl-
edges the occurrence of flashbacks, which are typically described as a
paralysing emotion causing detachment from routine and sometimes
from reality, but also she immediately details how she would tackle it:
ID010: I have a lot of flashbacks […], so I tend to ring helplines at one

in the morning and some of them aren’t great either, but at least it’s
someone.
Below we see the interviewee ID010 reflecting on the societal coding

of tears and crying as negative or weak; but, as shown in the extract
above, there is a sense of resoluteness, in this case it is about her shar-
ing with us the importance of openly expressing feelings as a therapeutic
aspect of recovery. Indeed, the interviewee expressed her regret for not
having cried enough, probably as an indirect response to perceiving the
behaviour as weak or to receiving signals from external parties that such
behaviour is not acceptable, in line with what discussed above in the
macro-analysis of coping strategies.
65
ID010: Unfortunately, I didn’t keep the crying up … that’s been one of

the main things that has helped me has been crying. I mean, people
see that as a weakness and I get upset when I see on TV when peo-
ple cry when something bad has happened and they say ‘sorry’ … I
just don’t understand why they are apologising, because they are just
doing a natural thing.
I: And it’s your way of coping in many ways?
ID010: Yes, it’s like they’re feeling bad because they’re crying and well,
actually, I can see why they say that because, in society’s eyes, they are
showing a weakness or whatever, but actually it is really good—bot-
tling it up is the worst thing.
[…], it is like a natural anti-depressant because I only believe that a
lot of depression isn’t a chemical imbalance in the brain, it’s just a lot
of stuck grief because there would be a lot of people—this is just my
opinion—but there’s a lot of people everywhere who haven’t grieved
for losses and then they wonder why they’re crying and ‘what’s wrong
with me?’, and it’s actually … there’s not anything wrong.
As in the previous case, resilience was often touched upon, whether

directly or indirectly, by victims who embraced an engagement coping
strategy, especially those with a long history of victimisation. The case
of ID013 is exemplary here—a male complex poly-victim whose most
recent trauma involved a domestic assault by a known person. ID013
reflected on his ability to adopt a positive narrative, a positive label—in
this case the label ‘survivor’—as a constructive way to move forward:
I: How much of your recovery would you credit to your own resilience?
ID013: […] In being kind to myself, I would say around 60–70% of
my recovery has to do with my mental resilience, my character. I even
wrote—I still [write a] journal quite a lot—and I remember, in fact I
pulled it out of my wallet only today a piece of paper where I wrote ‘I
am a survivor,’ and so that is how I see myself now, which is a contrast
to always wanting to see myself as that I shouldn’t [be] alive, to know
that I’m a survivor. It’s a very different way of seeing oneself.
66
The ability to accept oneself and one’s own thoughts is also part of the
narrative of focused strategy of coping, as evident in the case of inter-
viewee ID015, a woman who was abused as a child and spent many
years in therapy searching for ways to cope:
ID015: CBT [cognitive behavioural therapy] yeah, basic mindfulness.

Sort of a ACT [acceptance and commitment therapy], sort of let-
ting the thoughts, accepting the thoughts, letting them exist, instead
of pulling away from them or panicking from them or trying to shut
them down, which creates this obsession with the one thought, just
being like, ‘Oh yeah cool thinking about death, great that’s fine, I
can think about death as well as the kettle’ and you just sort of—It
naturally moves away instead of being your base of thought. So yeah
it worked, I mean it didn’t cure everything but the difference was so
noticeable just from major panic attack to anxiety of having a panic
attack, and still to this day it’s an issue for me … But having those
tools on board changed my entire life in perspective and other areas
I didn’t expect. My relationships got better, I made better choices for
myself, I started to just have emotional regulation and develop emo-
tional maturity and intelligence.
[…]
I have a role in protecting myself from all sorts of circumstances by
choosing better options for myself. Without taking on the blame of
the abuser’s actions.
For ID015, resilience was developed over time and through her experi-
ences, to build, as she put it, ‘value for myself ’:
ID015: As a child it was survival sex working, shoes, clothes, safe places
to sleep. And then as I got older I became aware of the sex industry as
a cash exchange and that also played a huge role in combination with
my therapy. Some of my therapy costs were covered by sex work, sex
work also contributed to my ability to place value on my body and
my time which had been taken away in child abuse and which obvi-
ously comes with its own set of complexities.
[…]
67
I was able to learn how to say ‘no,’ how to negotiate, that I can say
‘no’ because I didn’t think that that was a thing. So I met with a lot
of women who were like, you just say no, you just say this, you set
this, you own the room. So I learnt all these skills around consent
and developed value for myself that stopped me needing to seek out
sexual gratification to prove my template or you know like do any of
that, and I used that money to funnel into more therapy.
This case study is significant in highlighting the importance of time in

the analysis of recovery strategies. Crime can cause a disequilibrium of
emotions and expectations, and the situational demands can vary sig-
nificantly from person to person. This is especially the case for complex
poly-victims, among whom a reflexive narrative of coping (through
rationalising next tasks and internalising small achievements) may be
less prevalent or developed over a longer period of time.
Raising awareness and teaching clients how to develop coping strate-
gies has become a priority for counsellors, who can see that a long-term
commitment to any therapeutic regime is not sustainable for many cli-
ents for various reasons (such as time constraints, other commitments,
limited money and external influences, to cite a few). As Focus Group 1
(Adelaide) discussed:
I: So one of you before mentioned that the target is not the long-term
counselling but is the education and wellness. So teaching coping
strategies, is that what other people would agree with?
FG12 VSS004: I would agree, generally yes. That there’s lots of psy-
cho-education that we do as well as supportive counselling. And I do
some therapeutic counselling. And have had a couple of clients that
I’ve had on and off and from when they disclosed, they are both adult
survivors of sexual assault clients, so from when they disclose to the
end of the criminal justice process. So both of those clients have been,
um, up to two years, but at times there’s no regular contact it just
depends what’s happening for them. They may disengage for a little
while and then engage again when something is starting to proceed or
they need some additional help.
68
It is therefore critical for counsellors to engage with clients in what they

called ‘psycho-education,’ to enable the client to build the tools required
for engagement coping without the need for external counselling.
Avoidance and Disengagement Coping

Strategies
Disengagement coping refers to non-action or passive strategies aimed
at managing the trauma; typically these behaviours include self-removal
from potential ‘stressors,’ self-criticism and avoidance (Iverson et al.
2013). The aim of these behavioural strategies is to reduce the oppor-
tunities for the harm to be repeated and perpetuated. Therefore, in the
aftermath of the crime, the victim may experience an ‘impact disorgan-
isation phase’ (Frieze et al. 1987, p. 301), where disengagement strate-
gies, most of which are avoidance mechanisms, are adopted in the shock
absorption phase.
However, avoidance coping is understood to become ‘maladaptive’
over time and difficult to overcome (Wilson et al. 2012, p. 589). The
literature agrees that these avoidance strategies slow down and limit
recovery because they may reinforce distress and augment fear (Gutner
et al. 2006), for example, with the recurrence of flashbacks. Self-
isolation is also an important element in this context as irrational or
distorted beliefs are not shared with, and potentially addressed by, for-
mal and informal support groups. Negative feelings can cause, paralysis,
including the inability to resume one’s routine, losing one’s job, and the
inability to attend medical appointments or even leave the house. One
of our interviewees, ID009, was assaulted by a known person twice.
His removal of stressors is explained as a form of protection against
harm by others around him, but he lost his job as a result of ’ losing his
self-confidence:
ID009: I never used to feel vulnerable but since then [the first assault] I
do. And then this other one, that makes me feel vulnerable now even
in my own house. That’s why it is so bad. And everything I’m doing
is to try and get out of there, but it’s hard because I’m chasing my tail
69
… my income’s going downhill, and … I don’t know what to do, I

really don’t. If I had any hair I’d pull it out.
I: So what do you feel are your coping strategies? How do you best cope
with all of these events?
ID009: A lot of it is just denial or hiding it. You see, I got bashed on the
4th of August and my dad’s birthday is on the 10th of August and he’s
eighty-seven now, so we do tend to get together for that. And we all
had it planned that we were going to go to his birthday, but after the
bashing my eye was so black, my eye was red and so I just make an
excuse, you know, I rang my dad up and said that I wouldn’t be there
because I had the flu.
I: So you didn’t tell him about the bashing?
ID009: No, I couldn’t let him see me like that, because he would have
had a heart attack I reckon. And I didn’t tell my son until he invited
me up for tea one Wednesday night and it was actually … I think it
was a Thursday … anyway, I said I couldn’t make it because I had
something on. And he asked what it was and it was the day I went
to the hospital to have my eye fixed, and he pressed me, ‘What’s on?
What are you doing?’ So, eventually I had to tell him because I didn’t
want to lie and so I told him that I was going into hospital and of
course he wanted to know what I was having done. And so in the end
I told him that I got bashed, so that was the first time he had heard
about it and that was probably about ten days after, or maybe two
weeks after.
I: What I am hearing from you is that how you coped with that situa-
tion was to keep it within? Is that something you would have done
previously to try to insulate or protect your father or your son?
ID009: […] He [the son] thinks that there are so many things hap-
pening down here [where the victim lives] and so why don’t you get
out. So I just don’t tell him things. I just figure that I will deal with it
myself.
Interviewee ID006 was also a case in point in relation to paralysis and

avoidance. She was the victim of an assault by a stranger in a public
street and had a previous history of abuse:
70
ID006: No, he [husband] doesn’t come with me to any of the [medical]

appointments with me … he’d drop me off, but at first I wouldn’t go
anywhere unless my son was with me or he [husband] was with me.
I basically lost two jobs because of it, because I wouldn’t go. […] you
can’t trust people after something like that. You can’t be around that
many people.
[…]
I still don’t go very far and I don’t go out at night-time, even though
I got bashed during the day … and I very rarely come to the city
[centre].
I: You say that you haven’t been able to see a psychologist about
this yet?
ID006: No, I want to go though, because I really think that I need to.
Fear and avoidance usually have deep roots. This victim (ID006), for
example, revealed during the interview that she was physically assaulted
on many occasions as a young child in foster homes. When she returned
to living with her mother as an early teenager, her step-father physi-
cally assaulted her. She was later ‘thrown out’ of the house, aged fifteen,
because she fell pregnant.
ID006: Who are you going to tell? Basically, I grew up in kids’ homes
when I was a kid. In foster homes, welfare homes … whatever you
want to call them. Family group homes … whatever … And there was
abuse in them, like physical abuse. I remember that I was hit when I
was about three or four years old. And then when I was about twelve
or thirteen I went to live with my mum and I got abused by her part-
ner, so yeah … there’s my life.
What emerged in this study is that complex poly-victims like ID006 are
more prone to adopt a disengagement coping strategy. This is confirmed
by the experiences of our other interviewees, such as ID012, who was
a victim of sexual abuse with a long history of victimisation and drug
usage (complex poly). During the interview, she read extracts from her
diary of two decades ago, from which it emerged that she felt powerless
and wanted to block out reality and sleep through life:
71
ID012 (diary entry for Friday): saw … a psychologist, [I’m feeling] very
depressed and suicidal. I phoned a friend and talked to her. Put the
cats in animal welfare so they have a chance at living—because I had
three cats at the time—buy a bottle of Scotch and take pills and sleep
the weekend away. Hopefully I won’t wake up. [Name] phoned back
with numbers for … crisis care.
Went to markets, did some shopping and bought a bottle of Scotch.
[name of psychologist] phoned me and reassured me—umm … feel
better but exhausted, went for a walk then went to bed. Saturday:
slept badly and unable to concentrate on paper, even unable to lis-
ten to science show. Can’t concentrate on anything. Went to the city
to buy birthday present for friend, absolutely exhausted and dragging
my feet. Laid down in the afternoon because I started feeling dizzy,
forgot to eat, I keep doing that.
Exhausted but very agitated, can’t settle down. I can’t do anything and
am very confused. Developed a cold sore—went for a walk to calm
down. Sunday: slept very badly … umm … woke at 10 a.m., four
cups of coffee, very agitated—no wonder. Went back to bed at mid-
day. Awoke at 1:15, cleaned house … Looked for brown bears [?] in
the garden … 4–4:30…[..] started dinner and fed cats—5:30. Panic
attack started. Monday: exhausted and slept late, terrified about going
to the hairdresser in case I see [name]—
ID012: And that was what life was like. The panic attacks were terri-
ble—I’d end up in places and not know how I got there, or how long.
Interviewee ID014 is another example of a complex poly-victim with

a long history of severe trauma who has adopted disengagement cop-
ing strategies. Born in another country and adopted together with her
brother by an extremely abusive Australian man, she recollects years of
ordeal, including sexual and verbal abuse and forced drug intake, both
while living in the adopted house and after she left it:
ID014: He took me from [country], illegal adoption, I know it’s ille-

gal adoption. He smashed my head into concrete. He broke broom-
sticks over me and my brother’s bodies. He used to make us eat vomit
from the carpet. He used to try and drown us in filthy bath water.
He broke broomsticks over the soles of our feet and our hands and
72
our body and jump on us. So I have a lot of memory loss, because
I’ve been kicked into brick [inaudible ] and glass and that. […] So I’ve
got a lot of memory loss. I used to be loved in my country, but the
moment he came and got me, it’s like he just destroyed everything
of me and my heritage. I was really loved, I lived on temple food,
I grew up [in the] temple atmosphere and was on special diet. I never
had egg, I never ate meat, anything except for temple ‘presade,’ that
means bless offering. So, when this person came, he broke every rule,
he started giving me egg, he gave me meat, he would give me bacon,
he gave me this. Of course when I came to Australia I throw up.
[…]
I’ve been abused, tied up, gagged, raped up my ass, all this shit-raped
by kids and raped by adults, had drugs forced onto me, I didn’t know
what anything was, actually this person that I met he was a junkie
and I didn’t know anything what a druggie was, didn’t know what a
junkie was, didn’t know nothing, he acted bourgeois, I travelled the
world, I lived in France, so I was very, you know, spoke with air and
grace you know. But he was a junkie and he must of [sic] used all
my money because back then I didn’t use to spend any and I didn’t
have much, had some dumpy thing but I got paid and when he came
along it was like I had nothing and he was popping me, [inaudible ]
Rohypnol, [inaudible ], and he must have drugged me, he drugged me
actually I remember the first night he drugged me.
ID014 took years to scramble together a daily routine that provided her
with a sense of safety; yet her disconnection remained evident in many
ways, including through her inability to recount her daily routine:
I: Do you have a daily routine, a routine every day?

ID014: Yeah I’m starting to, I’m trying to go to sleep early everyday by
8:30 p.m., we used to go to sleep at the temple, they closed the cur-
tains at 8:30 p.m., and I go to sleep and then the deities, are Krishna,
they are statues but to me they are real, some people pray to Jesus,
they might have a statue or a cross and to them it’s real, you know, to
me god is real and so in the temple they have certain rest times so I’m
starting to, [inaudible ] gives me rest and things, so when I go home,
when I finish from here I see [VSS counsellor name] first, after and
73
I’m just gonna take rest and have a sleep and I go into a deep sleep,
I’ve been going into bit of a divine sleep.
After the interviews with the victims, the counsellors in the first focus
group (Adelaide) were asked to discuss the most prevalent negative feel-
ings or avoidance behaviours among their clients:
I: [Let’s talk about] key elements of dealing or coping with that trauma.
Are there other things that come up? Other emotions or sort of day-
to-day activities … What would be the most—obviously sleep is one,
um…
FG1 VSS007: Intrusive thoughts, flashbacks.
FG1 VSS005: I think anger.
FG1 VSS003: Anger.
FG1 VSS005: Anger is discussed regularly with clients.
This point was further discussed in the second focus group (regional).
What emerged is that there are not many victims who have no strat-
egies or coping mechanisms at all, but many of the strategies they do
adopt are deemed not appropriate for their recovery or for advancing
their recovery narrative:
FG2 VSS006: There’s no clear amount you can say what I see, you know,
clients with no strategy mostly. I don’t think that’s the case. I think
that sometimes even though they clearly have strategies that aren’t
working for them. To us, it’s affecting their ability to function or not
function, that’s what they’ve learned to do. They see that as actually
having a strategy. So, I don’t know, that’s just my thought but, um, it’s
actually hard to say that we see because we see them across the board.
Probably not so many that don’t have any particular strategies. A lot
of times by the time we get them they are linked in with some other
services—but sometimes and not always.
FG2 VSS002: And what I was just thinking there is sometimes that a
client may talk about a strategy that they have, but it might also be
one that they have developed on reflection. Now whether or not that’s
particularly useful or, really, but it’s part of their process that they are
going through. So they’ll talk about ok, so ‘how I’m thinking about
74
addressing things.’ You know, ‘how I’m coping with things or how I’m
moving on.’ Sometimes as a counsellor there is that decision about
how far you can kind of perhaps, um, I’ll use the word ‘challenge’
their strategy. I mean […] you know, it may not always look so useful.
But then again it’s their process and how you facilitate their process.
So yeah, it’s um, kind of varied there. I agree with [VSS004] that it’s
very varied in terms of the sort of clients that you have. And I’ve just
recalled one, and I’m going back a bit, about a client who … Initially
when she sought help it was both from a domestic violence service
and ourselves it was because of domestic violence. But as time’s gone
on she has been reflecting on what’s been happening to her and trying
to make changes in her life. She’s also recently revealed that she suf-
fered a child sexual assault at the hands of her father, as a very young
child, several times. And she was the eldest girl and how she protected
her sisters and things like that. And it’s really interesting watching
her because she now, and she was definitely using alcohol and talked
about her use of alcohol, and also her use of food. Eating as a strategy
of coping which kind of hasn’t come up because it’s not a substance
as such or a drug. But then eating is definitely something that people
use as a coping strategy. So she’s been really reflecting a lot on how
she in fact—and talking about strategies about how when she has the
thought, how she might interrupt that. And sort of talks to herself
about using a better way to deal with it. So she’s using journalling as a
way of doing that. Writing she’s finding extremely useful.
Re-establishing the routines and do/don’t rules for the purpose of

changing one’s narrative is an important element of the therapeutic pro-
gression, as highlighted by the first focus group (Adelaide):
FG1 VSS006: One thing that I use a lot with clients is the concept of
the trauma-world rules versus the now-world rules. Identifying and
drawing it, and in particular cases of DV, ‘when I did this, this would
happen to me,’ and identifying that they are still living by some of
those rules although the consequences aren’t there anymore, and that
can be really powerful to identify those differences and comparisons.
FG1 VSS007: I think often there is a real sense for women in those sit-
uations that hanging on to those rules will keep them safe. They’re
really attached to those ideas. And if they let go of those ideas, ‘what’s
75
gonna happen?’. ‘If I don’t stay on alert, if he ever does turn up again
then I’m not going to know what to do.’ And so part of working
those situations is educating people, that ‘fight, flight or freeze,’ it just
exists in you. If you need it, it will happen, it’s not going to not hap-
pen. But you don’t have to live with that at the ready all the time.
You can actually live differently. And that’s really tricky. I remember
I had a client who really articulated it and wrote it out in a map: ‘If
I blame myself then I know what to do. If I don’t blame myself then
I’m not in control. And then I have to accept that this world might be
okay, but sometimes bad stuff happens and I’ve got no control when
that’s going to happen.’ And that’s really tricky. So that kind of hold-
ing onto that, you know, ‘at least here I know what to do.’
FG1 VSS005: And that sort of ties in with some people’s shame iden-
tity. The shame identity is used as the cover and protection and it’s
a self-medicator, for exactly those reasons. ‘I know this world, this is
how it protects me, this is how it makes me think, feel, behave … I’m
gonna stay here.’
Self-Medication as a Coping Strategy

In the literature, self-medication has been associated with avoidance
coping (Khantzian 2003, 2009; Weiss et al. 2009; Hall and Queener
2011; Smith 2017), especially in the case of poly-victims who adopt a
disengagement coping mechanism (see, for example, Ullman et al. 2013
on lifetime trauma exposure and sexual abuse severity in childhood).
Khantzian (2003, 2009) proposes two self-medication hypotheses in
relation to AOD consumption. First, that those individuals who would
misuse AOD substances may experience higher levels of psychological
distress compared to those who do not abuse such substances. Second,
individuals would consume AOD substances, do so to alleviate specific
symptoms.
Starting with the first hypothesis, the survey has shown us an increase
in poly-substance use and a halving of the proportion of respondents
who did not consume any AOD substance after the crime incident.
Before the crime event, 57.8% reported at least one substance use, with
15.7% reporting poly-substance use, and 26.5% reporting no substance
76
Pre (%) Post (%)
57.8
56.9
29.4
26.5
15.7
13.7
ONE SUBSTANCE USE P O L Y- S U B S T A N C E U S E NO SUBSTANCE USE
Fig. 3.1 Overall patterns of consumption
use. After the victimisation, just over half (56.9%) still reported the use
of at least one substance, yet the figure for poly-substance use doubled,
at 29.4%, while the proportion of respondents reporting no AOD use
halved, at 13.7% (see Fig. 3.1).
Further, in proportion, more male victims (95.3%) had increased
their AOD consumption compared to their female counterparts
(79.7%). However, minimal (p > 0.05) connection was found between
increased AOD consumption and other demographic characteristics,
such as age, education and employment status.
More specifically, the use of each single category of AOD substance
increased after victimisation. The consumption of doctor-prescribed drugs
increased from 33.4 to 54.9%; the consumption of non-doctor-prescribed
drugs rose from 8.8 to 15.6%; the consumption of alcohol increased from
37.2 to 48.1%; and illicit drug use rose from 12.7 to 14.7%. This data
was intersected with other demographic characteristics and, again, the
most notable finding was the different consumption levels of males and
females. Male victims increased their consumption of alcohol and mul-
tiple substances, while female victims used a greater proportion of non-
prescribed drugs compared to male victims (see Fig. 3.2).
In terms of degree of change in consumption habits before and after
victimisation, the most notable level of increase occurred in the daily
consumption, moving from a pre-victimisation consumption of 9.8%
77
Pre (%) Post (%)
54.9
48.1
37.2
33.4
29.4
25.5
16.7
15.6
14.7
13.7
12.7
8.8
Fig. 3.2 Patterns of consumption before and after crime by AOD type
to 48%. This increase is almost five times the initial percentage. The
consumption of AOD substances decreased marginally after victimi-
sation in the other categories (weekly from 23.5% to 21.6%; monthly
from 17.6% to 11.8%; yearly from 9.8% to 4.9%). Further, we regis-
tered a noticeable change in frequency of consumption among those
who did not have a routine of using AOD substances (categorised as
‘never’) prior to the crime event, from 39.2% to 12.7%. This means
that less people ticked the ‘never’ category than prior victimisation and
therefore there was a large increase post victimisation in frequency of
consumption, indicating the use of new substances among non-users or
poly-substance users. In summary, the survey demonstrates that AOD
consumption increases after victimisation in terms of both type of sub-
stance and frequency of consumption (see Fig. 3.3).
In reference to the second hypothesis proposed from Khantzian
(2003), that AOD consumption occurs to alleviate specific symptoms,
the current literature on trauma refers to AOD consumption as a dull-
ing or deferring element typical of the disengagement coping strategy
(Flynn and Graham 2010; Guggisberg 2010; Morrison et al. 2011).
This point is looked at through the result of the interviews and focus
78
Pre (%) Post (%)
48
39.2
23.5
21.6
17.6
12.7
11.8
9.8
9.8
4.9
DAILY W E E K L Y ( 1-7 M O N T H L Y ( 8-3 0 YEARLY (FEW ALMOST NEVER
DAYS) DAYS) TIMES A YEAR)
Fig. 3.3 Patterns of consumption before and after crime by frequency
groups. Disengagement and AOD consumption were seen by the coun-

sellors interviewed for this study as a spiralling combination:
FG1 VSS003: Usually if they’ve been drinking or self-medicating for a

long time it creates more isolation against other people then it increases
the ‘no-one understands me, no-one gets me,’ and then it further leads
to a kind of reliance on substance, you know in order to kind of get by,
because it creates as many more problems as the trauma itself.
[…]
When I was working with [position and organisation named] they
would often come two, three years after the death [of relevant per-
son] and say, ‘I don’t know why I don’t feel better. It’s two years after
the death and I still can’t cope with it, and just realised that well, just
now I’ve stopped using my anti-depressants or whatever, and all of a
sudden these emotions are fed, so maybe I should go back and get
some more.’ Um, and it’s that talking to clients and informing them
about what is actually happening, for the first time that they’re actu-
ally feeling. Very often informs them as to what has happened in the
past because the GP has not … in my experience do not convey that
information.
79
Further, as revealed by the focus group discussions reported in the previ-

ous section, anger emerged as a key element within disengagement cop-
ing strategies. One counsellor in the Adelaide focus group observed that
anger and self-medication are often seen in combination, particularly
among male victims:
FG1 VSS005: Anger is discussed regularly with clients, um, and I think
anger and some of the self-medication goes together for some of
them. Um, I think the clients I have seen here, probably some of my
male clients … probably see that because they’re in a mindset where
they shouldn’t be, you know, seeing these things or they shouldn’t not
be coping … Um, they’ll tend to use their alcohol and things to help
with that, because it masks it and then they can just be one of the
boys again. I’ve had a cluster of fellows like that.
To add to the experience of the counsellors in our focus groups, the

vast majority of our one-to-one interviews with victims support the
literature findings about those adopting a disengagement mechanism
are more prone to consume AOD substances as a coping strategy.
During the ‘impact disorganisation phase’ (Frieze et al. 1987, p. 301),
those victims who would later adopt an engagement coping mecha-
nism, augment their consumption. As a point in case, ID004, who
have later rationalised and focused his responses and actions in a more
engaging and constructive manner, initially began to consume one bot-
tle of Scotch per week after his daughter’s murder. He reflected on the
adopted drinking habit:
ID004: […] I don’t think it is excessive, but the doctors will probably
tell you that none is better. I don’t know. I’m not concerned about
it, but I’m mindful of it, but again that’s my process. I’m looking at
cause and effect … I don’t think it is getting worse, and there was
probably a period where I was drinking more heavily … and that
would have been in the first six months. But since then I am back to
what I think is a reasonable level.
Additionally, it has been observed that those who consume AOD sub-
stances to cope with distress, or because they believe it will reduce their
80
stress or help them achieve certain targets display more PTSD symp-
toms. And this would be the case across the spectrum of simple/com-
plex poly- and simple victimisation. Examples of each are considered
below. What emerges from the present research is that in most cases the
victim has increased their consumption of alcohol and/or other drug
substances, whether legal or illegal. But they have incorporated the con-
sumption into their routine and rationalised it in different ways.
Starting with simple victimisation, as opposite to poly-victimisation,
we look at two cases in particular. In the first case, the male interviewee
had a history of depression, a brother who was killed in a home inva-
sion, and a sister who has struggled to cope and turned to drugs. At
the time of the interview, he was looking after his sister’s daughter over
the school holiday period and had been caring for his sister’s daughter’s
infant baby for a number of months. He explained:
ID007: When mum passed away she [sister] had a bit of a bad spell,
then got over that and she was doing alright until my brother was
killed and then she just lost it. She’s turned to drugs and drinking.
[…]
Well, I started hitting the bottle a bit […] just after the funeral [of
my brother].
[…]
I: But your wife thought that you were drinking too much?
ID007: Yeah.
I: So how much would that have been?
ID007: Ah … probably … I usually would have, like because I go out
on a Wednesday night I would have a can of Bundy … Bundaberg
[rum] and cola … and that would be all that I have all week. But just
after my brother’s funeral, I was drinking three to four nights a week,
for about six months.
I: And how much would you be drinking a night?
ID007: I would have drunk about three or four cans of the Bundy.
I: Right, but that was a lot for you?
ID007: It was. Through this, my wife had come to Victims of Crime.
The following extract provides another example of disengagement cop-

ing by a simple victim, where the interviewee discussed her long-term
81
consumption of prescribed drugs. Her nephew, the son of her sister,

was killed when was still very young. The death of the boy has never
been a topic of conversation in the family and it is all bottled up, as the
interviewee observed. She had been prescribed sleeping tables and taken
them for three decades:
ID011: They gave me the sleeping tablets. I had the sleeping tablets
and if I could just go into a deep sleep at night and not dream, not
think then I was ok, I could manage during the day. My GPs that
I saw didn’t really want to talk about it, they were happy to give me
script and didn’t really want to talk about it so I happily went on year
after year with the scripts and I have not slept without those tablets
for thirty-two years.
We now move to consider examples of poly-victims, and their avoid-

ance coping and AOD consumption. Interviewee ID009, a simple
poly-victim, reflected on his AOD consumption as a coping mechanism
that formed part of his disengagement recovery strategy:
ID009: I know that’s exactly what it is. I’ve got no motivation, and
you know, the coping mechanism—the alcohol—I’m smart enough
to know this, but I can’t get out of it … it’s been eighteen months
now and I reckon in that eighteen months I’ve probably spent maybe
a dozen days or evenings sober since then … maybe a little bit more,
but it wouldn’t be much.
[…]
I: Since the bashing, you have felt that each of those categories [alcohol,
marijuana, medication] has increased substantially?
ID009: Yeah, all of them.
I: For the purpose of what? How would you say that you use those
things?
ID009: To numb the pain yeah, the physical pain … and well the pain
of being, of feeling lonely and alone … See, even at home I screwed
the door shut.
I: Is that something you do every night?
ID009: Yeah. I undo it in the morning so I can get in the back door,
when I come home if I have to go in that way.
82
We now move to complex victimisation case studies. Interviewee ID006

admitted that her consumption of AOD had increased after the trau-
matic event:
ID006: [before the event] I’d smoke a bong … and maybe have about
twenty in a day, easy.
[…]
After I got bashed I was just constantly smoking, like all of the time.
I: So comparatively, how many a day?
ID006: Maybe fifty a day, something like that … it just stopped my
mind thinking so much…
I: And how long did that go on for?
ID006: Umm … probably like a year.
[…]
I still get anxiety attacks depending on where I am and what I am
doing … something will trigger it and I’ll have a little panic attack.
But yeah, I don’t always run a bong to fix it, you know. You can’t
always do that, because I’m not always at home.
ID012 represents another example of a complex poly-victim who has

adopted a disengagement coping strategy in response to a long history
of trauma and AOD consumption. She is a poly-victim with a long his-
tory of sexual and physical assault. The extract below suggests that the
interviewee, on reflection, sees her AOD consumption as an important
coping mechanism to accomplish other life-important tasks such as
schooling, training and eventually being employed in a stable position.
I: And how did you cope with the stress?

ID012: Drugs.
I: What kind of drugs were you taking?
ID012: Street drugs, marijuana, magic mushrooms … whatever I could
get my hands on. It was just so I didn’t feel anything anymore. Every
day. Really, up until … umm … I went to … overseas in 1978, and
I got very sick overseas and so sick in fact that I couldn’t use drugs
anymore … or drink. I caught some cholera … so I was so sick that
I couldn’t use drugs or alcohol for quite some time. So that was a
period of time that I couldn’t use … I just couldn’t do it. And ah,
but eventually once I’d recovered somewhat, I started using again but
83
not quite to the same extent. Except until the final exams came and I
started using heroin…
I: So what happened next?
ID012: I tried to commit suicide, and ended up in Hillcrest [hospital]
for just a short time, a few days … and ah, but then the heroin was
out of my life at that stage and so I eventually just went back to mar-
ijuana and stuff like that I could cope with. But that was my second
time with heroin addiction, because when I was in Melbourne at the
university and arts school I got an addiction then.
I: So what is your understanding of self-medication? Why were you
doing it?
ID012: Blocking out … just forgetting … pretending that it didn’t
happen.
I: And did it work for you?
ID012: It did. Otherwise I couldn’t have studied … I couldn’t have …
like, I started working in the public service in ’83, and I couldn’t have
done that otherwise.
I: And so when you were out of the drugs, how did you cope then?
ID012: I was never out of the drugs, except heroin, I depended on
somebody else for heroin.
I: So you never used prescribed drugs?
ID012: Oh yeah, I used prescribed drugs [too].
In the above cases, the victims see the purpose of AOD consumption as
either to block memories or to achieve short-term and, in some cases,
long-terms goals. Since ‘disengagement coping’ involves disconnecting
the individual from the victimisation, self-medication plays a complex
role within an unfolding victim-survivor narrative. In this context,
self-medication acts as dulling or deferring tool that may be utilised
to the advantage of the user. For poly-victims, as we have seen above,
self-medication as a form of avoidance or detachment has played role in
adopting and negotiating a survivor identity (Jordan 2013). Therefore,
how an individual responds to trauma is linked to a unique life trajec-
tory. In reference to ID012, for example, a comment made by a coun-
sellor in the regional focus group helps with understanding that, even in
the most distressing situations, AOD substances can function as a sur-
viving mechanism and help the user to achieve certain goals:
84
FG2 VSS005: I think that there are also other clients that see their, let’s
say, for example, alcohol use, as a surviving mechanism as well. So
[they] actually see their recovery as quite positive. And the use of alco-
hol is actually part of what they do to survive. You know, so the recog-
nition around what they might be doing isn’t necessarily an unhelpful
coping mechanism but it’s what I actually what I need to do to actu-
ally make sure I get up tomorrow or make sure I survive the next
week or, you know, have different kinds of lenses on what that means.
This aligns with the opinion of most of the counsellors in both focus
groups. Counsellors were asked to reflect on the prevalence of AOD
consumption as a coping mechanism, based on their professional expe-
rience and observations. The responses below refer to AOD as a mem-
ory-blocking mechanism as well as a way to cope in the short or long
term:
FG1 VSS008: I think it’s really dependent on the crime. So, like, you
were saying about recent homicide, those people are supported and
told about all the different services they can access pretty much from
the get-go. When you’ve got adult [survivors] of child sexual abuse,
they’ve been dealing with the shame and the guilt and the embar-
rassment for so many years. And, they’ve tried to find a way to get
through each day, let alone get through those years, that maybe some
of that shame and guilt comes up in them not being able to disclose
what [AOD] they’ve been taking because they haven’t known the sup-
ports to access, there’s … and they’ve lived a lot longer trying to …
holding all that trauma with them. I think it really depends on the
type of crime that someone’s experienced as to whether they’re block-
ing stuff out or coping day to day.
FG2 VSS003: To me it’s coping, and I find that some of them use it to
escape the memories, you know, of the trauma and abuse.
FG2 VSS001: I have had a client who, um, avoids … she self-medicates
otherwise, because alcohol would actually relax some of those barriers
she had put up, and she could actually remember a lot of the child
sexual abuse she endured.
85
In the second focus group (regional), it was also pointed out that AOD
consumption may be more prevalent at risk times, for example when
the court hearing was approaching, allowing the victim to cope with the
hard times:
FG2 VSS004: And I guess for me, it’s about how it [AOD] affects their
[victims’] ability to function. At times it can vary depending on what’s
happening in their life. Particularly if it’s leading up to criminal jus-
tice, which I’ve just had an example of—a trial. A lot of people find
that their coping around that time is, um, a risk time for them. So
there may be additional self-medication that’s happening. If it’s cer-
tainly ongoing and spiralling out of control and they’re not able
to control what’s happen[ing] I refer them to a DASSA [Drug and
Alcohol Services South Australia] nurse that we have here in [men-
tions region] or another program.
[…]
FG2 VSS004: I can use a current client as an example that I’ve worked
with on and off for a couple of years. She had quite a few suicidal
attempts and she was admitted and detained and worked with several
professionals and continued to seek some support here. Also leading
up to the trial we have … we’ve done preparation for court and those
sorts of things, but she has made quite a deal of progress in that time,
but as I’ve said, if something happens in the process where perhaps
the perpetrator is not been [found] guilty, and there’s that feeling of
not being believed and self-loathing that she has about herself, she
returns to self-medicating. But having said that, she has come a long
way with that, and is seeking medication with the DASSA worker.
And was quite positive about going to court, even come to the point
where she’s forgiven the perpetrator. However, now that she’s down
there and given evidence now it’s cross-examination and she’s not
coping at all. Because it, again, brings up those thoughts and beliefs
about not being believed. Just a reliving and disassociating in court
when she’s being cross-examined, and just feeling very, very vulnera-
ble. So I guess it just depends on what’s happening in their life at the
time. And total lack of support in any other form from this particular
person, which I think just with the adult survivors, I’ve noticed with
most of them that I’ve worked with in experience in this job is isola-
tion and lack of other substantial support from family or friends.
86
Still, it emerged that most of the counsellors expressed the view that
self-medication does not help with the shift from a disengagement cop-
ing mechanism to an engagement coping mechanism, as is evident in
the extract below:
FG2 VSS006: I can’t think of any person that I have supported that
has shifted from victimised mentality into survivor mentality. That
it’s always remaining one or the other. And as a very, very general-
ised observation that the, um, self-medicating tends to fall under the
category of the people that are holding onto, you know, seeing the
world through that victimised mentality and not so much the survi-
vor mentality. That could be quite an overgeneralisation, but reflect-
ing on some of the clients that I can think of, [who] do self-medicate
and their mindset, it’s very much still in the victimised mentality.
Nevertheless, the situation may change according to a number of vari-

ables (including type of crime, personality, validation and network) as
highlighted by the counsellor below:
FG2 VSS004: I think the clients with complex trauma certainly seem to
have more … self-medicating … Although it’s hard to say. It depends.
You can have a client come in, depending on their background and
their ability to cope or function, with less complex trauma, and isn’t as
great as those with complex [pause] … I don’t know, I don’t see any-
thing there that in my experience can indicate that one is more than
the other—if that makes sense. But there are certainly, in terms of
patterns of behaviour, those risk times when something’s happening,
particularly in the criminal justice system, for instance, or an adult
survivor of sexual assault, when court’s approaching or the perpetrator
may be going to be arrested. Those risk times can affect their ability to
function. Which has just happened with one client over the last week.
She’s at court at the moment, but she has been detained because she
was going to self-medicate overnight, and suicidal ideation because she
didn’t think she could continue but um … So I think, other than that,
leading up to that time she had been doing really well. And when she
decided that there was an issue and that she wanted to start drinking
again and the trial approached, she was referred to a professional to
help with that, so we work in conjunction with that other professional.
87
This extract suggests that the provision of support to victims during risk
times represents the way forward to reduce self-medication and support
the stability of the victim-survivor mentality.
Conclusion
This chapter has examined engagement and disengagement coping strat-
egies, and applied it to the context of self-medication. From analysis of
the findings of our interviews with victims and counsellors, it emerged
that self-medication is a dulling and deferring tool that may be used to
achieve short term and long term goals.
All the interviewed victims have developed individual and social
defence strategies to deal with the trauma they have experienced and
their everyday routine. However, some have adopted avoidance coping
mechanisms, which includes AOD consumption. In these disengage-
ment coping scenarios, self-medication often—but not always—plays
a significant role in preventing the victim narrative being transformed
into a survivor narrative. As expected, each situation has its own com-
plexities and each individual responds in line with their age, sex, life
experience and validation through their network. As it emerged in our
studies, the presence of a suitable listener which can offer validation of
the victim’s experience and narrative, is a point worth of further consid-
eration. The next chapter looks at support in more detail.
Notes
1. This terminology is explained in Chapters 1 and 2. Simple victimisation
is a one-off incidence of crime, simple poly-victimisation is a repeat and
different victimisation, and complex poly-victimisation is a repeat and
different victimisation with historical ramifications.
2. ‘FG1’ refers to Focus Group 1 and ‘FG2’ refers to Focus Group 2.
88
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4
Validation—Informal and Formal Support
in Narratives of Recovery
Introduction
As a result of experiencing a traumatic incident, a victim’s perception
of self undergoes a process of significant and ongoing transformation,
which is influenced by many factors, both internal and external. The
potential loss of trust and faith in others—including those in one’s
closer social circle as well as people in the wider society—is one of the
key direct effects of victimisation, as identified by Shapland and Hall
(2007, p. 178), together with other consequences such as the emotional
impact (for example, fear, anger and depression) and changes to one’s
lifestyle and routine aimed at avoiding or minimising further victimisa-
tion. Therefore, the presence of others in the victim’s life becomes a cen-
tral point of reference, and the type of support they receive—and how
such support is perceived—is crucial to the development of the victim’s
recovery narrative.
This chapter engages with the validation that stems from a victim’s
relationships with others in the context of both formal and infor-
mal networks. The chapter understands informal and formal sup-
port, respectively, as support received from the inner circle of family

92
and friends and that provided by agencies, such as police, health and
counselling providers, and victim support services.
Interaction with other parties becomes of symbolic importance to the
victim in that their status can be approved, denied, possibly reoriented
and reorganised according to the victim’s experience of the collective, or
endorsed through criminal justice proceedings, counselling therapy and
other encounters. Seeking validation and a recovery narrative is often a
lonely journey, even in the context of encounters with others of a for-
mal or informal nature, but being listened to is a validating experience
that helps the victim to establish a recovery narrative. There is consen-
sus in the literature that finding a recovery narrative is a constructive
step towards incorporating and assimilating the victim’s traumatic expe-
rience into their life and routine, as it helps the victim to reflect on and
shape their identity and has a positive impact on their mental health
(Androff 2012; Barnes 2013; Frieze et al. 1987). This ‘realigning of the
self ’ (Abrahams 2007) is considered crucial for dealing with the trauma,
processing the facts and emotions related to the trauma, and poten-
tially finding a way to move forward. In such a process, having anyone
to bear witness to one’s abuse and losses in a positive and constructive
manner is necessary and therapeutic (Abrahams 2007).
For the victim, finding one’s recovery narrative is different from giv-
ing testimony in support of the traditional aims of the criminal justice
process (McGarry and Walklate 2015). Yet Wemmers (2009) refers to
the expectations of recognition and validation that victims frequently
have when entering the criminal justice system. This expectation of
being offered a platform for reconciliation and therapy is in sharp con-
trast with the reality of the role of victims within the criminal justice
process (Fenwick 1995; Kirchengast 2006; Doak 2008). Restorative-
based interventions have sought to introduce a more meaningful expe-
rience of the criminal justice process for the victim (see, among others,
O’Mahony and Doak 2017). Yet, despite the progress made in restor-
ative justice, it remains challenging to reconcile the victim’s need for
validation through a therapeutic experience. This is especially the case
in the current socio-political environment where restorative justice has
not managed to shift the focus of the neoliberal aims underpinning the
criminal justice system: ‘as the demands of neo-liberalism have taken
4 Validation—Informal and Formal Support …
93
hold, so has the need to ensure that the legitimacy of, and support for,
justice is maintained’ (McGarry and Walklate 2015, p. 140). In such a
climate, the victim’s needs and expectations would still come second to
the just-deserts and similar individual responsibility’s concepts rotating
around the role of the offender.
The first section sets up the basis for the discussion on formal and
informal networks with reference to the findings of the survey. It moves
on to discuss formal and informal networks in more detail using the
interview and focus group results. Here we see that the victims’ expecta-
tions of validation through encounters with the police and other formal
agencies of the criminal justice system are a tangible outcome of this
study, as discussed in the second section of this chapter. In the third
section, the discussion then considers the victim’s search for a recovery
narrative through informal encounters.
This chapter concludes with the finding that both formal and infor-
mal networks play a crucial role in supporting the victim’s incorpora-
tion of their trauma into their life and, potentially, achieving a form of
recovery. The evidence collected in this study suggests that informal net-
works represent a more reliable and consistence source of support.
Formal and Informal Networks

Developing one’s narrative is an important step in the victim’s jour-
ney towards an incorporation of the trauma into one’s life and possible
recovery. The need for validation is a direct result of the feeling of vio-
lation caused by the traumatic experience with the perpetrator (Elliott
et al. 2014). Feeling disempowered, disconnected and a lack of control
over one’s own life and narrative is a potential consequence of a trau-
matic experience, and victims, through their narrative, often see them-
selves as objects of the perpetrator’s perspective, rather than active
subject in shaping their life narrative. This can be so internalised that
the vocabulary choice of the victims renders themselves a passive ref-
erence of the perpetrators’ ‘speech,’ removing themselves from being
object of their own speech (Androff 2012; Bal et al. 1999). Grounding
the self in the present and maintaining a routine are important steps
94
in the process of recovery. The presence of a suitable listener—a person

who is emotionally and attentively able to listen to the victim’s account
of their trauma, and its impact on their mental and physical state—is
also essential for the victim’s recovery. This is because one’s narrative has
been broken and needs to find a way of restoring the personhood. Bal
et al. (1999) talk about a ‘suitable listener’ as ideal for this constructive
exchange. The ‘listener’ may belong to a social circle of family, friends or
colleagues (an informal support network), or to an agency that provides
support to the victim via a formal network, such as the police, courts,
victim support agencies and health practitioners. The findings on vali-
dation offered by a suitable listener, whether via an informal or formal
network, is a topic that has been addressed ambiguously in the literature,
especially in reference to the benefits and consequences of validation for
victims (Kunst et al. 2015), and is in clear need of further research.
For the purposes of this research, we also aligned alcohol and other
drug (AOD) consumption pre and post trauma with validation gained
through support. The starting point was to consider whether there was
a direct or indirect connection between any type of support and AOD
consumption. In previous studies, it has been suggested that social sup-
port contributes in a positive way to reducing or delaying AOD con-
sumption, rather than preventing it altogether (Danielson et al. 2006;
Dore et al. 2012; Ullman 2003). This position provided a benchmark
against which to test the collected empirical data.
To explore and test the relationship between forms of support, the
value of listening, and validation, the survey and interview questions
were designed to elicit answers on these matters. In this section, the sur-
vey results are briefly outlined before a discussion of the interviewees’
responses is presented.
According to the survey results, the vast majority of participants
(81.4%) actively sought a form of assistance, with most of this group
seeking a combination of informal and formal support. A small per-
centage of participants sought either only formal support (11.8%) or
only informal support (3.9%), with a small number (2.9%) not seeking
any type of support. The characteristics of the pool of support seekers
cut across a number of variables (demographics, type of AOD and fre-
quency of consumption, single or poly-victimisation) (see Fig. 4.1).
95
any support sought only formal support only informal support no support sought
Fig. 4.1 Support sought by victims
From among the participants who sought assistance emerged a pos-

itive perception overall of the type of support received, with informal
support being assessed slightly more favourably (at 66.7%) than for-
mal support (at 60.8%). The remaining participants within these two
datasets offered a more fragmented view, depending on the type of
support—a point that is significant in reflecting further on the deter-
minants of validation. In the case of informal support, the remaining
33.3% of participants were split almost equally between reporting a
negative experience (11.8%) and reporting mixed perceptions (11.8%),
with 9.7% not responding. In terms of formal support, a higher num-
ber of remaining participants reported mixed perceptions of their
experience (25.5%) or a negative experience (11.8%), with 1.9% not
responding (see Fig. 4.2).
The survey found a very low association (p > 0.05) between type of
support, perception of support and level of AOD consumption. And
this result cuts across demographic variables such as gender, ethnicity
and level of education. This means that the survey instrument alone
was not able to demonstrate that a more positive perception of sup-
port is associated with a lower or delayed level of AOD consumption,
thus not supporting the initial hypothesis formulated for this research
(see Chapter 2) based on the existing literature. The current literature
96
Fig. 4.2 Perceived response to type of support
(Danielson et al. 2006; Dore et al. 2012; Ullman 2003) highlights the
importance of social network in reducing, or delaying, the severity of
AOD consumption. Therefore, some level of support may reduce the
development of AOD habit, which, as we have discussed in Chapter 3,
is linked to avoidance coping strategies (Ullman 2003). Our lack of
statistically meaningful connection between type of support, perception
of support and level of AOD does not deny the existence of an increase
of self-medication after the crime. The survey demonstrates that more
than half of the participants (55.9%) either began consuming AOD
substances or increased their AOD consumption level after the trauma,
while 40.2% did not change their consumption habits. Such behav-
ioural changes were explored further in the interviews. This offered us
an opportunity to explore the type and perception of support received
to test in greater depth whether the presence of a network was a factor
influencing the modification of behaviour.
Formal Support
The presence or lack of formal support is important in terms of validat-
ing elements of the victim’s narrative. The potential for secondary vic-
timisation is often raised in relation to the distress experienced by the
97
victim as a result of their involvement in the criminal justice process.

This does not refer only to the victim reliving their traumatic experience
when offering an account of this experience in trials or police interviews.
It also encompasses a broader sense of the victim being ‘let down’ by the
authorities—for example, by not being treated sympathetically, kept
informed or believed (McGarry and Walklate 2015). This ‘let-down feel-
ing’ frequently remains a strong and significant experience for victims
throughout this process and shapes the construction of their narrative.
And it is not limited to encounters with criminal justice agencies but also
with other organisations with which the victim meets in a formal setting,
such as counselling and health practitioners and victim support agencies.
The section will now consider the point of formal support through
the interview and focus group findings. The interviewees’ reflections on
their formal encounters are divided into subsections below according to
the type of support received and their perception of it.
Police
Encounters with the police were often discussed by the victims in the
interviews, far more than were other criminal justice agencies, and pre-
dominantly in negative terms—with a number of exceptions (see sec-
tion below on ‘Police strategies for validation’).
For victims, the police represent the gateway to the criminal justice pro-
cess, acting as a first point of contact—hence the prevalence of references
to the police in this study. The interaction with the police is of particular
importance in supporting or undermining a victim’s self-esteem post vic-
timisation: trust in the police, feeling that one’s voice and contribution to
the evidence are important, being reassured of protection and other key
elements play an important part in shaping the recovery narrative of the
victim (Elliott et al. 2014; McGarry and Walklate 2015). Therefore, the
initial and subsequent encounters with the police may have a positive or
negative impact on the victim’s mental health (Kunst et al. 2015).
In the first instance, the negative perception of encounters is analysed
as a potential source of anxiety or of the ‘let-down feeling’ referred to
above. This can lead to a perception that ‘nothing is being done’ by the
police, which was identified a number of times during the interviews.
98
Often the perception that ‘nothing is being done’ is closely related to

a feeling of not being taken seriously. The following extract from inter-
viewee ID009 is an example of this. The victim, when lodging a com-
plaint with the police, realised that the police were not taking any notes.
At a later stage, when another incident of assault took place, the victim
found out that no record of the first episode had been filed. At the end
of the quote below, the interviewee reflects on the possible reasons why
he was not taken seriously—specifically his AOD consumption:
ID009: I did ring the police and I spoke to them pretty well out in front
of my house and they talked to me, but they didn’t write anything
down, nothing was written down. Two guys talked to me, but they
didn’t write anything down. I said that I reckon he had been waiting
for me, and I’m pretty sure that he was … and they sort of nodded
and asked, ‘What do you want us to do about it?’ And so I said that
I want you to arrest him … and they said, ‘No worries,’ and off they
went and I never heard another thing about it. Now, when this sec-
ond bashing happened, I queried them about it. I asked whether they
had a report from the first one and she said, ‘No, there’s no report,’ so
obviously they didn’t put any paperwork in, they didn’t do anything
… they just sat on their hands. In their defence, I suppose, in some
way it’s because I told them at the time that I’ve had a skinful, I’m not
sober or anything…
Another interviewee (ID005) was taken aback not just by the lack
of support he received but also by the feeling that the police were
condescending:
ID005: The police … yeah, the police were really gruff with me. I found
them almost like it was my fault … They came and saw me there, and
they came to my place, and they treated me like I deserved it.
[…]
I did ring the police that one day actually, to find out if they had
found the people … and they treated me kind of … offputtingly.
I: Right, so you stopped of course, further…?
ID005: I just stopped [reaching out to the police] yeah, I just didn’t [sic]
be bothered. Because, you know, there’s a part of you that wants to
know that those people have been caught.
99
The second focus group with Victim Support Services (VSS) regional
counsellors offered an opportunity to explore the issue of the relation-
ship between victims and the police, and counsellors reported observing
that victims frequently have quite negative perceptions of the police and
limited knowledge of the role of the police:
FG21 VSS002: It’s really interesting when you look at the police, for
example. So, some of the clients, particularly DV [domestic violence]
clients, you are connected with the family violence officers and are
getting quite a bit of significant support with that. But then there are
sometimes clients who say, ‘The police aren’t doing anything,’ and
often that is because they really don’t understand the role of the police
and also, while the police might arrest someone it’s not up to them to
keep them in jail, that’s actually the magistrate. Sometimes I’ve found
that I’m successful in explaining that to a client. But sometimes, it’ll
be madness, they’re not even listening, you know they’re so angry or
whatever, or frustrated but it’s actually very difficult to provide that
kind of psycho-education […] sorry more education about the crimi-
nal justice system.
This resonates with the victim’s experience cited in the following quote,
which reveals the victim’s expectation that the police’s role, duties and
general capability to investigate contrasts with reality, contributing sig-
nificantly to the sense of being let down:
I: And so the police came?

ID006: Yeah, and basically nothing’s ever been done about it.
I: Nothing has been done?
ID006: Oh, I got bashed outside a toilet block that had a camera out-
side it, but I found out that the camera is a dummy camera … so
that’s no help to anybody. They jumped into a taxi … I gave them the
taxi’s number and they couldn’t find them and so that was the end of
that.
In another segment of the VSS Focus Group 2, the counsellors reflected

on how they have observed an improvement in the way that victims are
treated by the police in cases where the victim had been previously iden-
tified by the police as an offender.
100
FG2 VSS003: I feel from when I started with VSS some years ago now,
the relationship having improved from the perspective of working
with police. I used to find sometimes in the early days that, particu-
larly if somebody had a little bit of a history with police in commit-
ting a crime and then they have become a victim, it doesn’t matter if
it was domestic violence or some other crime, there was a little bit of
stand-offishness from police. And perhaps that person wasn’t always
treated the way they should have been treated, as a victim, because
they had done something in the past. I feel that has improved over
time.
In contrast to the evidence of the negative impact of interactions with

the police on victims’ recovery narrative, there were a number of exam-
ples of positive perceptions of such interactions, revealed in the quotes
below.
ID002: The police was more about getting as much information as they
could, and they were supportive in the way that they had to be in
doing their role, and there’s nothing to pick on in terms of their role,
they were quite good.
ID011: The police were very good, they were supportive as much as they
could be, you know, in major crimes the detectives that worked on
the case … umm … they did what they could. You know, they said,
‘We’re here if you need us’ … but I managed.
ID013: Initially I found the police … were very supportive and inter-
acted with me very well. Strangely enough, it was enjoyable—I felt
that it was a positive experience, the support that I received from the
police.
The police have long embraced positive interactions with victims as a

strategy to validate victim experiences. According to the extant literature
(Elliott et al. 2014; Ruback et al. 2014, p. 592), these police strategies
for validation include the following practices:
• acknowledgement of the wrong done to the victim

• non-acceptance of the crime
• non-blaming attitudes
101
• relating to the victim as a person, independent of the case itself

• empathic listening, allowing victims to express their emotions and
share their story
• taking action to repair the lost feeling of safety.
As evidenced in the quotes above, a victim’s experience of police (dis)

interest is linked to their perceived credibility as a witness. Although
some police may be aware of and begin to adopt trauma-informed care
protocols when interacting with victims, the therapeutic and criminal
justice communities comprise distinct institutional knowledges and
demands that do not perceive victim-complainants through the same
institutional criteria.
With regard to taking up the quest for justice/validation through
police reporting while at the same time seeking to avoid secondary vic-
timisation, there is an argument that this leads to the development of
various adaptations, depending on whether there is first and foremost
an acknowledgement that the wrong occurred and the victim suffered
the harm. Police and prosecutors may not perceive the acknowledged
event as a crime or that the victim complies with the preferred purity
demanded by the adversarial system. Even where police and prosecu-
tors decline to pursue a case and therefore have no need to instrumen-
talise the victim as a credible witness, the manner of their interaction
with victims beyond that instrumentality counts a great deal to vic-
tims, as we and others have seen. Victims are acutely vulnerable as they
report and recount, as they can either have their dignity buttressed or
kicked out from under them (Elliott et al. 2014, p. 592; Ruback et al.
2014, p. 160).
At the same time, policing is bifurcated between service and law
enforcement, and subcultural preferences that police act as ‘crime fight-
ers’ and not ‘social workers’ will sometimes work against their solicitous-
ness towards traumatised victims (Chelimsky 1981, p. 86). Additionally,
while many victims’ rights reforms have been underway since the 1980s,
their implementation has been ‘uneven’ and many crime victims are still
not treated with respect (Wemmers 2013, p. 9). Doak (2008) found
that insensitive treatment was a structural problem caused by work-
ing cultures and perceptions that fail to acknowledge victims as having
102
a prominent role in the justice system. Parsons and Bergin (2010)

support this finding, claiming that the adversarial system has a focus on
contest and outcome which allows for aggressive questioning, confront-
ing the perpetrator and the imposition of victim blaming which targets
their credibility and validity. Dunn (2010) similarly acknowledges this,
suggesting that a possible way to safeguard the rights of victims and
avoid secondary victimisation is to have as their first point of contact an
agency whose primary focus is victim recovery, such as victim support
services.
Criminal Justice System Overall
Satisfaction with the justice system is another important element to be

considered when understanding victim recovery narratives. Kunst et al.
(2015) have identified the positive psychological impact on victims of
their positive perceptions of procedural justice. In contrast, the crim-
inal justice system can also cause further trauma, often referred to as
secondary victimisation. This is at times associated with the way the
adversarial system is organised, such that the credibility of the victim
can be doubted by the prosecutors and defence lawyers, whose aim is to
control the dialogues and the silences, for example what is given voice
to and what is not, and to bring to the surface any inconsistencies in
the witness’s account (Laxminarayan 2012). But the causes of such sec-
ondary victimisation are broader than this. Participation as a witness in
a trial, as well as the nature of their interaction with judges, prosecu-
tors, defence lawyers and other parties, is also of great significance to
the victim, because of their experience and perceptions of justice and
its impact on further traumatisation. And the victim’s expectation of
achieving satisfaction or justice is often misplaced in a criminal justice
system that is organised around the defendant. Thus, procedural justice
as it stands cannot adequately address the consequences of victimisation
that the victim seeks to rectify. Victim recovery is often bypassed in the
justice process, where the expectations of the victim are modified, mini-
mised and neutralised. In this regard, Parsons and Bergin (2010, p. 184)
have categorised dissatisfaction with the criminal justice system into a
number of elements:
103
• disappointment with minimal civil settlements, especially among

victims of domestic violence
• disappointment in not receiving an apology
• misunderstanding of the role of the defence lawyer as a victim’s advo-
cate, in the same way that the prosecutor advocates for the accused
• confusion about the external factors that may lead a case to be
dropped or settled, such as excessive caseloads or performance targets.
A number of interviewees expressed their dissatisfaction with how their

case had been handled (ID005, ID001, ID006, ID009), or how their
expectation of procedural justice was not met by the reality of their
experience. Interviewee ID005 summarised this point in the following
extract:
ID005: So, as happy as I was that it was over, I felt a bit ripped off … by
the system. I wasn’t angry, I was just glad that it was over. But I was
angry in a way that I didn’t get what I should’ve got.
I: Did you feel disenfranchised with … ?
ID005: Absolutely…
I: … with the police, with the courts… ?
ID005: Totally…
I: …with the lawyers?
ID005: Totally. Especially my lawyer. My lawyer acted like a lawyer
should. Which is cold and to the point, and that’s fair enough. But,
once we were in the … it didn’t happen in court it happened out
of court. And it was between … and a room very similar to here, a
boardroom. And it started off with my lawyer and their lawyer talking
about the party they went to last night … all best friends.
Another interviewee reflected on the lenient treatment their former

partner received from the criminal justice system after she stabbed him,
in relation to conflict over the custody of their child.
ID001: It’s been really sad actually, going back to the magistrate … yeah
the magistrate has allowed her to go to Melbourne with her sisters,
allowed her to go to Queensland for two weeks … I’m sure if I did
this [stabbing], I’d be incarcerated and I wouldn’t have made it even
to home, and I wouldn’t have been allowed to leave the state at all.
104
[…]
Y
eah, and the police apologised, they said, ‘Look, you’re the victim
twice in the space of a month because you were attacked and then
you had to fight to get your child back’ … it was weird, because my
son … obviously ‘nanna’ looked after my son, which is fine because
my mum was looking after me as I was in hospital and so it is still
‘nanna,’ but then it was like, ‘Can I have him back?’ And it was like,
‘Oh, no … you don’t have the paperwork’ … Sorry, what? And so my
son was then given to his aunty for care and was released to his mum,
but they were told that they can’t spend time together … but they
were all living in the same house. This is how things fly, and so that’s
why I scratch my head and wonder how the Magistrates’ Court fall
down. I mean, I’ve got multiple examples of this … it’s the equality
between men and women, I mean if I did what she did, there’s no
way that I would make bail … no way I would have been out for this
long, waiting for my trial.
Interviewee ID009 commented on how he felt forced into providing a

victim impact statement, with which he was dissatisfied, as well as the
lack of opportunity he was given to be present at the trial and to hear
the sentencing stage.
ID009: They made me do this … well, they didn’t have my arm behind
my back, but they made me do this victim impact statement. So,
I don’t know whether it … I mean, I’ve gone back and read it again
and it doesn’t read that well.
[…]

I would have loved to have been there when he got sentenced.
I would have been in the court, I would have sat right there.
I wouldn’t have said anything, but just to be there … but they didn’t
give me that opportunity. They never said that they think he’s plead-
ing guilty and that he’s coming to court on this day.
Social Workers and Victim Support Services
Social workers represent a significant mechanism for providing sup-

port to individuals facing challenges in their lives that impact on their
105
wellbeing. However, the extant literature points out that some victims
experience a degree of distrust and/or dissatisfaction in response to the
selective manner in which social workers offer support, thereby demon-
strating how social workers may either approve or disapprove of a vic-
tim’s choices. This inevitably has repercussions for how much or little
social workers support and encourage identity management, impacting
the actual victims’ validation and recovery (Barnes 2013; Keeling and
van Wormer 2012). Keeling and van Wormer (2012), in their analysis
of victims of domestic violence who have children, highlight how dis-
trust in social workers linked to a fear of child removal means that there
is often not a full disclosure of the abuse. This results in resentment
towards a system that is in theory supposed to help the victim but in
reality exacerbates the victim’s sense of powerlessness. Only where social
workers approve of the victim’s goals is there evidence of a more positive
association with this institution (Barnes 2013). In this regard, it should
be noted that the observations on social workers provided by our inter-
viewees was mostly about social workers from victim support agencies,
such as our research partner VSS.
Victims are often uncertain as to whether they want a more struc-
tured form of support and, indeed, are ambivalent about whether they
need any type of formal support at all—as indicated in the following
extract:
ID002: I was seeking victim support … I don’t [know] whether I felt

I needed to or it was about knowing that there was support out there
and I didn’t know what was going to happen and so I think it was a
mixture of that. I didn’t really feel as though I needed it … I mean,
one part of me said I really don’t need to and the other part said don’t
be so bloody-minded, you should.
Going to a victim support agency is often the first, difficult step towards
regaining one’s recovery narrative, insofar as the victim has acknowl-
edged that they have to face the impact of the trauma. At times in our
research, the ‘reward’ of challenging one’s own narrative by taking this
first step and thereby pushing one’s boundaries was highlighted in the
following interviewee’s self-assessment:
106
ID007: It was because of the murder, she [the wife] came [to VSS]
because of the murder. And, it helped her and she … it was nearly a
year after the murder that she said, ‘Look, go see them.’ And I did, I
came to see the Victims of Crime [VSS] and talked about what hap-
pened and stuff like that, and I found out that I did have a problem.
And since then, I’m back to my regular one drink a week and that’s it.
If we go out I might have a couple on the weekend, but we very rarely
go out so…
[…]
I: So what changes have you noticed with that [going to VSS]?
ID007: Oh, a lot. I’ve noticed that life is really … like, I’ve really
opened myself up, I see more of my wife, I can do more. I’m not
as reclusive as I used to be and with having young Jasper with us, it
has really turned my life around. If this hadn’t happened, I probably
would have ended up worse, so in one respect that this has helped me,
but it has really—at the time—it has put a dampener on my life and
sometimes I wish that I was dead because of this. In the few months
after the funeral I kept asking, ‘Why wasn’t it me?’ I wished it was me
… I wished I was dead … and that was one of the things that my wife
didn’t like and that’s why she was telling me to come and see counsel-
lors and stuff like that. Because, that was the only thing that I had on
my mind—I wished that I was dead. But since coming to Victims of
Crime [VSS] I don’t think like that anymore.
For some, a victim support service was seen as the only available option,
as discussed by interviewee ID012:
ID012: This is what’s happened to other women too, because my

department was … well, there weren’t too many women in my
department … mainly males. Certainly all of the senior positions
were males, and nothing has changed. And ah … they offered him
counselling, and left me to just … so in the end I came to the Victims
of Crime service. I didn’t know what else to do.
In another case, an interviewee reflected on how they would have liked

to receive support but that they were not classified as a ‘victim’ a few
decades back, when the crime occurred:
107
ID011: What happened was that, at the time, it was 1983 … the

Victims of Crime had just formed and a lady by the name of
[removed], whose daughter was a murder victim, she came to the
house but it was to support my sister and brother-in-law, so, no, there
was no great support … no specific support for me.
Building trust and a reliable relationship seems to be a crucial element

in enabling recovery. One interviewee talked about the positive impact
of social workers, one in particular:
ID012: They were good, especially one of the social workers … [name]
… she was great. She was only trained as a social worker, but she was
great. […] they loved having [name] coming to them because they
didn’t have to train her, because she instinctively knew what to do.
This account contrasts with that of interviewee ID015, who did not
trust any sort of service for many years:
ID015: I didn’t trust the services, I didn’t trust the services because
I thought the services were fronts for paedophiles and abusers to hide
behind whereas now, with a bit more of a broader understanding of
the world and the unfortunate reality that I entered a systemically
abusive organisation and that’s not necessarily the people within it.
These two opposing perspectives were explained by a counsellor from

Focus Group 2 as interconnected:
FG2 VSS004: I guess, um you know, it depends on the nature of the

crime versus whether they are able to or want to interact with other
services. For instance, with adult survivors of child sexual assault and
Royal Commission [into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual
Abuse] clients, a lot of them, especially if they’re older, it’s been living
a lifetime of hoarding a secret of not being believed, and why would
services believe them at that point. So they won’t share because there’s
the shame and self-loathing and all that versus … an elderly man that
I saw recently, in his mid-eighties, who had a trauma in his home and
again it’s that generational ability to cope. You know, just different
108
coping mechanisms and different crimes, where he didn’t really have

an issue connecting [with a support service], did what he needed to
do and off he went. And he [is] very well connected within his com-
munity and support groups, and neighbours and friendships, com-
pared to the CSA [child sexual assault] crimes that are very isolated
and are afraid perhaps that they won’t be believed … Until they con-
nect in and, you know, realise that, you know … there is support.
Counselling and Mental Health Practitioners
Taking up and participating in constructive counselling and other

mental health therapeutic sessions is important for victim recovery
(Campbell et al. 1999), such that a positive client–therapist relationship
can have a positive impact on the victim’s recovery narrative. A num-
ber of interviewees talked quite positively about their experience with
GPs, psychologists, counsellors and other therapists (ID0012: ‘he [the
GP] was really supportive’; ID013: ‘I’m seeing a psychologist there, and
a podiatrist and a GP. So I go there regularly, yes’; ID007: ‘Yeah, the
counsellor from here [VSS], she was always helpful, very helpful’). A
counsellor from Focus Group 2 similarly commented:
FG2 VSS002: With regard to GP and health providers some of them

seem to have quite good relationships with them, some of them will
be seeing a doctor, you know reasonably regularly. Some of them
might get a mental health plan [and] pursue that. [One of my cli-
ents] was seeing a regular psychologist, she just started that, so that
was a really positive thing about exploring what had happened to her.
So every client as we know, is different, you know in terms of their
experience.
Counsellors in Focus Group 1 had an opportunity to reflect on what

aspect of their dealings and exchanges with clients may have a more
positive impact on in terms of transforming the victim’s narrative. One
counsellor referred to the challenging but necessary step of disentan-
gling from the discourse of shame and guilt:
109
FG1 VSS007: When I’m working with people who are talking about
shame and guilt, […] probably the most powerful movement
I reckon, in the work I do with a client, is starting to disentangle from
that shame. When you can disentangle from that shame and start and
start to, um, feel like you don’t have a sign on you that says, come
over here and do something horrible to me, um, that really changes
someone’s ability to kind of move through the world, how they see
themselves. Um, and that can be really tricky and really difficult and
sometimes that can be, um, as hard as the actual trauma itself. Like
moving away from that identity can be really, really difficult. So focus-
ing on values and being able to relate with yourself differently is really
important.
This resonates with the experience of interviewee ID005:
I felt stronger and stronger as I went along [with the counselling sessions],
and more relaxed. And I felt like … I could let myself feel victimised.
I could let myself feel sad. I could let myself feel angry. Instead of just
being a slave to them. Which was a great power to get. And to relax, it
taught me how to relax … which was the major deal. And if I didn’t get
that I don’t think I’d have coped with it, I still think I’d be sitting at home
now. And would have gone through a year of school, of uni. But um, if it
wasn’t for here I think my uni[versity] studies would have gone right down.
An issue highlighted by VSS counsellors in rural South Australia is the

inability to have face-to-face sessions with clients and having to use the
phone instead. Trust can be difficult to establish and develop further in
this context, where communication is limited by logistics, as explained
by a counsellor from Focus Group 2:
FG2 VSS004: Our region doesn’t have any public transport at all. The
distance between some of our towns can be up to an hour. So if they
don’t have their own mode of transport it’s really difficult to access
some services that don’t attend each of the major towns. They’re set
quite a distance apart and there are five of them, with lots of little
ones in between. With lack of public transport, that can be an issue.
However, a lot of services, like as our self, we do phone work. I know
it’s not always ideal, but that can be arranged.
110
Continuity of service provided is directly linked to these geographic

constraints, with the majority of clients seeing the VSS counsellors only
a few times and for limited tasks, as highlighted by a counsellor from
Focus Group 2:
FG2 VSS006: I guess [the number of visits] varies on what we’re tasked
for, um, per individual client because as regional workers we work
across all the programmes of Victim Support Service, so we, um,
provide support for someone who is writing their victim impact
statement or going to court, or provide that supportive counselling.
There’s quite a range of different things that we do. We might only
be tasked to see someone under one capacity, doing a victim impact
statement or something like that, and only see them for one, two,
three times, um, whereas others we might on occasion see over a few
months, it varies. I can say that I’ve only had one or two that I’ve seen
over a good, you know regularly, for almost a year I think. I’ve only
had one that has been that long-term, the rest maximum of a couple
of months. The majority, just a few visits.
The interviewee quoted below reflected on their counselling sessions

and his own passive-aggressive resistance towards them, which persisted
until ‘it finally clicked’ with the realisation that owning a narrative is
not about accepting responsibility for the traumatic events. This person
also talked of the positive impact of formal support in terms of taking
up or modifying AOD consumption, and clearly saw a direct connec-
tion between the two.
ID014: I’m glad I didn’t use drugs. I’m really, really, really glad I pushed
through and found a counsellor that spoke to me. And it was weeks
and months even before I actually understood what he was saying, it
was just him saying do this and I was like ‘that’s fucking dumb’ and
then one day it just all clicked and it was like this massive shift in my
internal dialogue instantly that allowed me to actually not be a victim
of the world and to just be okay. And to take accountability for my
part in the trauma without taking responsibility for the trauma, just
accountability for my part and my choices and how they impact what
happens to me.
111
However, distrust in and denial of therapists’ capacity, skills and general

outreach abilities were raised as an issue in some of the interviews
(ID010, ID011, ID012):
ID010: So, I got through … I managed to get through it all, mostly by

myself. I have seen therapists since I was twenty, but actually most of
them have caused more harm than good, to be honest. Because I’ve
found that a lot of therapists have their own issues that they haven’t
healed from and they end up messing up other people’s lives.
[…]
I know I sound negative about counsellors but I’ve had a lot of prob-
lems with them too, so I start thinking … I get this from everywhere,
so what is wrong with me? The way some of them have treated me
hasn’t been good, like the main issue … they don’t like you talking
about that because I think they don’t want you to get upset. They
don’t want you to get upset, well that’s what has been explained to
me. And I rang the Brisbane Rape and Crisis Centre and I also real-
ised … and I am seeing a counsellor now, she’s an adoption coun-
sellor and she’s a lot younger than me, but I think I overload her
sometimes. I chat to her like I am chatting to a friend … I don’t have
friends, but I have a woman who belongs.
ID0011: Well I did go to a psychologist. What happened was that when
the court hearings started, it was very much about the gay scene in
Adelaide and the underground gay scene in Adelaide I should say, and
I was very affected by that. So I went to a psychologist at the sug-
gestion of somebody—I can’t remember who, but they said perhaps
you need to talk to somebody about this—and he was quite gay, and
I found that after two sessions I didn’t want to talk to him.
I: So, you never sought…?
ID012: I can’t deal with it.
I: Have you ever talked with a specialist, like a counsellor or a
psychologist?
ID012: Yes, but I can’t deal with that. And even with what happened at
work … I couldn’t give them any details.
In Focus Group 2, a counsellor observed how refusal of help—which

can be linked to denial or lack of trust—may be based in generational
differences:
112
FG2 VSS006: There are a lot of victims who might not be linked to a
counsellor or GP or … you can see they may very well benefit with
long-term therapeutic assistance but are coming to the service and
have the mindset of ‘I’m strong, I can handle it on my own. I’m
strong. I can do this.’ And perceive accessing regular ongoing coun-
selling support as being a, um, a weakness. That’s something that I’ve
observed particularly in, um, generations that are thirty upwards.
Whereas, this could just be my perception, but younger generations
are more willing to talk or seek help.
Further, some counsellors reported that at times health providers are

unable to understand victims and are ‘not getting the trauma.’ As one
commented:
FG2 VSS003: Some GPs do seem to get trauma, some don’t. I was just
thinking of a man, a recent Royal Commission [into Institutional
Responses to Child Sexual Abuse] client; it was actually his partner
who had her own experience with childhood sexual abuse. He started
to recognise, ‘Hang on I think my partner was abused as a child.’ Um,
so that enabled him to disclose. So after some time of going to the
doctor and then being able to talk to the doctor about his experiences
because he had been having support from his new partner, the GP
actually said, ‘That explains a lot of things about what I’ve seen in the
past with your physical and emotional health.’ There’s another Royal
Commission client who went to the mental health service, he said,
‘They didn’t understand me, they couldn’t wait to get rid of me.’ He
went across town to a mental health unit and spoke to a psychologist
who hadn’t even heard of child sexual abuse. And he actually felt that
he had to become protective towards that psychologist, you know,
[and the client said the following:] ‘You know I think it was just the
culture that he come from.’ Um so in this day and age that was a little
bit of a concern. And I find if clients’ relationships with other agen-
cies they’ve been in contact, once again that can be a little bit of a
mixed bag as well. I think we all engage with people we feel a cer-
tain connectedness to. I think if clients come in contact with people,
you know, that first appointment is really important because it’s about
how you engage the client. If they feel, ‘Oh okay, this person is believ-
ing me, they’ve got some understanding of what I’ve been through,’ it
113
lays a really good foundation of how things are going to progress. But
if they find that there is a little bit of, perhaps, lack of understanding
or uncertainty then that actually puts them on the back foot.
In some cases, GPs prescribing sleeping pills in response to a victim’s dis-

closure of their trauma was noted by counsellors. This was also a result
of our survey, whereby the most significant AOD increase after victimi-
sation was in relation to doctor-prescribed medication, with more than
half of the sample reporting use. The counsellors reflected on the reluc-
tance of victims to take up prescribed drugs because they were already
self-medicating with other substances to include tobacco. Also, in some
cases, the victim displayed awareness that prescribed drugs may link to
further self-medication and additivity. As one counsellor observed:
FG2 VSS001: If clients do go and see their doctor within a week of the
crime occurring, I do find the first thing they are prescribed with are
sleeping pills. And whether that leads to an increase in self-medication
and things like that I’m not sure. But it is a very general thing that
doctors do in my experience.
My experience in particular with doctor-prescribed medication with
… I find a lot of the clients that I see, especially with the sleeping
tablets … I’ve come across so many clients that are reluctant or refus-
ing to take them, um, because of the addictive concern. So I found
that interesting, that even clients who would self-medicate with can-
nabis or cigarettes, but refuse to take the sleeping tablets that they’ve
been prescribed.
In this vein, some of the counsellors reported a similar experience:
FG2 VSS003: Yeah, I’d agree with that from my experience as well. It’s
that reluctance to take the medication that has been prescribed from
the doctor because they’re concerned that they will get used to it, get
addicted to it. But yes, on the first time they’re quite okay to use some
cannabis or alcohol.
FG2 VSS004: I usually find the reluctance more on males than females
and the cannabis use is probably more evident with males. Not saying
it’s not with females, but that seems to be their mode of coping.
114
Informal Support
Validation and support provided by informal networks play a crucial
role in externalising the trauma in narrative therapy (Abrahams 2007;
Androff 2012; Bal et al. 1999; Keeling and van Wormer 2012), espe-
cially when the victim first seeks help. In most of the cases collected
for this study, informal support was the only type of support the vic-
tim sought for a long period of time. In this regard, acknowledgement
of the crime and the harm done and community denunciation of the
crime are important for the victim’s validation (Herman 2005). At
times, community validation is perceived by the victim as the most
important factor shaping their recovery (Herman 2005). This finding
is echoed by Androff (2012), who refers to public acknowledgement of
suffering as a key determinant of the success of narrative therapy, and
cites other elements such as respectful listening and thoughtful ques-
tioning as necessary for creating a supportive environment in which
the victim feels comfortable disclosing their trauma. A supportive and
empathic audience is therefore a recurring theme in terms of its impor-
tance for external validation, and for the narration and reincorporation
of the events in a validated version of them (Bal et al. 1999, p. 46).
The presence of family and friends is therefore an important part of
narrative therapy, such that those with a strong social network are more
likely to progress further with recovery. Gutner et al. (2006) found that
an increase in social support was correlated with a decrease in symptoms
of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), while social withdrawal was
related to less improvement in PTSD symptomology. Herman (2005)
discusses the importance of validation from family, especially when vic-
tims have been isolated from them, supporting a reconciliatory therapy
with the aim to (re)build a level of trust among participants.
This point resonates with the experience of a number of our inter-
viewees. One referred to the strong support she received from friends
and family:
ID001: Umm … I’ve found that just talking about it a lot with my

friends, like my friends never tell me how bad their day is because
they know that they can never top mine, though I still listen to them
115
of course, when they have a bad day … I’m not a tool about it or
anything, but it’s just the whole thing that for a long time they never
used to tell me how bad their days were going because they knew my
situation.
I: I guess that is one of the good things about having good friends, they
can listen if you need?
ID001: Yeah, and to be fair, they wanted to hear about it as much as
I needed to talk to them, because who knows somebody who died
and came back and had all these wounds and the doctors cut through
more nerves than she did … I’m not disabled, I’m up and around.
I: You’ve listed a number of people, but is there one person would be
your primary support?
ID001: I use to say my mum, but I don’t know if that’s the right answer
because she gets … like, up until the event, she gets really emotional
about it because I’m her only son and I get that, but I’d be telling her
about stuff and she’d end up crying … And then I’d have to end up
consoling my mum, like I had to do that when I was the one covered
in staples and stitches and I had to console my mum.
Interviewee ID006 reflected on how her family had been a primary

source of support for years:
ID006: Basically I was abused as a kid. You can go all the way back there
if you like.
I: So how long ago was that? Or what age were you?
ID006: Mmm … probably about thirteen. So that’s like thirty years ago
[and told no one for a long time].
[…]
I: When you got your own place what happened, did you start working?
ID006: I was actually a stay-at-home mum for eighteen years.
I: So your hubby was helping with the bills, and you’re still with that
person?
ID006: Yep.
I: Well that sounds like somewhat of a positive outcome…?
ID006: Yeah, I’m very much for fighting for what is mine and my fam-
ily, you know. I’ve done that my whole life—I’ve fought to keep my
family there, like my family is just me, my hubby and my two kids, so
that’s it.
116
The following interviewee referred to his colleagues as a primary source

of support and validation:
ID005: I’ve basically got rehabilitation about ‘91. I went back to work
for television in ‘92. Which was actually fast I must say. Because the
group I work with, I actually had a group to work with, we were tour-
ing comedy festivals around the world. And they were so good that
they actually brought me back into their fold, because they knew
I could do it. They were sick of hearing people say I’ll never be able to
do anything, they knew I could, so I was very lucky to have them. So
I was brought back onto television, I was brought back into touring
overseas. So, I was thrown … thrown into it without thinking, which
is the best way.
Another interviewee spoke of a past friendship and related events,

and how ‘catching up’ could bring closeness and advance his recovery
narrative:
ID004: An example of that is when I was a young, draftee cadet—I was

probably in my late twenties—my supervisor, his son had just grad-
uated from Duntroon as an officer and he had a cardiac myopathy
or something and he passed away in his sleep. And, my boss never
fully recovered but he recovered. And I empathised with him because
my son had just been born before that, and as a father I empathised
with him as best I could … but until you lose your own child it is not
quite the same. And he must be in his late sixties now but it is in the
back of my mind that I wouldn’t mind catching up with him, have a
beer, and reminisce on the times when we were together and maybe
share a tear together. And again, that’s just me working through as
many facets of my experiences [before, during and after losing my
daughter]. Because obviously there is some overlap there and I always
admired him and respected him, and I think he would have been torn
between being, I suppose, a little resentful of bringing it up so long
after the fact, but also hopefully a little happy that I would regard him
so highly that I would make that effort.
In some cases, the interviewees had first accessed informal support

before choosing to seek out formal support:
117
I: Ok, so can you talk a little about the fact that, right after the event,
you received a lot of support from your girlfriend obviously, and you
went to VSS … how long after the event did you wait to go to VSS?
ID008: Maybe nearly a year, I can’t remember. I think I sort of left it
and I thought look, I was of the attitude that it’s all done now and
there’s not much I can do, all I can do is try to do the best from here,
recover and this and that. So I tried to stick with that attitude and
didn’t really think that VSS could offer me much more than that. But
after a while, I thought that the service is there, so I might as well go
and see if I can get anything out of it, you know.
We encountered a similar pattern of behaviour in another interviewee:
I: And as you say, it happened just before you came to VSS, so in many
ways it [informal support] could have been a stepping stone?
ID002: Yeah.
In other cases, it was the family members who encouraged the victim to
seek formal support:
ID007: It was my wife—she told me, if I don’t get help, she’s going to
leave me. And that was the crux of it, because I didn’t want my wife
to leave and I still don’t want my wife to leave. That was the turning
point … she said, ‘I’m going to leave you unless you see someone and
stop, there’s help out there—get the help or I’ll leave you.’
Factors like the nature of the trauma experienced and the personality of
the victim can also influence whether informal support is sought and
to what extent. Jordan (2013) suggests that the victim may feel more at
ease if the details of their trauma are discussed without family members
being present in cases where there is a familial lack of understanding. In
this regard, having someone to ‘bear witness’ to the trauma requires that
the listener be adequate and suitable (Bal et al. 1999, p. 41).
On this point, a counsellor from Focus Group 2 referred to informal
support as a ‘mixed bag’:
118
FG2 VSS003: Um, I think what I found with clients, it’s a bit of a mixed
bag when it comes to family and friends. What I find is if family and
friends are supportive and recognise that a person has experienced a
trauma then their recovery is much better. However, if, on the flip-
side, they have people around them such as family and friends who
think, ‘Okay. This has happened. You’ve had your couple of weeks, it’s
time to get over that and move on.’ Um, their recovery isn’t quite so
good because they’re thinking, ‘Well, hello, but I’m not over it.’ So it’s
very much that mixed bag with, um, family and friends.
Examples of the informal network not providing support to the victim

were present in the interview findings, in cases where family and friends
were ‘fed up’ by the victim’s perceived inability to recover from trauma:
ID004: Whereas, I think my wife—through [VSS]—went onto some-

thing about balloons … something where victims release a balloon
every year or something … she got into that group, but to be honest,
I’m not sure if she has recovered at all. From what the kids tell me,
she can’t stop talking about it, to the point where they are a bit fed up
about it.
This resonates with the long-time lack of familial support experienced

by ID010, as outlined below.
I: Is it something that occurs quite frequently, or did it taper off as you
got older and moved away from your family?
ID010: Unfortunately no, it still … because I’m still being victimised by
family, even though my sister and brother and my dad’s dead now—
he died when I was fifty-nine—but my mum has done some shocking
stuff. I mean … even though I understand that some people won’t
believe this, but my mother has actually rung up and left messages
that you would think a male stalker would do. I don’t want to say
the word, but it starts with ‘m’, and then there’s lots of heavy breath-
ing blah, blah, blah. My own mother did that. And it’s caused havoc
in the family because I told them and no one believed me of course,
but I know it was mum. And she more or less admitted it to me any-
way, because she has been on a lot of psych drugs for many years too,
119
which has affected her brain and destroyed her health. Even when
I was a child she was on psych drugs and yeah, I am really against
them even though I know that they can help people.
Interviewee ID015 had no access to informal support in the immediate

aftermath of the traumatic event:
So where were we? Oh, the way in which my networks have changed, a
lot of my friends used to drink with [me], we used to try and tell each
other how sad our lives were, we didn’t really support each other […]
heaps and heaps of friends, absolutely nobody knew anything about me
or my life, and if they did it was me drunkenly disclosing it.
Similarly, in another case the traumatic experience led to the victim

choosing to isolate themselves from family:
ID013: I still spend time regularly each day assessing in my mind what
happened and why I have very little interaction with my family.
I: Is it your sense that other people are assessing that too? Do you think
your family is assessing why they have such little interaction with you
too?
ID013: I would strongly suspect that. Since the assault upon me,
I pretty much have zero contact with my two ex-partners, my four
children and also since the assault, family members whom I have been
close with throughout life have passed away. My grandmother passed
away—this is all in the last few years—my mother passed away, my
sister passed away, my brother passed away… I’m not trying to sound
tragic but it is … a relevant coincidence, the timing, and it height-
ened all my resolve to establish myself in a new manner, living inde-
pendently. I don’t leave my unit much so it’s quite a big deal that I’ve
come here. I think I’ve become probably deliberately, content spend-
ing most of my time with myself, which in itself is a huge contrast
to the way I lived, or the nature of my character and the way I lived
prior to the assault. I was a very social and interactive person; I did a
lot of public speaking in high schools about youth issues, relationship
issues … now, I’m quite content not talking.
I: Did you have friends at the time that you were assaulted?
120
ID013: Yes, and again … for reasons unbeknown to me, I don’t now

have what I would call friends or mates whom I can lean on.
The choice between accessing formal or informal support was non-ex-

istent for those who had no family and friends around the time of their
traumatic experience, as evident in the case below.
I: Did you have friends or did you have family…?

ID012: I had no one. I was in a psychiatric hospital because I tried to
commit suicide, umm, and I had nothing.
I: So when did you come out of the hospital?
ID012: About … I’m trying to remember … a couple of months after
the rape … I just packed my bag, crossed the golf course and caught
the train to Brisbane. I went to what I knew was a safe house … I
absconded.
But building an informal support network over the years has paid off
for interview ID012:
So yeah, we went there because we were celebrating Irene’s Order of

Australia medal and he was supplying champagne – and when I say that,
it was Australian champagne – and I remember him saying that I couldn’t
have it. It was ‘a lemonade for Pauline’ … and Mark seems to know now
that I can’t drink alcohol without having to go into all of the gory details,
so they protect me. And if I put my drink down somewhere at a party,
they watch it, so my friends do look after me and they are very sup-
portive of me going to AA [Alcoholics Anonymous] and NA [Narcotics
Anonymous].
Reciprocities of Formal and Informal Support

and Validation
We have noted that validation is perhaps the most important step in
victim recovery. In this section we probe this a little further by exploring
recovery narratives as a response to a trauma that, from the subjective
point of view of the victim, has not been properly validated through
121
their networks. As noted above, an absence of formal validation is quite

synonymous with the concept of secondary victimisation. Victims will
seek validation from informal networks in the first instance, but where
supportive significant others are unavailable and formal validation is
also not forthcoming, the road to recovery may involve many adapta-
tions of affirmation, including potentially destructive indulgences. As
illustrated in a variety of criminological accounts, particularly between
the 1950s and 1970s following Merton’s (1938) famous reconceptualis-
ation of anomie and expressed in strain and social control theories (Nye
1958; Cloward and Ohlin 2013; Hirschi 2002), people cultivate or slip
and slide (Matza 1967) into marginalised or outsider groups when they
are unable (and in some cases unwilling) to bond (Hirschi 2002) with
highly integrated (mainstream) social networks.
A complex poly-victim we interviewed for this study told us how she
used her experience to help an abusive boyfriend who had just killed
a Sudanese immigrant with a pipe (according to his description), in
the aftermath of memorialising what would have been the due date
of her terminated pregnancy by him. She was sixteen, he twenty-four
and seeing many other young girls at the time. They were watching
the news accounts of the homicide and she became suspicious that he
was involved. Her account was not completely consistent; it is accu-
rate about the fact of the murder, but not necessarily the extent of her
involvement.
ID015: He walked around it for ages, and then when I said it he was all
like, ‘Who told you?!’ and I was like, ‘You’re telling me very clearly
with your actions right now, with the shifty meet-up in a public place.
“I’m in trouble.” You’ve made it pretty clear, you’re watching the
news, it’s happening on the street you were living at, I’m just gonna
say that you’ve gone and bashed this guy.’ So then I gave him all my
money and my healthcare cards for his other girlfriend at the time,
and started to talk him through, ‘What have you got on your clothes?
What were you wearing on the day?’, ‘Everything, you’ve got to get
rid of everything, all of it’ because my foster mum, when she became a
drug addict, that involved a bunch of criminal people coming in and out
of the house so I’ve got a bunch of experience. (Emphasis added)
122
ID015’s use of ‘experience’ may be variously interpreted, but we offer the

following reading. As we know, the criminal justice system operates to
reify victims and constitute or construct them in opposition to offend-
ers. This is because the drama or narrative of modern justice demands a
contest between equal and opposing forces and is compromised where
that contest and contrast is diminished or washed out. And, as we hinted
above, for victim-survivors, reflexive engagement with the institutional
conditions of criminal justice involves aligning with this narrative drama.
Recalling what she did at the age of sixteen, having recently escaped
a sexually and physically abusive stepfather and drug-addicted foster
mother, ID015 showed no inclination to go to the police. In recounting
the crime committed by her former boyfriend to the interviewer, ID015
reviews the problem in terms of informal ‘outsider’ justice. In this,
she provides a straightforward narrative ‘truth.’ Reciprocal support is
offered to those in her informal support network. As Edwin Sutherland
claims (Sutherland and Cressey 1978, pp. 80–82), criminal behaviour
is learned inclusive of motives, attitudes and specific techniques. It is in
the form of knowhow drawn from insights and techniques cultivated,
although not necessarily dependent upon, observations she made grow-
ing up with her foster mother.
ID015 may well have wondered what sort of preparation she was
being offered in witnessing how criminals undertake to avoid the police,
but here she is confronted with a familiar routine or pattern whereby
someone in her intimate network will benefit where an application of
techniques to avoid the law may be offered and exploited.
She was then sought by the police:
ID015: Took them a day or two, then they arrested him. Then they
started looking for me, ‘cause I was a witness, even though I wasn’t
there for the actual crime, I was in the area constantly liaising and met
up with [the perpetrators] before they fled. And his other girlfriend,
who was I don’t know sixteen and I was fifteen at the time, and his
other girlfriend had told the police, or I don’t know done something
so they were looking for me. I lied in my statement, just lied, lied,
lied, lied. And then I was eighteen, it was still on going, it hadn’t even
gotten to court, and I was eighteen and I made a new statement that
was a bit more truthful.
123
For ID015, as for many witnesses confronted with the protocols of the
criminal justice system, the naturalised position is that of the outsider.
When many of one’s most significant authority figures in early childhood
and the teen years have been compromised or corrupted in some way, it is
likely that authority itself will be regarded with scepticism or even dread.
During the data collection phase of this research, the Royal
Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse was
hearing witness testimony. The commission was established in no small
part because there was evidence that across religious and residential child-
care institutions there was a lack of diligence by authorities in following
up on allegations of child sex abuse. Robert Fitzgerald, one of the com-
missioners, made the argument that the criminal justice system pendu-
lum was still tilted in favour of alleged abusers and that, in 2018, it has
‘barely moved’ from the position it was in when the historical abuses the
commission has heard were occurring (Australian Associated Press 2018,
see also Royal Commission final report 2017).
ID015 noted that paedophiles cluster around children in care
because they are not well supported or credible as witnesses to abuse.
ID015: Yeah there was a lot of stuff with the people I was hanging out
with, was sexually assaulted a lot and I was beat on a lot, and fos-
ter carers when you report enough stuff to Families SA, they give a
light briefing to the carers to say ‘be careful of her because she’ll make
sexual assault allegations you’ve gotta make sure you’re always above
board with her’ which is sort of a good idea in theory but it just alerts
every paedophile in the vicinity to your existence and that you’re not
taken seriously.
I: Really?
ID015: Yeah. Absolutely.
I: So, are you saying that paedophiles are particularly clustered around
girls in care?
ID015: Absolutely.
I: That’s sort of a prime target for them?
ID015: Absolutely. You’ve got no family, no one to be accountable to, it’s
an office of people who don’t have personal connections to you [Emphasis
added], not only that but you’re usually already groomed, you’re
already oversexualised, depending on the type of paedophile, because
124
paedophiles aren’t just bad bogey men, creeping in corners, you’ve got
people who are opportunistic who wouldn’t otherwise, you’ve got a
fourteen-year-old girl coming at you saying, ‘No I really want your
dick in my mouth’ you know then they sort of get into a situation
they wouldn’t of [sic] otherwise engaged in, definitely wouldn’t have
actively sort out themselves, you’ve got people who would seek it out
themselves and do, and of those people you’ve got people who think
they’ve got meaningful loving relationships with children, you’ve got
other people who think that they are just having a gratifying experi-
ence with the use of a child, you’ve got people who are sadistic and
enjoy the fact that they are hurting someone, so there is such a bunch
of subgroups—[Emphasis added]
I: And did you have sort of the experience with all of those subgroups?
ID015: Yeah, I’d say so. I can’t speak for people who—whether or not
people would seek it out or wouldn’t—because I was really oversexual-
ised so I was often trying to engage older men in like sexual activities
from, just forever, so I didn’t quite, like I couldn’t say whether or not
they were gonna do it anyway.
[…]
So where were we? Oh, the way in which my networks have
changed, a lot of my friends used to drink with them, we used to
try and tell each other how sad our lives were, we didn’t really sup-
port each other. I didn’t trust the services, I didn’t trust the services
because I thought the services were fronts for paedophiles and abus-
ers to hide behind whereas now with a bit more of a broader under-
standing of the world and the unfortunate reality that I entered a
systemically abusive organisation and that’s not necessarily the peo-
ple within it.
According to this reflexive recounting, ID015 is vulnerable because

the formal networks she accessed offered her inadequate protection.
Subsequently, she has been drawn to creating informal support net-
works in order to bolster her protection from predation. At the same
time, and ironically, the repeated ‘grooming’ contacts by older men or
paedophiles—she later came to view at least one of her boyfriends as a
paedophile—also made her more vulnerable to the exploitative valida-
tions that are offered by such men.
125
Conclusion
For victims of crime, validation gained via informal or formal social
interactions is an important aspect of victim recovery, which to date has
been addressed in the literature. However, the links between such valida-
tion and the construction of a recovery narrative have been less explored
(Kunst et al. 2015). Opportunities for or obstacles to validation are cen-
tral to understanding the recovery process and this chapter has sought to
address this gap by reporting the self-reflection of victims in relation to
external validation and its impact on their recovery narrative.
As put by a VSS counsellor (Focus Group 2), ‘the value of networks’
is fundamental to building a self-worth narrative:
FG2 VSS006: One analogy I find myself using with, um, clients, with
people who, um, may not be linked in with services and I might be
encouraging to link into services and create that network is talking
about, giving the analogy of the rock climber climbing the mountain
and each of the little things you put into the rock are your anchors
that create this safety net. And one of those anchors that is very
important is that valuable network, that community of help, and
whether that community is within the family or the larger community
connecting them with the police or Victim Support Service counsel-
lors. By creating that safety net, that community network of helpers.
Further, some counsellors from Focus Group 2 highlighted that valida-

tion by external parties is important but its significance varies according
to a number of factors (the personality of the victim, the nature of the
traumatic experience and the person offering validation):
FG2 VSS001: I think there is a difference being validated by, this is just
my personal experience, being validated by the worker and then being
validated by the CJS and the police and things like that.
FG2 VSS004: And I guess that fluctuates, you know, on what’s happen-
ing for them. You know, maybe they’re feeling believed and validated,
but then that can be you know…
FG2 VSS002: Questioned!
126
FG2 VSS006: Challenged!
FG2 VSS004: Yeah certainly challenged when something else happens
or revictimisation or the coping strategies fall off and they take a
step back. But then that’s about reviewing where they’re at and what
they’ve done in the past and you know that’s a step back not a leap or
whatever that is, and focusing on the strengths and the progress that
they have made.
Police are often the first point of contact for victims and therefore the
quality of contact with the police is significant for the victim’s recov-
ery from their traumatic experience (Elliott et al. 2014; Parsons and
Bergin 2010). Elliott et al. (2014, p. 589) conducted qualitative inter-
views and found that there is symbolic value in police validation, in
part because police are ‘prototypical representatives of the moral val-
ues of society’ (p. 589). Parsons and Bergin (2010) support this point,
finding that many of the victims of intimate partner violence in their
study who were able to report and pursue their case reported improve-
ments in self-esteem regardless of the outcome. These results reveal that
engaging the criminal justice system can be a ‘cathartic and confront-
ing reminder of the original crime’ that supports recovery (Parsons and
Bergin 2010, p. 182). Several repeat victimisation participants in Elliott
et al.’s (2014) study, who were receiving care from mental health profes-
sionals, emphasised the importance of reporting to the police to obtain
this symbolic validation, even if the perpetrator could not be caught.
Victim reports to the police are also driven by a reaction to the con-
fidentiality of reporting to the mental health profession. As per Elliott
et al. (2014, p. 594), the therapeutic protocol of discovery and recov-
ery has an unintended effect of making some victims feel ‘shrouded in
secrecy, [and] shame.’ As discussed next in this book, victim accounts are
structured by the values and interests that drive the protocols of various
institutional discourses (see, for instance, Rose 1990). It is worth paus-
ing here to reflect that the nature of reporting to criminal justice actors,
which tends to compel victims to either make or withdraw a public alle-
gation, contrasts with the nature of reporting for therapeutic purposes,
by which records are usually prevented from being made public. This
difference in institutional values and protocols means that the narrative
accounts produced in these two contexts will differ accordingly.
127
Note
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5
Adaptations in Recovery
Meaning Work Following Trauma

Perhaps the most elementary factor that connects the individual to the
life-world or collective or social life is what Frankl terms a ‘will to mean-
ing’ (Frankl 2014; Maddi 1970). Humanistic theories of the counsel-
ling process and the promotion of positive outcomes following trauma
depend upon and exploit this basic human need (Wong and Fry 1998).
According to Frankl life ‘holds meaning for each and every individ-
ual, and even more, it retains this meaning literally to his last breath’
(Frankl 2014, p. ii). Many who follow his teachings practice a thera-
peutic system that draws upon logotherapy, which holds that a lack of
awareness of or emotional frustration in the meaning of human exist-
ence is at the back of such maladies as learned helplessness. A firm
belief system is related, as we will see in Chapter 6, to a view of justice
and injustice. It has also been found to support recovery from trauma
(Brune et al. 2002). In general, people develop a logos or develop their
in beliefs a system of measurement by which to conduct an ontological
self-examination. We refer to this as meaning work.

132
Both therapists and traumatised victims draw from templates that are
made familiar or naturalised through repetition in various discourses by
institutional authorities. It is perhaps a matter of preference in our anal-
ysis that we lend priority to the influence of the liberal social and eco-
nomic order in the shaping of therapeutic discourses, so that meaning
work is set against the necessities of that liberal order. In so doing we
are following a tradition. The works of Weber (1930), Althusser (1971),
Foucault (1979, 1990), Rose (1990, 1998), Cruikshank (1993) and
Giddens (1991) are particularly instructive in this regard. These ana-
lysts are concerned with how people make sense of their lives against
normative and prescribed ways of being in their socioeconomic, cultural
and political domains. In other words, these are ‘big picture’ templates
against which individuals are encouraged to match their own under-
standing of what is meaningful. What are these templates, and how do
they inform the meaning-work that victims are confronted with after
trauma?
Beginning at the broadest or hegemonic level, in the Protestant ethic
and the spirit of capitalism, Weber (1930) argues that there are cultural
underpinnings that are antecedent to yet also co-existent with the devel-
opment of capitalism. What is consistent across the economic relations
of capitalism and the cultural relations of Protestantism, he argued,
is a sense of duty or ‘calling’ and style of frugality as part of a strong
work ethic that permits a highly individualistic and even possessive
accumulation of wealth. For Weber, the connection or ‘elective affinity’
between the spiritual in Protestantism and the material in capitalism
is not only fortuitous for a specific socioeconomic system, but is also
buttressed by the method of verstehen, ‘interpretation’ by which it is
important to explore actors’ meanings, understanding that people need
to attach meaning or significance to their actions. In this case, Weber
provides an explanation for the normalisation of capitalistic accu-
mulation. In this and other works (Weber 1994), he suggests how
rational-legal domination, under the authority of which bureaucratic
organisation produces a slavish obedience to rules and process as people
came to occupy what he terms the ‘iron cage’ of modernity, has had the
effect of stripping belief or meaningful endeavour from our lives.
5 Adaptations in Recovery
133
How people interface with material and cultural conditions is

also explored by Anthony Giddens. In particular, in Modernity and
Self-identity (1991, pp. 10–35), Giddens argues that what he prefers to
call ‘high modernity’ has distinct social forms including discontinuous,
disembedded and reflexive institutions. He asserts that individuals liv-
ing in high modernity adapt to continuous changes or revision as they
depend on institutions that separate time and space (through ‘symbolic
tokens’ and ‘abstract systems’). As he notes, the condition of self-iden-
tity in the world today is one in which knowledge is no longer stable
or certain and trust in disembedding mechanisms produces a relative
deskilling as each person depends upon expert intermediaries to nego-
tiate the built environment in which they live. Giddens argues that
under contemporary conditions of high modernity the ‘altered self ’ has
become ‘a reflexive project’ ‘to be explored and constructed as part of
the ... process of connecting personal and social change’ (1991, p. 33).
He notes that this project involves abstract systems including modes of
therapy and counselling that, in a way, are replacements for the supports
provided by traditional village life. For instance, and as also explored
by Rose (1990), a therapeutic community has emerged to discover and
identify, explain and treat maladies, syndromes and diseases accord-
ing to a rule book (for instance, the DSM-5 (American Psychiatric
Association 2013)).
As per Jirek (2017), the individual negotiates this meta-narrative.
Neoliberalism informs and subjectifies, it supports schemata that may
place a great burden on the individual for failing to measure up as
resilient or responsible (Cruikshank 1993; de Lint and Chazal 2013).
On the other hand, belief that immediate, individual experience is
connected with a broader set of values in the unfolding of a teleology,
whether rooted in the spiritual or rational-scientific, is associated with
the reduction of pain and anguish (Park 2005; Dezutter et al. 2010;
Unruh 2007). That a system of belief can arguably be destructive at the
societal level, as Marx among others has shown (McKown 1975), does
not take away from the therapeutic role of meaning and belief for the
individual. However, it does suggest and may complicate how victims
may review the interface of justice, order, and trauma.
134
In this regard, Thompson and Janigan (1988, p. 263) propose that the
search for meaning is really a search for meaningfulness, or order and
purpose: to discover how an event ‘fits into a larger context.’ People want
to believe that their world is governed and made meaningful on the basis
of its orderliness, justness and coherence (Thompson and Janigan 1988,
p. 263). From this perspective, an event is meaningful if it ‘follows in an
orderly fashion from our views and beliefs’ and ‘it has a purpose whose
value we recognize.’
Indeed, to recall Weber’s rational-legal authority, people may find
solace in what is for most educated people a naïve belief: that in a
highly rule-bound organisation an authority applies penalties rationally,
equally and without favouritism (that is, justly) where those rules are
broken. Importantly, events that may be challenging or threatening pos-
sess what is called an ‘implicit meaning’ (Thompson and Janigan 1988);
the event will be signified or framed (implicitly) as, for example, some-
thing that the individual can overcome with relative confidence, is too
much for them to cope with or provides them with a chance to shine.
If an event is implicitly signified as too much to cope with, it may be
because that individual has an underlying latent or unresolved distress.
Confirming these theoretical assumptions, studies have found a
positive relationship between meaningfulness the ability to cope with
a stressful experience (Ficková and Ruiselová 1999; Park et al. 2008;
Halama and Bakošová 2009; Zika and Chamberlain 1987; Ryland and
Greenfeld 1991; Ulmer et al. 1991). According to much research, find-
ing positive meaning in life events will encourage individuals to perceive
that their situation is self-enhancing, thereby promoting adaptation
(Taylor 1983). Roy (1988) uses the term ‘veritivity’ to denote the pur-
posefulness of human existence.
Recovery begins with and is dependent on everyday decision-making
(Maddi 1970) and involves the maintenance or nurturing of a coher-
ent life narrative (Kenyon and Heath 2001). It also depends on
self-efficacy, or the view that a person has the capability, if the will is
there, to e xercise control over events that may affect them (Bandura 1989,
p. 1175). As per Bandura (1989), people draw on their knowledge to
make inferences and discern probable outcomes of actions, while those
who are ‘plagued with self-doubts’ may be chaotic in their thinking
135
(Wood and Bandura 1989). But there will be a gap between what appears
to be needed and the capacity of the affected individual to engage in
the creative work needed to arrive there. There may be incongruencies
between meaning in these different spheres, across the global and situa-
tional. Several scholars, including Park (Park and Blumberg 2002; Park
and Ai 2006), distinguish between an event’s significance for the person as
a reflexive being (a more global meaning) and how an event challenges a
particular person’s situation (situational meaning). The traumatised indi-
vidual is to create meaning at the same time that a deficit of meaningful-
ness is associated with depression, anxiety, substance abuse and suicidal
ideation. Crime victimisation is associated with these negative outcomes,
and with feelings of despair.
At the micro-level of meaning-work, as per Thompson and Janigan
(1988, pp. 260–261), since the 1980s researchers have been looking
at how people adjust to traumatic events by adapting their search for
meaning. As this research has hypothesised, an experience that is deeply
challenging at the ontological or existential level is one that calls upon a
reassertion or revision of the individual’s ‘life scheme.’ People who have
been able to reassert or revise a meaning schematic ‘have been found
to cope better after the event, presumably because positive assumptions
about the world and self have been restored’ (Thompson and Janigan
1988, p. 261). Meaning-work, in this application, may be more or less
productive of the recovery trajectory.
What Thompson and Janigan (1988) identified as ‘implicit mean-
ing’ or the significance of an event for a person, Lazarus and Folkman
(1984) term ‘cognitive appraisal.’ This combines existential and situ-
ational meaning in processes that relate trauma or stress to how peo-
ple see the world. And according to research by Bulman and Wortman
(1977), it is possible to categorise how people view a traumatic and
life-changing accident (such as someone being paralysed as a result of a
car crash) into a limited number of schemata. We may relate this to our
discussion (Chapter 6) of social and casino chance.
For example, the victim may deem that the event occurred because
it was their turn in the draw; that it was predetermined to happen (they
could not have prevented it); or that it happened because they deserved
it due to their lifestyle choices. Bulman and Wortman (1977) found that
136
those who recovered best were those who had a traumatic experience while
doing what they enjoy. For Wong (1993), the ability to cope is dependent
on an individual’s internal resources, including how the person is able to
find congruence between their view of self-identity and the condition in
which they believe themselves to be. This may require a ‘restructuring’ of
attitude and philosophy so that some way forward may be charted.
Thompson and Janigan’s (1988, p. 265) life scheme framework
is a cognitive representation of the ongoing or unfolding narrative. It
involves the individual as a protagonist, who charts a course from their
point of view, with plot and objectives, as well as obstacles such as
events that challenge the protagonist and their worldview. Importantly,
the life scheme places necessary significance on the reflexivity with
which people encounter life. As these authors point out, the concept
encompasses the fact that people seek to draw meaningfulness from
order (stability in the world) and purpose (viable goals). The perception
of order needs to be somewhat hopeful against any ‘objective’ measure
of how one really fits into the world, and the perception of purpose
needs to place goals that are in reach.
The capacity to cope with tensions is dependent on both intrinsic
and extrinsic factors (Maddi 1998; Antonovsky 1987). According to
the salutogenic approach (Antonovsky 1987), a person’s adaptation to
stressors or a stressful situation can be salutary, neutral or pathogenic,
depending on how a person copes with the tension created by the
stressor. A person has what Antonovsky calls a number of ‘generalized
resistance resources’ for coping, including social supports, and cultural
and material capital. These assist in buffering or negotiating past the
tension. It is the second group of resources, internal resources, including
what he refers to as a sense of coherence, that concerns us more here. By
sense of coherence Antonosvsky refers to meaningfulness, manageability
and comprehensibility, and relates these respectively, to the relative wor-
thiness, the relative capacity to address these demands, and whether an
individual perceives impulses as attached to ordered, predictable cogni-
tive meaning.
The recovery pathway does not have the same starting point for
everyone who has been confronted with trauma. First, as noted by
Antonovsky (1987), Wong (1993) and others (Barnes 2013; Jirek 2011,
137
2017), there are different extrinsic and intrinsic resources or obstacles

that make the commencement of every journey unique and non-linear.
Second, there is much literature that suggests that trauma may be com-
plex and cumulative, and that in some people’s lives it is difficult to find,
either subjectively or objectively, a more or less precise point at which a
therapeutic intervention is deemed necessary.
Psychological trauma involves a range of consequences including
disempowerment, loss of control and disconnection from self-identity
(Androff 2012; Bal et al. 1999; Jordan 2013). At the same time, there is
no singular path or optimal placement or pattern of milestones marking
the best way forward and this is the case for persons fortunate enough
to have avoided victimisation in their lives as well as those who have
suffered multiple traumatic experiences. Consequently, there is a thera-
peutic danger in assuming that recovery narratives all more or less follow
the same pattern. Individual victims have meaningful experiences that
require incorporation into a narrative, and the triggers, beliefs or events
that assist the construction of the recovery narrative manifest in vari-
ous ways and forms. Thus, lives and perspectives are composed of one
or more narratives. In many cases, multiple and sometimes contradictory
ways of seeing are evident in victim accounts (Frank 1995; Barnes 2013).
According to Janoff-Bulman (1999), a traumatic event will often
challenge the view that events are predictable or make sense, and recov-
ery requires a resetting of meaningfulness, or a renewal of the belief
that there is an affirmative value and meaning in life. This re-evalua-
tion is understood as essential to trauma recovery, and involves engaging
with the event through a revised life scheme, to borrow Thompson and
Janigan’s concept.1
Charting Recovery Adaptations

If, as according to the research cited above, everyone experiences more or
less anxiety that is ontologically challenging, and meaningfulness is the
orderly and purposive translation of a view of the world into a concept
of self-identity, a traumatic event may separate order and purpose from
identity. The event is not only disruptive of immediate plans or goals
138
and the person’s adaptation to a view of order, but it is also challenging

to the person’s view of the world and their place in it—a process that has
been termed ‘narrative wreckage’ (Frank 1995, p. 68). The adaptation,
as per Thompson and Janigan (1988, p. 270), is either to change the life
scheme or change the perception of the traumatic event.
Building on the above observations, Polkinghorne (1988), Neimeyer
(2001) and Frank (1995) have developed therapeutic interventions
based on the observation that self-identity, being dependent on con-
tinuous reflexive construction that provides a storyline or ‘master nar-
rative,’ must adapt to incongruous, traumatic or upsetting life events
through revision or rewriting. A ‘restructuring’ (Landenburger 1998) or
‘realigning’ (Abrahams 2007) of the self refers to this reflexive engage-
ment with an adaptive narrative. Narrative therapy seeks to empower
the individual to take control of their recovery via an active construc-
tion of the incident, rather than passively experiencing its negative
effects (Androff 2012; Bal et al. 1999).
Given the importance of meaningfulness and especially its incor-
poration of teleology or purposive living, it is unsurprising that some
scholars have begun to unpack understanding of the role of personal
narrative in recovery from trauma. Reflexive engagement with the event
involves a review, or ‘narrative reconstruction’ (Jirek 2017, p. 166), of
the distinctive signposts that form, inform and reform the life course.
Maddi (1998) conceptualises ‘hardiness’ as stemming from beliefs
that divide trauma responders into those who find value in active
engagement or strong commitment, those who see negative and posi-
tive experience as a challenge requiring the individual to take a chance
for personal growth, and those who believe that they are able to control
events if they make the requisite effort. Transformative coping is found
where people take action by making decisions and carrying out plans or
where they adopt a broader perspective or more deeply frame the mean-
ing of the stressful situation or event.
Barnes (2013) studied forty intimate partner violence abuse victims,
adapting Frank’s (1995) illness narratives, to postulate four narrative
types. Frank (1995) identified three narratives, including chaos, resti-
tution and quest, with those maintaining a chaos narrative experiencing
139
an ‘anti-narrative’ that lacked a clear tie to an ongoing perspective; those

with a restitution narrative on the path to recovery and locating expe-
riences of abuse in the past; and those with a quest narrative seeking to
create a renewed and emboldened identity, and not fearing change or
challenge. Barnes found that about half of her sample conformed with
the restitution narrative. Three-quarters of her sample gave accounts
that reflected the chaos narrative, with respondents speaking about
ongoing struggles and confusion, continued abuse, over-sensitivities and
struggles with their self-concept (Barnes 2013, p. 389). She found quest
narratives, expressing the positive impacts of trauma, in just over half
of her sample. And she identified what she termed ‘active recovery’ as a
fusion of these other narratives but which is dominated by a recognition
of the adverse effects of the abusive experience but also an effort to take
charge and end the negative impacts (p. 392).
In her work concentrating on post-traumatic growth (PTG), Jirek
(2017, p. 172) identified major categories of trauma survivors in terms
of levels of narrative coherence and PTG, and five major post-trauma
narratives. She coded her qualitative interviews as revealing: (1) a con-
tinuous and coherent storyline before, during and after the traumatic
occurrence; (2) an ‘intelligible, organized and logical’ life story; (3) a
clear sense of self-reflection on continuity and change before and after
the trauma; (4) incorporation of trauma into one’s worldview; and
(5) incorporation of the trauma into a vision of the future. Regarding
post-trauma narrative coherence, Jirek found that she could divide her
sample into the following groups: level I—individuals with low narra-
tive coherence and low PTG; level II—individuals with moderate nar-
rative coherence and moderate PTG; and level III—individuals with
high narrative coherence and high PTG. For instance, about one of
her respondents who conformed with level I she observed: ‘As a result
of not forming a coherent narrative about his life, including his sister’s
death, Mike’s trauma remains nearly as raw and unprocessed today as
it was two years ago’ (Jirek 2017, p. 173). In contrast, she noted that
Jennifer (Jirek 2017, p. 175) was at level III because she had incorpo-
rated the traumatic incidents ‘into a coherent story,’ by relying upon her
Christian belief system and trying ‘to live each day with purpose.’
140
Adapting the work of Frank (1995), Barnes (2013), Jirek (2017) and
Thompson and Janigan (1988), and taking into consideration the previous
discussion on self-medication and self-identity, we can identify four adap-
tations consisting of continua along three dimensions. We take from the
above that the individual will have a more or less complete and coherent
narrative structure in an individualised onto-epistemology consisting of:
1. a more or less ordered pathway consisting of signposts (marking

difficult stretches of journey, indicating how the significant trauma
has been memorialised or integrated into identity and what still lies
unfinished). The pathway is clear or resolved or it is obstructed by a
significant blockage from unprocessed trauma.
2. a daily routine and reward regimen that is more or less oriented
towards completion of the unfinished journey and characterised by a
daily regimen that is marked by numbing or isolating indulgences on
one end and productive or dignifying activities on the other.
3. a supporting (as opposed to undercutting) belief system that either
provides solace and synergy in an affirmation of meaningful connec-
tion to the world or undercuts it to produce despair or nihilism.
In this adaptation, a recovery narrative will consist of an ordered path-

way that is supported by routine undertakings with both of these girded
or supported by a way of seeing oneself in the world. The question that
the recovering victim may ask themselves is: how far back is it neces-
sary to go before meeting up with that signpost that marks the division
between that part of the journey that still needs more reflection and
integration into identity and that part of the journey that is more or less
integrated (as the division between PTSD and PTG)? As is well-known,
many victims do not feel themselves as moving forward because they are
not in a position where they are willing or able to integrate the fact of
the significant trauma event into their self-identity.
The second question is: how is the daily routine and particularly the
reward structure oriented to support a balanced routine that nurtures
production and dignity? Some people will be more proactive with their
routine, aiming to build up at least part of their resilience and per-
haps also slowly easing themselves back out into public appearances.
141
For many others, the daily routine is reactive and retreating, tending to
the bandaging but not ready engagement. Here, the question is whether
there is some part of the daily or weekly routine that is oriented to
attaching an affirmative meaning to a lingering legacy. What needs to be
modified or revised in the trauma reflection to that they may be satisfac-
torily incorporated or validated in the preferred identity?
In this regard, and taking up the question of the underlying belief
system, questions need to be asked: is the belief system, or the way
the victim-survivor sees the world, supportive of inspiration, synergy
and involvement? Alternatively, is that belief, challenged by a signifi-
cant event, driving towards nihilism and despair? Is the metanarrative
consistent or an impediment to an affirmative connection between
self-identity and the significance of life? If belief is stymying, does mov-
ing forward on an ordered pathway require a modification in the belief
system?
This leads to four ideal-type adaptations:
• Level I (chaos)
– The victim occupies is uncertain or unable to identify a pathway
that is disordered by obstacles (markers of significant unresolved
trauma).
– There is also weak connection to a meaningful world; they have
their view of the world jarred loose or are otherwise not grounded
by a strong affirmative worldview. There is a disintegration
between routine, pathway and self-identity, beginning at the
‘ground zero’ of the original trauma (cf. Barnes 2013, p. 384).
– There is no clear recipe to take from an affirmative identity from
which to build up the day to day routine (there is dread regard-
ing what still lies dormant) and/or there is no system of belief that
might help to make the identity work meaningful.
• Level II (scrambling)
– The victim occupies a weak position on a disordered pathway but
a meaningful connection with the world through a positive belief
system.
142
– The belief system has been challenged, and meaning work is

needed to reconcile facts on the ground with the self-identity
ideal, which may require a bit of revision, but still provides a sup-
portive foundation.
– There may be some need to reframe or redirect as the untoward
event is incorporated into the narrative as a signpost. The adap-
tation may involve a looking back upon that event as an unre-
solved injustice or ongoing menace or an inability to look forward
beyond that event and its impact on identity.
– Since that incorporation is a move that also involves the burying
of innocence and perhaps the aspirations of that innocent identity,
it is symbolically tragic. There may be a good deal of self-indulgent
self-medication by victims who are blocked or not prepared or able
to take on and come to grips with a traumatic event.
– The victim may by indulging with drugs, alcohol or over-eating.
They may be visiting with the trauma in manageable dosages or
preventing themselves from being lucid regarding the event.
• Level III (ritual/control)
– The victim appears to hold a strong position on an ordered path-
way by engaging in highly structured affirmative daily routines
that are consistent with resilient adaptation, but at the same time
weakly is connected to a system of meaning.
– The person believes that overcoming the traumatic event is pos-
sible through doubling down on commitment to an ordered, rig-
orous programming of the routines of their daily lives and/or by
vigilant monitoring of all entry points. Such an adaptation substi-
tutes ritualism for meaning.
– Since the recovery/discovery narrative is not strongly attached
to a supporting belief system, the victim-survivor may be
disempowered.2
• Level IV (quest)
– The survivor sees him herself as in a strong position on an ordered
pathway and a meaningful connection with the world through a
positive belief system.
143
– The person has accepted and incorporated the victimising trauma

into their identity, has placed markers and is taking stock of the
distance taken in self-development.
– There is a strong affirmation that all historical events play a
necessary and beneficial role in the stronger, more affirmative
identity.
Figure 5.1 depicts the four adaptations along three continua, where
the text has been minimised for the purposes of representation. There
are four adaptations, representing chaos, scrambling, control and
quest. The dotted line indicates weak or entropic connections around
the perimeter between the dimensions of belief, routine and pathway.
Each dimension- continuum is represented in a line across three points
from a periphery apex to a centre apex. For ‘pathway,’ ‘blocked’ is at the
periphery and ‘clear’ is at the centre; for ‘routine,’ ‘indulgent’ is at the
periphery and ‘productive’ at the centre; and for ‘belief,’ ‘nihilistic’ is at
the periphery and ‘affirmative’ is at the centre.
In this schema of adaptation, a few points are worth noting.
First, as in all such schemata, individuals do not fit precisely into
one or the other. We do think that the three variables that feature
across them are important and we hope that readers find it useful
Pathway
Chaos
Scrambling
Control
centre
Quest
Belief Routine
Fig. 5.1 Recovery adaptations

144
to consider how these factors play out in the negotiation between

traumatic victimisation and PTG. Since we understand that each
variable (pathway, routine and belief system) may be stultifying to
that growth, we should emphasise the implication that for some
people, some belief systems may be in the way of positive change.
Beliefs are not always or necessarily therapeutic and they require
revision (as per Thomson and Janigan 1988).
We know that there is much to be understood beyond quantify-
ing how much. In addition to identifying how a person is tracking
with more or less order or elaboration in belief, it is helpful to dis-
tinguish among kinds of ordering and believing. As is understood
within research into belief systems, there are various belief systems
and people with different learning experiences will use different
schemata or ideological tools to interpret their world. Individuals
represent their world with cognitive systems in mental mod-
els that represent, and so create, structure and order. In this anal-
ysis, we have not developed the material to parse the character of
the belief system as a potentially counter-developmental cognition,
but we do note here that this is something that complicates recov-
ery. As per the ritual/control adaptation, like too much belief, too
much reflection on the ordering of the self may be associated with
a less-than-robust recovery pathway. The emphasis on ordering the
self produces a fetishistic ritualism, but this can become a substitute
for meaningful reflection. The figure depicts the four adaptations
along three continua, where the text has been minimised for pur-
poses of representation. On the x axis, the pathway is depicted in a
continuum between obstacles and objectives; on the y axis, routine
is depicted as a continuum between indulgence and productivity;
and on the third axis between these is the belief, depicted on a con-
tinuum between nihilism and synergy.
In what follows, we present examples that we hope support the view
that self-medication is an adaptive behaviour. It is a response to the
interplay between pathway, routine and belief system.
145
Level I: Chaos
As per the description above, and borrowing from Frank’s (1995) original
concept, many victims will have experienced a time in their recovery (if
they recover) at which both past and future is a disarming blur of disar-
ray. Not everyone can be clear-eyed about their situation as it being lived.
People are generally in a position to deploy perspective, or place them-
selves in a sequence of linked events, when they can do so retrospectively
at a safe distance, not hunkered down facing a situation they do not feel in
control of and from which they see no way clear.
ID012 is a poly-victim who came from a ‘dysfunctional family’ and
was sexually assaulted as a young woman several decades ago, began to
abuse heroin and other drugs to disengage following the assault, became
suicidal, and then transferred her energy into a community project to
help women who have been abused. Since then, she has been the victim
of workplace sexual assault, for which she did not receive help from any
type of formal support. She believes that, had she not chosen to cope by
disengaging (through drug use) following the event, she might not have
survived. However, she is currently not a user and believes that she can
now never safely return to drug use.
She has a segment of her diary from ten years previous to the inter-
view, at which time she was experiencing panic attacks, which she says
‘sums up what I felt at the time’:
ID012: Friday: saw Grant, he was a psychologist, very depressed and

suicidal. I phoned a friend and talked to her. Put the cats in animal
welfare so they have a chance at living—because I had three cats at
the time—buy a bottle of Scotch and take pills and sleep the week-
end away. Hopefully I won’t wake up. Paula phoned back with num-
bers for [name’s place] and crisis care. Went to markets, did some
shopping and bought a bottle of Scotch. Grant phoned me and reas-
sured me about work—whatever that was—umm … feel better but
exhausted, went for a walk then went to bed. Saturday: slept badly
and unable to concentrate on paper, even unable to listen to science
show. Can’t concentrate on anything. Went to the city to buy birth-
day present for friend, absolutely exhausted and dragging my feet.
Laid down in the afternoon because I started feeling dizzy, forgot to
146
eat, I keep doing that. Exhausted but very agitated, can’t settle down.
I can’t do anything and am very confused. Developed a cold sore—
went for a walk to calm down. Sunday: slept very badly … umm
… woke at 10 a.m., four cups of coffee, very agitated—no won-
der. Went back to bed at midday. Awoke at 1:15, cleaned house …
Looked for brown bears in the garden … 4–4:30 … started to fill out
the Commcare form, started dinner and fed cats—5:30. Panic attack
started. Monday: exhausted and slept late, terrified about going to the
hairdresser in case I see Mark—because the hairdresser was next to
the building where we worked—Grant phoned. I don’t really want to
go near the Commcentre—because I worked in the Commonwealth
Centre—forced myself to leave home and went the back way to the
hairdresser. Fortunately they placed me in a dark corner, hidden from
[name’s place]—so I guess the hairdresser knew something was hap-
pening. I didn’t tell her or anything—saw some ABS people on the
way to North Terrace, but I was wearing sunglasses and pretended
that I didn’t see them and I didn’t speak to them.
ID012: No, I didn’t go to the police that time. I went to the police,
I think it was last year or the year before, when another guy from
work [abused me] … that was a waste of time though, because noth-
ing has changed … nothing’s changed since 1976. Very little, as far as
rape victims go. And that’s another reason why I wanted to take part
in this [interview] too, because so many people that are victims do
use, do self-medicate and it’s just not understood and it should be.
I: Is there a connection between that and your reasons for talking about
your life for this research project—is there any connection between
your news and this?
ID012: No, not really … umm … I mean, one of my friends said that
I can start using marijuana again because it doesn’t really matter, does
it, because I’ll be dead in six months? And I said to her—she only said
it to me the other day—and I said, ‘No, there’s no way I’m using mar-
ijuana again. I don’t care if I’m due to die in a couple of weeks, I’m
not using marijuana again, ever.’ Because you think—and I thought
this with drinking—you think that if you have time off drinking or
using marijuana and you go back to it again, you think it’ll be like
starting again like it was in the early days, where everything was great.
But it’s not the case, you go back to exactly where you left off and it
goes downhill very quickly. So yeah, I’ve learnt that I can’t do that …
it’s not an option anymore … So, I went to see a lawyer I had, and
147
she actually asked me after a few years of everything, she said ‘can you
give me some more details?’ And I couldn’t tell her … She was working
on my behalf and I couldn’t tell her. See, I haven’t gotten very far any-
where because I can’t talk with anyone, it’s too hard … it’s too painful.
And that is why I medicated.
I: Would you like me to organise a counselling session for you?
ID012: I don’t know if it would be any help or not, I’m just … I just
can’t do things … I’m hopeless. [Emphasis added]
ID012 linked the routine or daily travails to the discourse of Alcoholics

Anonymous. There is much reflection in which she is explaining herself
in terms of a daily struggle against backsliding into debilitating addiction.
However, there is no clear route by which the trauma of the past will be
laid open and the wounded child laid to rest. There is the possibility of
repeat cycles, as the validation from some formal supports (the psycholo-
gist, her volunteer work), but there is also a clear danger that without a
strong self-belief the survivor narrative is still only appearing in dribs and
drabs. Similarly, ID006 affirms that there is work to do so that she can lift
herself beyond her current state of malaise. The difficulty is identifying the
connection between the belief system and the interpretation of the obsta-
cles still on the pathway. As with so many victims, the alcohol and other
drug (AOD) use is symptomatic of the parlous state of this reflexive work.
ID009 is a poly-victim aged in his mid-sixties who was viciously
assaulted on a busy street in front of bystanders by the boyfriend of an
abused woman to which he had provided solace (regarding the abusive
boyfriend). It was the second assault by that perpetrator on ID009.
Subsequently, he was the victim of an (unrelated) home invasion in
which he narrowly escaped injury. Since the attack, ID009 has become
forgetful, fearful, has disengaged and increased his use of alcohol.
He lives alone in a rented flat. He has three years of university and is
employed part-time as a technician.
ID009: I’m not one of these people that is on guard all of the time when
I’m walking down the street … you should be able to walk down the
street and not be assaulted. But afterwards, I never used to feel vul-
nerable but since then I do. And then this other one, that makes me
feel vulnerable now even in my own house. That’s why is so bad. And
148
everything I’m doing is to try and get out of there, but it’s hard because
I’m chasing my tail … my income’s going downhill, and … I don’t
know what to do, I really don’t. If I had any hair I’d pull it out.
A disordered pathway is clearly evident in this short description. ID009

feels under siege, but also does not indicate here, or in other quotes,
a strong belief commitment beyond survival. He ‘checks the computer
everyday’ to see that his assailant is still serving the sentence he received
upon conviction for the assault and appears not to convey a strong faith
that he will not face another confrontation that will hurt him. He seems
unable to plan or to rethink the pattern of victimisation. There is also a
vexing mystery about the bashing as a near-death experience that seems
to be arresting:
ID009: I remember the first [incident] … I was on the median strip and
I was sort of on my knees … I was not half-stood up but I was sitting
back on my haunches and this guy grabbed my arm and pulled me
up. I stood up, after a fashion as I was still out of it from the kick-
ing, so when people say that they have the wind knocked out of them
I know what the mean. I was taking in the big ones trying to get
some breath back into me and then he starts swinging me around.
At this stage I could hear the traffic going the other way, they won’t
stopped … it was only one side. And so, this lane I could hear the
tyres going—they were doing 60 kms/hr and I could sense that he
was going to throw me in front of the cars so I just dropped. I made
myself as heavy as I could and dropped to the ground, so he had not
the chance. So, I went back to do that [give a statement] but the other
one was when I was on the phone, they said, ‘Ok, hang up’ … so
I hung up. I had my phone in my hand like this … I remember it dis-
tinctly, I was shaking like mad. This idiot, that smashed me, he came
up and I felt his hands grab my phone and he walked away. I couldn’t
see much, but just enough to lean back … and I was starting to panic
and so I yelled ‘he took my phone, he took my phone’ … I yelled it
really loud, and a few minutes later someone put my phone back in
my hand. I don’t know how that happened.
He notes the following about the first incident regarding this perpetra-
tor, after he was hit:
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ID009: Now, when this second bashing happened, I queried them about
it. I asked whether they had a report from the first one and she said
‘no, there’s no report,’ so obviously they didn’t put any paperwork
in, they didn’t do anything … they just sat on their hands. In their
defence, I suppose, in some way it’s because I told them at the time
that I’ve had a skinful, I’m not sober or anything.
His self-medication with alcohol makes him a poor witness, and police
are disinclined to provide formal validation. He does not know how
to place the dread of the near-death experience; he appears to believe
that he only just, miraculously, prevented himself from being pushed in
front of fast-moving traffic. His life appears to be on hold until he finds
the clue to unlock his vulnerability to repeat victimisation.
ID009: So, I bought some plywood and screwed it in so it would be

harder to get through, even though they could if they wanted to. So
now, I’ve got this massive solid door and I’ve gone to the trouble of …
well not the front door, but the back, I screw that shut … I’ve got one
of those electric screwdrivers and I’ve got these long screws that screw
into the door jamb, so no one can get through that.
Yeah. I undo it in the morning so I can get in the back door, when
I come home if I have to go in that way. See, being on the corner
like that, I go up the alley and I’ve got a gate so I go in there. I’m
always wary about just opening the gates and driving in because what
if someone’s there waiting?
In the chaos adaptation under a disordered narrative, there are tempo-

rary or quotidian ‘fixes’ that may be unconnected in a sequence until
there is a means by which a survivor finds a significance that enables
them to chart a way clear of present circumstances. ID009 is by his
own description a victim who is expressing being cornered without
offering himself a way clear: in his routine activities he appears to be
sleep-walking through the dread of the next traumatic event; the under-
lying cause is only explained in terms of random or inexplicable acts;
the covering explanations are unfinished or find their way to a discourse
on existential precariousness.
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Do most victims begin a journey of recovery in condition in which

their ‘world is turned upside down’? It is certainly not unfamiliar to
many of them. The pathway has been disordered by one or more deeply
traumatising events. This has also pushed into doubt the metanarrative
or a set of beliefs. The relationship between the commitment to a set
of ideologically-informed tasks and a condition of wellbeing, safety and
social involvement has been torn asunder. As discussed next chapter, the
implicit contract of reciprocity is broken. There is instead the inversion
of justice, purpose and self-development.
Level II: Scrambling

As above, the scrambling adaptation is identified by an inability to
reframe identity in light of the worldview so that every day or routine
ordering is patchy, and there is likely to be a reliance on drugs or alco-
hol to numb the pain or push away the trauma and traffic with the out-
side world. What distinguishes it from the chaos adaptation is that there
is some reference to belief, where a self-identity is connected, if only
incompletely, to a positive worldview.
We asked the question of our focus group participants if they were
aware of clients who struggled with managing their daily routines in
the face of confronting their victim narrative, especially as some victims
were offering testimony in front of the Commission.
FG23 VSS002: I’m going back a bit, about a client who … Initially
when she sought help it was both from a domestic violence service
and ourselves it was because of domestic violence. But as time’s gone
on she has been reflecting on what’s been happening to her and trying
to make changes in her life. She’s also recently revealed that she suf-
fered a child sexual assault at the hands of her father, as a very young
child, several times. And she was the eldest girl and how she protected
her sisters and things like that. And it’s really interesting watching
her because she now, and she was definitely using alcohol and talked
about her use of alcohol, and also her use of food. Eating as a strategy
of coping which kind of hasn’t come up because it’s not a substance
151
as such or a drug. But then eating is definitely something that people

use as a coping strategy. So she’s been really reflecting a lot on how
she in fact—and talking about strategies about how when she has the
thought, how she might interrupt that. And sort of talks to herself
about using a better way to deal with it. So she’s using journalling as a
way of doing that. Writing she’s finding extremely useful.
ID006 is a poly-victim who was neglected and physically and sexually

assaulted during childhood by her stepdad. Her mother died before
she could ask her about her knowledge of these assaults. She had two
siblings, one of whom died at twenty, and the other with whom she’s
had no contact in over thirty years. Her most recent victimisation was
a stranger assault on a public street. She suffers from acute anxiety as a
result of the assault, including fear of public places. She uses marijuana
to dull the anxiety. Her PTSD directly followed from the assault, but its
severity is probably linked to the trauma of repressed childhood experi-
ences. The visit to Victim Support Services (VSS) for the interview was
a significant undertaking.
ID006: Basically, I grew up in kids’ homes when I was a kid. In fos-

ter homes, welfare homes … whatever you want to call them. Family
group homes … whatever … And there was abuse in them, like phys-
ical abuse. I remember that I was hit when I was about three or four
years old. And then when I was about twelve or thirteen I went to
live with my mum and I got abused by her partner. So yeah, there’s
my life … I basically lost two jobs because of it, because I wouldn’t
go. I used to do work at the XXXX, and at the XXXX … you can’t
trust people after something like that. You can’t be around that many
people.
I: So it really put a huge fear into you?
ID006: Yeah, and I still don’t go very far and I don’t go out at night-
time, even though I got bashed during the day … and I very rarely
come to the city. The only reason I came to the interview … like I
said yes to the interview because they pushed me to come … I went
to the doctor and they closed my head up. They put some tape over
it, but I got a scar for it. I went to the doctor and I got them to write
me a report for, like a referral to a psychologist … but in getting the
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referral, I worked myself into such a state that I was vomiting, so to

this day I still haven’t seen the psychologist. Like, I’ve still got the
referral and everything and I want to go back to the doctor and speak
to them again, and still do it because I know that I need to … I’d
hope that in a year from now that I would have been to see the psy-
chologist … like, I’m over putting up with it myself, I want to get it
out. Like I said though, when I thought about getting it out, I made
myself sick … and then I was too scared to go because I didn’t want
to make myself sick again, so I’ve just … like, I psyche myself into
things. I psyched myself into coming here … I was glad when they
rang me and said that you’ve got a week or whatever, because that
gives me that time to work myself into going.
I: Would it be this most recent trauma that you would be talking about
mostly … or would it be historical?
ID006: Yep … the recent stuff, and we’d probably delve into the other
stuff too because I haven’t really dealt with that, so I’m not going to get
over that either am I?
I: And you’ve sort of delayed that, partly because you were bringing up
children…?
ID006: I’ve never really like … there’s no ending to it all … I mean, it’s
already over because the person that did it is dead, so that’s it, it’s done …
there’s no, like I don’t have to face that person ever again.
I: So you don’t have to worry about deciding whether to charge them or
not?
ID006: No, and so I’ve kind of let it slide … I mean, it’s still there and I
suppose it don’t hurt to talk to somebody and get it off my head, you know.
I: There’s quite a few things that people do, for example, swimming,
because they were very angry, so they were able to release a lot of
anger doing swimming. [19:55]
ID006: Well, I trashed my backyard basically. I like to be outside and if
I am angry or anything like, I will go and work in my yard and do
something, but yeah, I made a mess.
I: So that’s what you did after this last event?
ID006: Yeah … but I used to do it all of the time, anything that used to
stress me out … I’d just go out and hack up my backyard. [Emphasis
added]
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In assessing or interpreting how ID006 is negotiating the three dimen-

sions of pathway, routine and belief we will highlight a few points from
above. First, with regard to pathway, the historical trauma has been
pointed out as still requiring meaning work in order to be integrated.
There is the matter of the view of past events of her mother and her sib-
lings, and the stymieing of recovery that an absence of validation may
portend. Her daily routine is not supporting reflection, but rather dull-
ing it; and she appears to be prone to expressive destruction, targeting
her backyard, which otherwise provides her a limited solace and respite.
With respect to belief, she appears to be in a long moment of suspended
animation. There is reference to the necessity of some meaning work
that links the past to a positive affirmative future, but there is at present
no strong pull to bring pathway, routine and belief into harmony.
ID014 is a poly-victim in her mid-forties who believes that as a
young she was stolen and illegally adopted out to an Australian who
physically and sexually abused and isolated and tortured her and her
brother for seven or eight years. Her brother committed suicide as a
young man. She then was with a ‘junkie’ who drugged her and her girl-
friend and brought them somewhere to be raped by several people.
ID014: He used to make us eat vomit from the carpet. He used to try
and drown us in filthy bath water. He broke broomsticks over the
soles of our feet and our hands and our body and jump on us. So,
I have a lot of memory loss, because I’ve been kicked into brick [inau-
dible ] and glass and that. Twice, two accidents, one inside for not
changing my shirt when I was about seven or eight, about eight. And
it happened twice to my head, two separate injuries. So, I’ve got a lot
of memory loss. I used to be loved in my country, but the moment
he come and got me, it’s like he just destroyed everything of me and
my heritage. I was really loved, I lived on temple food, I grew up [on]
temple atmosphere and was on special diet. I never had egg, I never
bad meat, anything except for temple ‘presade ’, that means blessed
offering. So, when this person came, he broke every rule, he started
giving me egg, he gave me meat, he would give me bacon, he gave me
this. Of course, when I came to Australia I throw up.
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The ability to slow down the pace of stimuli, to separate events and
responses and take a position where routine and milestone events are
not a threatening cross-cutting jumble is not equally available to all
crime trauma survivors. In the following passage, note the cascade of
detail and the immanence of the threat:
ID014: What happens to me is I get very suicidal if I get told off. If

people are having a go at me, if it’s more than one thing, like two or
three things in a day or something, it can turn me over. And [PO1]4
was working on a case about foster care or something, I can’t remem-
ber now, but they are no longer dealing with me, [PO1] heard me
very suicidal after speaking to [PO2] and about the police offer
from the [indecipherable ] and I got very suicidal and I was beside
myself at home and I was wanting to take my life and rang [PO1]
how [PO2] had given me all this information it was overloading me,
how he couldn’t do this, he couldn’t do that, it just felt like betrayed,
I spilt my guts out for him and then somehow got through to Royal
Commission [into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse],
saw them and I don’t know the order and all that part, [PO1] was the
one who called VSS, she’s the one that got me onto it, and because
I already had seen the Royal Commission I was, and [PO1] was my
police officer and she was very loving to me and she’s a lovely woman,
and I had a lot of respect for her, and that’s how I started coming,
because [PO1] heard that she, ‘you need some extra support.’ … He
drugged me and he took me to some guy’s house and they were doing
whatever they were doing with body but I didn’t know he drugged me
because I was [inaudible ] I never had that experience, and yeah he was
out near the Glenside, there was a KFC, around there. I see that guy
but I don’t know his name. But he, I can tell he’s ashamed of it. But
whatever they did and I don’t know how many times, initially there
was me and my girlfriend ‘it’s a happy pill’ but he was drugging me
and abusing the fuck out of me, excuse my language, but like, and
one day I didn’t even have saucepans, bowls, fridges, nothing, never
had a mother figure, because that man never let me have a woman
figure, he had loads of girlfriends, like a prostitution house our house
was, the one that adopted. And that’s what I reckon, because he was
having women galore, because we had to stay away from his end and
at the back with the door deadlocked. So, I’ve been raped, I been
155
gagged, I been fucking abused and so much by people … You know

what I’d really like, I’d like, listen to this one, I’d like, I’d never had an
apology from the man that adopted me, except once in the Rundle
Mall, called my name and [inaudible ] and said, ‘Oh sorry I accuse
you for taking Gina’s wedding ring’ and I said, ‘What the fuck’s that
about?’ He thought I stole his wife’s wedding ring and he found it
behind a picture, that’s the only apology I ever got, what I want is
this Trevor [inaudible ] that adopted me and my brother … he’s now
passed away, deceased seventeen years ago, what’s the date today?
I: [Provides date ]
ID014: Yeah on the 15th of March is seventeen years my brother’s
died, took his life, gassed himself in a remote part of the river land
had a whole heap of medication from [name’s place] and so, this story
comes out for him on his behalf because he doesn’t have a voice. What
was I saying? What were you asking?
When asked about her daily routine, she said that she was ‘starting to,’
implying that she had no definite daily pattern, after which she referred
to sleeping at the temple among the deities that are ‘real’ for her, noting
that she would be having a deep sleep, a ‘divine sleep,’ when she finished
at VSS. From this, and from the style of answer, it is quite likely that the
integration of routine, pathway and belief is still disjunctive. ID014 had
a very strong belief system, but she did not connect the experiences of her
life to that system. In this case, the quest for justice would appear to have
been stymied by actors that have not served her well, by her account.
Level III: Control

Where victims do not permit themselves to perceive a passive vulner-
ability to what appears to be unpredictable and demeaning events and
instead seek to reframe such events in a structured, temporal order, the
adaptation may be control. The capacity to govern routines by excessive
ritual and hypervigilance is a means to place or fix an event and not
allow it to overwhelm. This is manifested, for example, where sufferers
experience intrusive and scattered flashbacks commonly associated with
PTSD (Bal et al. 1999; Frieze et al. 1987).
156
ID004 is a single-event victim who has incorporated his victimisation

into a narrative of resilience. He is analytical and introspective and may
be a bit obsessive about controlling all aspects of his daily and weekly
routines.
ID004: I’m a very structured and logical person. I’m disciplined … in

some regards, perhaps a little obsessive-compulsive … not to any
degree of needing to be medicated, but my career and my … and
the way I conduct myself as a person in society has always been very
pragmatic in that I look at the pros and I look at the cons, I look
at the relationships and I try to draw logical and intelligent conclu-
sions from that and then learn from it and move on. So, that’s how
I have been successful in my working environment and I tried to
apply a similar approach in trying to understand what the hell hap-
pened, because I was separated from my wife at the time … I wasn’t
part of the family unit in terms of close contact with my kids, and in
particular my daughter that was murdered.
I tried to dissect it, reassemble it, digest it and evaluate it and all of
those things and through some of that I got some clarity and through
some I got obsessive. And not necessarily obsessive about under-
standing the event, but also obsessive about some of the other things
… like, I’ve never been involved with a funeral and I had to learn
that quickly … the etiquette, the protocols, the eulogy and par-
aphernalia. But I also got a bit obsessive over a shrine … and how
and what I would hold onto as far as remembering her … I got a
little bit obsessive in my work as a distraction, probably distanced
myself from my girlfriend a bit … I only talk about it if we have
to and that is usually at milestone events, like the anniversary of
her death … Umm … as far as coping with it, I think one of my
strengths career-wise, divorce, estranged children and etcetera, I think
is just the fact that I am a highly resilient individual, and that’s not
to blow smoke up my own shorts, but I look at people around me
and how fragile they can become and yet I can go through similar
and/or worse things and come out the other side. I think that is what
has happened with this. There are still elements of this that I will
never understand and accept, there’s been some circumstances that
from this have led to other conflicts, which again I analyse, I dissect
and try to rationalise … I try to compartmentalise, and that really
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is my coping mechanism. It is part of me, it is something that I am

comfortable with. It is something that I do naturally and I do quite
well, eventually.
ID005 is a double-event victim. He has elevated anxiety because a his-

toric event (a pedestrian injury) primed him to the emotional impact
of a recent event (a gay bashing). Despite this, he has taken hold of
his narrative, drawn from supports (including VSS), resumed univer-
sity studies, and interpreted his victimisation in the maintenance if not
improvement of his self-esteem.
ID005: I think you have inbuilt strategies that you don’t know you’ve
built. Because you have survived it so long you have a natural way
of getting through it. So when it comes up again, it doesn’t become
as important; you don’t give the importance that you used to. You
don’t give it the power that you used to, because you start to realise
that you are giving them the power, not anyone else, but those people
that were actually bullying you. And that sounds like I made a very
well-balanced decision, but it wasn’t a well-balanced decision logically
anyway, it was just something just happens … as a survival technique,
that’s what it was.
Because as a victim … you learn to live with the victimisation, you
don’t sit in the corner crying … You know the wanting to be aware of
predictability of life, knowing the party that you’re going to be going
to, you’re going to know everyone that’s gonna be there, you wanna
know what will happen in the next hour … you do want some kind
of, um, settlement in everything you do. And I still have that. I still
find it hard to go to a party and feel totally comfortable. Go to a din-
ner party and feel totally comfortable. I’ve got to know what I’m going
into. I’ve got almost like reconnoitre. It sounds mad, but it’s true.
Level IV: Quest

Evans and Lindsay (2008) argue that the journey post victimisation may
be better understood as ‘incorporation’ rather than ‘recovery.’ Recovery
assumes that the individual can return to a pre-victimisation state and is
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no longer ‘significantly affected’ by what they are recovering from—an

idea that has obvious limitations (Evans and Lindsay 2008, p. 360). One
clear demonstration of incorporation is the use of the term ‘survivor’ in
place of ‘victim’ (Jordan 2013, p. 48), which posits the ‘linear progres-
sion from a negative to a positive state’ (Jordan 2013, p. 48), emphasis-
ing actions and responses, and acknowledging strength and resilience,
while still recognising the victimisation (Jordan 2013). The term survivor
describes victims as active, thereby dispelling the negative connotations of
‘helpless’ and ‘vulnerable’ victimhood (p. 49). One limitation, however,
of this terminology is the presumption of a linear progression. In con-
trast, the idea of incorporation acknowledges that the individual is still
affected by their victimisation, suggesting a more ‘complex and nuanced’
relationship between the self as victim and the self as survivor (p. 48).
The concept of incorporation complements notions of a journey fol-
lowing abuse and the legitimate construction of a sense of self, affirming
one’s resilience and strength (Evans and Lindsay 2008; Barnes 2013). The
fourth narrative type, the quest narrative (Frank 1995), builds on this,
and identifies personal growth and the positive impacts stemming from
the trauma, such as uncovering the victim’s strength of character (Barnes
2013, p. 384). We would add, as per our discussion above and in line
with Frank’s (1995) original typology, that the quest adaptation repre-
sents a productive synergy between an ordered pathway and a meaningful
connection with the world engaged through a positive belief system.
ID013 is a poly-victim who was neglected and sexually exploited
during childhood. He is on a disability pension. His most recent vic-
timisation was a brutal assault by a schizophrenic lodger that left him
with severe injuries, but also opened up in him a resolve to live that
he says was previously absent. He has two children from an ex-partner,
but is estranged from these family members. He is working on how to
best draw meaning from the variety of abuses he has encountered. He
has by his account good formal supports but a notable absence of infor-
mal supports, including an ex-partner and stepfather. He drinks ‘two or
three glasses a day’ of white wine as a ‘comfort companion,’ but he was
‘clinically regarded as an alcoholic and drug addict’ prior to the assault,
which in this regard, ‘has been ironically positive. I would say I live
more healthily now.’
159
ID013: It’s a psychological pain I feel, yes, and I … there’s two aspects
to this: one, I have no idea what happened to me, or why it happened
to me and—in terms of the assault—it was a severe assault. It was just
a, you know, king hit or … like I said, over fifty bones were broken
… And I question myself, I try not to, but I question myself whether
I actually deserved to be assaulted like I was or that it was my fault.
My ex-partner who is the mother to my youngest two children, she
… is best mates with the young man’s mother, who assaulted me, and
she said to me one day on the phone, this was a few years ago because
we don’t talk now, she demanded that I stop looking for someone to
blame because it was all my fault. So, that still rings through my mind
and I don’t want to allow myself to fully accept that I was assaulted so
severely because it was my fault.
He adds at another point in the interview that it is a ‘bit ironic for me

but not tragic’ that as a person who has been running youth shelter and
community living residences that he was assaulted in this way. It is also
an added irony that he was doing this for a close friend of his ex-part-
ner who appears to believe he should be taking more responsibility for
being attacked. At the same time, he says he has ‘lost probably about
ten years of memory’ and was ‘in a coma for about a month.’ Almost as
an aside, he notes, ‘I think I ended up spending up to … well I spent
longer in the hospital than [the attacker] spent in prison.’
Formal and informal supports in this case would appear to be work-
ing harmoniously:
I: Ok—so you feel that you’ve leaned on some of the official agencies or
at least they’ve stepped into help you? You said that they were helpful,
whereas some of those friends and family weren’t as helpful after the
event?
ID013: No, I … I think I found my … well, I only began calling him
my stepfather after I came out of being unconscious. I’ve never called
him my stepfather in all my life. He was with my mum for a good
twenty years I think … my experience with him after the assault was
that he willingly spent … well, almost excessive amounts of time
apparently supporting me. But he was manipulative and he was …
primarily after the benefits of any compensation that came my way.
160
I: How did he have any access to that?

ID013: Well, he doesn’t have access to it … umm, he introduced me to
the lawyer that worked with me and I’ve concluded recently to myself
that it’s highly probable that the reason that the lawyer recommended
to the judge that the compensation awarded to me be put into public
trustees was in order primarily to keep it away from him …
The following is a reflection on the pathway from a position of affirm-

ative belief. It is thus a recipe for everyday living that derives from an
appraisal of the past informed by a transcendent perspective.
ID013: Prior to the assault, I think I lived a life within my sense of

self, of not really caring whether I lived or died. And, I had actually
attempted suicide a few times in my earlier years. I was abused as
a child … I ran away from home when I was thirteen years old. At
sixteen I was sold on the children market to a man in Bangkok and
Thailand who ran a business, a restaurant there. He was quite wealthy
so he paid for me to go over there to live. So, I think I grew up as a vic-
tim really. And strangely for me, this experience—the bashing—it has
almost woken me up to living. In fact, during the month that I was in
a coma just prior to coming conscious again, I had umm … a sort of
out of body or spiritual experience, where it was clearly said to me in a
voice or manner that is way beyond human talk, that it’s not my time
to die. There are still things for me to do. And that gave me some sort of
quite … positive resolve, that there is a purpose in me being alive, even
though I don’t know what it is specifically. And, so since the impact of
the assault five years ago I have now had no death wishes in the sense
of what I am saying is that I never consider taking my own life.
I: So, would you say that … I mean, how much of your recovery would
you credit to your own resilience?
ID013: Good question … that’s a specific and positive question. In being
kind to myself, I would say around 60–70% of my recovery has to do
with my mental resilience, my character. I even wrote—I still jour-
nal quite a lot—and I remember, in fact I pulled it out of my wallet
only today a piece of paper where I wrote, ‘I am a survivor,’ and so
that is how I see myself now, which is a contrast to always wanting
to see myself as that I shouldn’t be alive, to know that I’m a survivor.
It’s a very different way of seeing oneself … I am quite consciously
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and legitimately addressing in the sense of my own psyche … like,

not being hard on myself and giving myself a break. Umm … even
like, language like loving myself and making choices that are good for
myself … that’s really quite powerful action and I’ve been implanting
that sort of action personally, in recent months, and it requires deliber-
ate effort on my part to apply my choices like that. [Emphasis added]
We see that ID013 is in the process of charting a course in which he can

have some assurance that he will not continue to go around in circles.
He is considering whether he himself is responsible for the assault by
the schizophrenic, who was a boarder in his house (provided as an act
of charity) and who is known to be unpredictably violent. He appears
to reflect on how his family members seem to have abandoned him at a
time of need, and to be wondering whether the key to moving forward
is accepting fault for that abandonment and assault. At the same time,
he is well on a route, on a quest for a better outcome.
ID015 is a poly-victim aged in her mid-twenties. She was sexually
abused by her stepfather since as far back as she can recall and was
involved in abusive, but by her understanding not necessarily avoided,
sexual relations with older men from the age of twelve. She became a
call girl in order, as she put it, to gain some control over her sexual rela-
tions with men. She said that the closing date of the Royal Commission
into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse was what triggered
her to take action by filing a complaint against her stepfather.
I: But so one thing that’s changed I guess, and I don’t want to put words
in your mouth, but you used when younger to be afraid of your step-
father, so when did that fear diminish?
ID015: When I was fifteen and I was moving around high schools and
he became a high school teacher, or he was a high school teacher or
existing teacher at one of the schools they put me into. And we had
a confrontation … and I sort of ended up locked in a room being
interrogated by a principal because he’d tried to protect himself and
said I made false allegations against him in the past or something.
I can’t say because I wasn’t one of the adults privy to that, I just
know that I was in a room being told I couldn’t leave and panicking
about being detained and not sure why. Um, one of my carers of the
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resi-carer facility came down because I told them that I have to call
her or she will make a missing persons report and I acted really weird
on the phone and wasn’t making sense to the questions she was asking
me and she was like, ‘Are you safe?’ and I was like, ‘No, no’. ‘Right,
can you tell me where you are?’ ‘Nope!’ ‘Okay, are you still at the
school?’ ‘Yes!’ ‘Great. Front building?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Is it a teacher?’ Or ‘Yep!
Absolutely I would love to do that later’ and then she drove down in
her van, her name was Jane kicking ass, pulled up, busted her way
into the thing and was like, ‘How dare you!’ and just like went off and
he stepped up and said, ‘I represent the school [inaudible ]’ and tried
to sound super adult or something or I dunno, super legitimate and
she said, ‘I know who you are’ and called him by name and started
blasting him. Um, which was really odd to me because I didn’t real-
ise, I hadn’t told anyone he was a teacher there, I was trying to hide
it because I really wanted to finish school and knew they would pull
me to another one and I just wanted to pass Year 9. Um, and I was
really scared of him in that moment, but having her stand up and be
like, ‘Get in the car’ and he was like, ‘Stay here’ and it just went on
for ages until she said, ‘You will never touch her again, get away from
her, you understand me’ and I was sort of like, seeing somebody so
easily, ‘cause everything in my childhood was unspoken or whispered,
to have somebody outright say, ‘I know who you are, get the fuck
away from her’ that was pretty cool. And he lived in a suburb close to
where I lived and I ran into him quite a bit. Maybe three times I ran
into him. That’s how I found out he was married. We played friendly.
And I was just really surprised at how short and fat he was. I guess
seeing him being a lot taller, you know when you’re smaller, literally
the physical size is quite scary.
For ID015, this moment of intervention, credited to her own actions

and the intervention of a social worker, permanently diminished her
stepfather and allowed her to begin the process of adopting the survivor
identity. The conjunction or confluence of spiritual fatigue and imme-
diate danger with an exceptionally generous act provided a watershed
moment that rejuvenated or restored hope and belief.
As per the reflections of both ID013 and ID015, they have both
experienced epiphanies, or startling moments in which a blockage
is suddenly removed and a clear and a clear pathway is opened up.
163
Epiphanies are a meaning-moment, they infuse the quotidian with

heightened significance, where that significance is thought sometimes to
emanate from, or at least suggest, a ‘divine’ or extraordinarily beneficent
intervention. Epiphanies are only available retrospectively, because not
only the event but also what occurs following the event must be availa-
ble for reflection on its significance. Epiphanies are theoretically availa-
ble to everyone, but it is necessary that the yearning insight is attached
to a view of the routine and the significant events that loom large and
must be resized.
Unpeeling Complex Trauma and Moving On

The discovery of suppressed trauma is an everyday occurrence for vic-
tim support service counsellors, as illustrated by the following response
raised in the focus group discussions:
FG2 VSS006: I recently had a situation with a woman who is the vic-
tim of domestic violence and, um, the offender was in jail and was
recently released on parole and, um, you know, having the victim rec-
ognising that when she would see him or triggered by memories or
whatever that she would automatically shut down and disassociate. I’d
been having phone conversations for quite some time and it wasn’t
until I said to her, ‘You know, can I ask, has there been some previ-
ous trauma?’ Without me asking that question she wouldn’t have dis-
closed there’s actually a previous complex childhood trauma history
there. So the recent trauma that she had experienced with the DV
[domestic violence] is just obviously just triggering of trauma patterns
and coping and ways of dealing as well. It’s quite often not the first
thing that they will tell you.
FG2 VSS001: I’d say it’s quite common.
FG2 VSS003: I’m actually thinking of two at the moment. Um, one is
a woman who discovered that her husband had sexually abused her
daughter and granddaughter. Um, she actually made the [inaudible ]
notification herself and contacted police. And saw me in the con-
text of what had happened to her daughter and grandchild. Um, and
then she said to me one day, ‘I’m going to tell you something that
164
I’ve never told anyone else.’ She said, ‘I was actually raped by a neigh-
bour when I was thirteen years of age,’ and this actually happened in
another country very close to Australia. Um, and then it was only a
couple of weeks ago that I got a call from this woman after all these
years, and this woman is now close to sixty [years old]. A police officer
from the country [where the rape occurred] contacted her because
a lot of other young girls as they were at that time disclosed about
what this man had done … Um, and also recently a court case which
has just finished, um, I saw the mother of a young victim, a young
woman, of domestic violence and the perpetrator had actually gone
to the family home. And so, in the process of talking with her she
disclosed about her experience of fourteen years of domestic violence
she actually experienced in her first relationship. And how her daugh-
ter’s experience had brought up some of those memories. But she in
the interim, um, had been seeking support. She had the psychologist.
And so, you know, while her daughter’s experience had triggered some
memories, and the fear of the perpetrator, the threats he made that
he was going to kill her, she felt that she had gained some strength,
and she had learned how to cope. And to the point she said, um, ‘He
doesn’t frighten me anymore,’ ‘I’ve gone past that,’ ‘I no longer feel
fear.’ And that’s quite interesting, particularly with a threat to kill.
FG2 VSS005: I would say that my opinion is across the board, um, we,
you know, rarely see those pure single-incident traumas anymore. It’s
far more common that someone has poly-trauma, complex trauma,
you know that really kind of pure sense of single trauma where there
is not identifiable previous trauma. Where they might be coming to
us for a housebreak, and that’s the worst thing that they’ve ever expe-
rienced is actually quite rare. You know, when you actually start to
unpeel some of that stuff, poly and complex trauma is far more com-
mon than single incident. I’d have to say across the board, I don’t
know if you guys agree, but—[Then the whole group indicated that they
agreed ].
While the differential patterns of a narrated recovery are of particular

concern here, there are also some quasi-universal milestones. Victims
characteristically experience anxiety, by which a person is lacking
the resources to predict immediate and long-term events, both pos-
itive and negative. Victims who describe an everyday life of anxious
165
‘hyper-veillance’ have quite likely not been able to ‘move past’ an

original trauma and repeatedly return to this original event with refer-
ence to their narrative immobilisation, or ‘being stuck.’
At the other end of the continuum of adaptations, we placed ID015
in the category of quest because she is engaged in meaning work involv-
ing reflection upon her recovery narrative. In particular, as below, she
has adapted to the lack of safety or validation in her formal and infor-
mal networks by incrementally replacing the network ‘pieces’ or ‘hop-
scotching up.’ According to the account below, after reflecting on some
quite dramatic events, including a homicide, ID015 engages a small
network of ‘friends’ including people she views as above her station or
circle. Once she believes herself on par or perhaps even superior to this
set, or with individual people, she works on another rung in the ladder,
so to speak. She systematically displaces into a secondary designation
those who no longer serve to challenge her. She also makes reference to
being able to be controlling in this respect.
ID015: Okay so I admire most of my friends, especially if they’ve been

in my inner circle because it’s usually because I’ve viewed them as bet-
ter than me and I’ve—
I: Do you really? That’s interesting, I mean you view them as better than
you in what way? When you say better that’s a—
ID015: In every way.
I: Sort of noble.
ID015: Yeah in every way, not necessarily physically, but emotionally in
life circumstances you know usually they’ve got something that I want so
there is something in their life or way of approaching life or existing that I
see in them and I go, ‘I want to do that’, or like that’s what I want. So at
one point in my very early days, I chose very intentionally my inner cir-
cle and that were non-drug-using, non-smoking, non-partying, edu-
cated people who finished school and it was very minimal education,
but I was the opposite of that, and I faked it and eventually I was able
to absorb, sponge up the way that they sort of felt and thought and I
bettered as a person, so usually the people who are in my inner circle
I admire a lot and that’s why I scouted them to be part of my inner
circle because I need to better myself and the best way to do that is by
controlling my environment intake which is a bit controlling [laughs ].
Like I said earlier, I can be very controlling.
166
I: That’s very logical.

ID015: Yeah so [laughs ] if I just surround myself with what I want to be
next I eventually hit a point when they become my peers and I don’t
feel better than them—
I: Oh you don’t feel like they are better than you anymore?
ID015: No, nah I feel like we understand—
I: And then you move on to a new inner circle?
ID015: Yeah, they may become … secondary friends, we’ve got a strong
relationship it’s just not, you know strong every day. I can rely on
them, I could call them, they could call me, if they called me and
said, ‘Oh, I’m having a crisis my dad is dead and I need somewhere
to sleep’ I’d set up my bed for them which was very special I guess
because I don’t like people in my home.
I: So, would you say that your inner circle then has improved over the
years?
ID015: Absolutely, yep. Systematically improved with every—
I: Iteration.
ID015: Yeah it gets better every time. Yeah and what do you think, what
was the other part of that?
I: That’s basically it, yeah the people you compare yourself to—
ID015: Oh yeah, and sometimes I compared myself to other state kids who
come out of care. And it makes me feel really sad. To see the outcomes
for some of my peers.
I: And so you still have contact with quite a few of them?
ID015: No they’re just everywhere, you can’t, you know, thousands of
them, you walk around you see them, they are homeless, they are on
the TV being arrested, one of them got murdered the other week by
her partner and her kids, and you know para hills or something and
seeing that sort of thing I compare myself yeah to them and I feel dis-
tressed at their lack of ability to step forward. [Emphasis added]
In reflecting on how she became or is becoming a survivor, ID015 high-

lights the preconditions of her recovery evident in the sexual abuse she
suffered as a child, the crucial intervention/rescue by one dogged social
worker, an ‘oversexed’ life of high risk as a teenager and young woman,
and the methodical approach she took to self-help and recovery. The
instrumentalisation of a support network as a dynamic, alterable step-
ping stone is thus presented as a deliberate survival plan.
167
The following commentary was offered by ID005, who expressed the

belief that he overcame enslavement to affects that he identified with
his victimisation. He said that he self-consciously permitted himself to
express sadness and anger and saw this as acceptance, which was in turn
a stepping stone to productive self-development.
ID005: I felt stronger and stronger as I went along, and more relaxed.
And I felt like … I could let myself feel victimised. I could let myself
feel sad. I could let myself feel angry. Instead of just being a slave to
them. Which was great power to get. And to relax, it taught me how
to relax … which was the major deal. And if I didn’t get that I don’t
think I’d have coped with it, I still think I’d be sitting home now. And
would have gone through a year of school, of uni. But, um, if it wasn’t
for here I think my uni studies would have gone right down.
I: Why?
ID05: Considerably. Because I was studying cultural science, studies and
social studies, and, um, sociology. And it made me … If I didn’t have
this I wouldn’t have been objective enough to do that kind of study.
So now actually, I’m stronger as a student, doing sociology than I am
… than I was because of it, which is great. So, you gotta see the good
things of it … than the bad, because then, you know, you’d just be a
victim to it.
Conclusion
In matching up values and norms to interests and goals, the individ-
ual engages the social via formal and informal networks. Community
organisations provide or fail to provide institutional support and, in this
way, give ‘enduring relations between the structural position of actors’ at
the level of social work (Hood 2012). These organisations also ‘possess
ontological depth,’ that is, they are dependent on the alignment of val-
ues between community actors and agents and versions of emancipatory
social improvement (Matthews 2009; Bhaskar 2013). In this regard, vic-
tim support agencies have come a long way in acting upon their under-
standing of their existence or mandate in respecting the dignity of the
victim where the resilience of the survivor may be a work in progress.
168
However, and as we have attempted to demonstrate in this chapter, that

understanding maybe further aided where there is a sharper understand-
ing of the interplay between the social world of support/non-support net-
works and the interior world of the victim-survivor. As we have shown
here, the meaning work that is done by victim-survivors is not without
pattern, because it is dedicated to reconciling belief, routine and pathway.
Trauma has literally and figuratively pushed victims off of their pathway,
with the consequence that they are often left in disarray, questioning that
the path they were on was the path that they were meant to take.
This, of course is the tragedy of criminal victimisation. The need to
find meaning in events is placed alongside the randomness of a preda-
tion, even against the innocent child. And then the double-whammy:
To convert the tragic end of innocence into a tale of resilience depends
upon the transformation of the victim. Given that the metanarrative of
neoliberal resilience ‘helps those who help themselves,’ the political ide-
ological space of victimhood is impoverished. The focus is on victims as
a talking-point for retributive crime policy or to demonstrate the mira-
cle of the human capacity at reinvention, left to its own devices.
In fact, the meaning work that is required is often enormous. It
requires that the person understands that they have a unique life history
with properties that set them apart from others. This is a work of discov-
ery that ought to be consistent with the means of recovery. That is to say,
if meaning work must be ideographic for the victim, so too is it neces-
sary to represent that onto-epistemology in its treatment. In reviewing
the reflections of survivors, that is to say those victims who seem to have
worked their way onto a new pathway using a guide towards routines or
daily logistics and a revised metanarrative or belief, we have attempted
to relay the vivid accounts of their journeys. Although we are using
ideal-types along three dimensions in order to help guide understand-
ing and differentiate the attitude of survival, it is worth noting that the
intrinsic and extrinsic influences are dynamic, with the consequence that
an affirmative self-belief is (almost) always vulnerable to collapse.
ID005: This [is] a weird kind of oxymoron, but um … I felt stronger

and stronger as I went along, and more relaxed. And I felt like … I
could let myself feel victimised, I could let myself feel sad, I could let
169
myself feel angry. Instead of just being a slave to them. Which was
great power to get. And to relax, it taught me how to relax … which
was the major deal. And if I didn’t get that I don’t think I’d have
coped with it, I still think I’d be sitting home now. And would have
gone through a year of school, of uni. But um, if it wasn’t for here
[VSS] I think my uni studies would have gone right down … Because
I was studying cultural studies … So now, actually, I’m stronger as
a student, doing sociology than I am … than I was because of it,
which is great. So you gotta see the good things of it … than the bad,
because then, you know, you’d just be a victim to it.
Notes
1. Cognitive behaviour therapy is used to reconfigure how victims of crime
interpret themselves and their place in a meaningful world. This requires
a reflexive engagement with a series of possible stepping stones that actu-
alise a positive understanding of the nature of meaningfulness for that
individual.
2. This may make a person prone to becoming an object of the perpetra-
tor’s speech (Bal et al. 1999).
4. The names of persons referred to by the interviewees have been changed
to protect their anonymity. Here, the names of police officers referred to
are replaced by ‘PO1’ and ‘PO2.’
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6
Meaning Work and Chance
Fitness to the Metanarrative—The Macro

Socio-cultural Context
Like all people, victims reflect on their lived experience, and this is
dependent on a generic assumption concerning the role of volition
or individual agency in day-to-day affairs. It is therefore important to
identify the persuasive views—or metanarratives—by which most
people evaluate themselves and provide themselves with a schemata
or cognitive roadmap. These may offer spiritual nurturance, solace or
structural support and suggests a place (or placement) on a difficult
journey. As suggested by the bracketed caveat, this is not to say that
such schemata or belief systems are always supportive or tailored to
individual circumstance. Although there is no objective standpoint
from which we may be certain to know this, it is reasonable to con-
jecture that some people may be using a roadmap that runs counter
and provides an impediment to their recovery journey. Determining
when this may be the case will may only be partially clear where a per-
son has been long immobilised by discomfiture.1 In any event, and as

176
per our discussion in Chapter 5, we view victimisation as an attitude to

an event that must be incorporated into a worldview or Weltanschauung.
Everyone who is educated, nurtured and normalised to live and
(perhaps) thrive is socialised or instructed on the practices of a proper
ontology and attitude. There is no contract, but it is implicit (and
sometimes quite explicit) that in a society that ideologically follows a
neoliberal doctrine, governments and citizens place great emphasis on
self-development and self-help. This is predicated on the belief that
(social, cultural or economic) capital is wasted where individuals do not
maximise their potential. That underachieving may constitute a ‘sin’
against the eufunction or efficient operation of society is also consistent
with the (somewhat structural, functionalist) belief that social and polit-
ical systems are weakened when people come to depend on a ‘nanny
state’ (Murray 1994). In liberal democratic states, there is an alignment
between the terms of the political- and social economy of self-identity.
Where the former is supported by neoliberal values, the latter is sup-
ported by precepts of the therapeutic or care community. No doubt
there is much necessary overlap, but random misfortune can and does
challenge the relation between attitude, expectation and reward.
The Entrepreneurial Self
Entrepreneurial self-identity or the entrepreneurial self is at the apex

of culture in the neoliberal ‘meritocracy’ (Cruise 2017; Giddens 1991;
Earley 1993). The rewards of a strong enculturation according to the
spirit of bonanza is a deep sediment, as illustrated by the resonance of
rags to riches tomes like Horatio Alger and The Great Gatsby, among
countless others. In the economic context of finance or ‘casino capital-
ism,’ the individual is archetypically an investor or risk-taker, a ‘slumdog
millionaire’ who rises from the ghetto to attain riches and fame. Most
business start-ups fail, yet it is through economic actualisation that
self-actualisation is deemed to be most fully realisable. Risk-taking is a
necessity of economic advancement, which in turn reduces vulnerability
to social predations.
6 Meaning Work and Chance
177
In support of this Weltanschauung, even those who start off the blocks
in a weak position must ‘make their own chances.’ That the econom-
ically and socially disadvantaged have limited resources with which
to make good bets is true enough (Pikkety and Saez 2014), but only
reinforces the political ideology’s strong social Darwinian affirma-
tion that the onus is on the individual to change those circumstances.
As famously articulated by Margaret Thatcher, individuals may volun-
teer to provide charity to those disadvantaged by misfortune, but there
should be no expectation that ‘society’ owes anyone a living or should
provide a safety net; on the contrary, government should deliberately
restrict interventions that serve to take responsibility for individual
improvement away from the individual (Murray 1994). In this macro-
socio-cultural context, the remedy for and causes of victimhood will
tend to be understood as dependent on individual resilience rather than
social support, with the onus residing with the individual to maximise
their chances against unpredictable adversity—a conditionality to be
celebrated as an antecedent to economic vitality (Donzelot 2008).2
The Nurtured Self: Therapeutic Discourse
Meaning or signification is also framed by the therapeutic environment

and discourse. Whether the self is empty (Cushman 1990, p. 599) and
needs to be ‘soothed and made cohesive by becoming filled up’ with
consumer products or other nurturing properties or is instructed to
develop mastery over emotions (Hazelden 2003), the therapeutic dis-
course sets out the contours of nurturance but is not detached from the
ideological values of neoliberalism.
Nikolas Rose (1990, 1998) and Anthony Giddens (1991) have
explored how the modern. western ‘regime of the self ’ incorporates lib-
eral values including autonomy, individuality, liberty and the freedom
to choose. Rose has argued that we now ‘interrogate and narrate’ our-
selves as ‘psychological beings’ such that the ‘inner life holds the secrets
[of ] identity which [we] are to discover and fulfil, which is the standard
against which the living of an “authentic” life is to be judged’ (1998,
p. 22). Following Foucault (1990), and concerned to understand the
178
‘practices in which persons are understood and acted upon,’ he refers to

‘the intellectual and practical techniques that have comprised the instru-
ments through which being has historically constituted itself ’ (Rose
1998, p. 23). Like Foucault, Rose is interested in interrogating how and
when human actions are viewed as non-normative—that is, degenerate,
maladjusted, sick, troublesome or dangerous.
A recent illustration of the therapeutic self may be found in the
applications of resilience theory (Luthar et al. 2000; Brown 2006;
Richardson 2002; Yates and Masten 2004; Worthington and Scherer
2004). In line with Luthar et al. (2000, p. 543), who argue that ‘work
on resilience possesses substantial potential for augmenting the under-
standing of processes affecting at-risk individuals,’ Richardson (2002,
p. 307) argues that resilience refers to a ‘force that drives a person to
grow through adversity and disruptions,’ and that there have been three
waves of inquiry into this phenomenon. Worthington and Scherer
(2004, p. 385) note that health resilience is dependent on reducing
stress emotions (such as anger and resentment) and increasing positive
emotions (such as empathy and compassion), and based upon direct
empirical research, they argue that forgiveness ‘is related to health out-
comes and to mediating physiological processes in such a way as to sup-
port the conceptualisation that forgiveness is an emotion-based coping
strategy.’ Brown (2006, p. 43) interviewed 215 women on their expe-
rience of shame to identify ‘the various processes and strategies women
use to develop shame resilience.’ She notes that ‘mutually empathic
relationships,’ ‘critical awareness’ and the freedom to ‘speak shame’ are
shame resilience boosters. Greene et al. (2004, p. 75) interviewed psy-
chologists and found that personal attitude, spirituality/religion, edu-
cation and multilevel (formal, institutional, informal) attachments or
bonds are the conditions that buffer stress and contribute to coping and
resilience.
From the perspective of public policy, what counts is what is most
likely to happen to most of the people most of the time. The path to
health is provided by stepping stones, each of which is determined by
the probability of recovery, according to research measuring the expe-
riences of large cohorts (Stroup et al. 2000). Analysts have also under-
taken to mine the terrain between the ‘objective’ diagnosis of traumatic
179
events and the ‘subjective’ interpretation or absorption of such events

into one’s self-image and identity. ‘Personalised medicine,’ which
emerged in the early 1990s, refers to the effort to push away from the
centre of medicine’s claims and counterclaims of a ‘one-size-fits-all’
model in favour of ‘knowledge about individual specificity and variabil-
ity’ (Tutton 2012, p. 1721).
Of course, people do try to match themselves to idealised others
and stuff their own experiences into the templates or schemata on offer
by expert diagnosticians. Yet therapists are aware that a patient’s ideal
model must be tailored, as there is no one-size-fits-all. The narratives
of wellbeing are strongly situated. A meek person is edged towards
some safe risks, while a brash person is invited to reflect upon others’
needs or feelings. By contrast, there is no presumption that the person
is recovering so that they can live self-sufficiently in a remote wilder-
ness. Overall, those therapeutic models must have sufficient nuance,
and must be attentive to the real possibility that patients may have a
false positive relationship with the proffered template. Socialisation, and
versions of the self, track along with regard to deviation from an ideal
neoliberal subjectivity. As per Giddens (1991), even though self-identity
is dependent on self-understanding, through the sieve of neoliberalism
the therapeutic discourse is heavily steeped in self-help.
This context of meaning or signification is experienced by victims
as an encumbrance from which they must make good an escape, the
ideologically correct course of action being to assume upon themselves
the burden of responsibility for their victimisation (Cruickshank 1993).
They are measured against the normative ‘good’ of the entrepreneurial
self. Under the neoliberal doctrine, victims are told not to wait for the
‘big bad state’ to overcome their vulnerability to predation or provide
them with a remedy for it. To the extent that victims show fitness to
this metanarrative, they will be reluctant to seek social services and will
believe that doing so may be counterproductive to recovery. No doubt,
there is a quandary as the victim is told that, from a therapeutic per-
spective, she ought not to engage in self-blame despite the temptation
while at the same time taking self-defence classes to help overcome her
vulnerability and to wrest a sense of confidence and self-control out of
the wreck of an inward-looking malaise.
180
Meaning Work and the Chance of Victimisation

According to Janoff-Bulman and Frieze (1983, p. 1), the psychological
distress experienced by victims is largely due to the ‘shattering of basic
assumptions held about themselves and their world,’ including ‘(1) the
belief in personal invulnerability; (2) the perception of the world as
meaningful; and (3) the view of the self as positive.’ They argue that a
rebuilding of the presumptive world is a necessary step in the recovery
process. As per the above, the ideals of the nurtured and entrepreneurial
self are sometimes in conflict; that tension is on bright display when the
cultivation of risk is opposed to the random application of hardship.
For the complex poly-victim, the belief in invulnerability may be
shattered early on. Where a person experiences childhood abuse at
the hands of a trusted authority such as a mature relative, the basic
assumption about childhood and maturation is contradicted, as indi-
vidual experience is opposed to cultural or social representations. This
is linked, as per Janoff-Bulman and Frieze’s observation, to the percep-
tion that as individuals we are engaging in a meaningful world. After
a shattering experience of childhood trauma, victims are likely to
experience—as per Janoff-Bulman and Frieze’s third point—an exclu-
sion from whatever meaningfulness there may be in the world. The self
is viewed as damaged, and the worldview is eclipsed by negative trauma.
That human beings seek to perceive the world as meaningful accords
with findings regarding a just world hypothesis. Montada and Lerner
(1998) have compiled several studies that demonstrate that people will
tend to equate victimisation with desert. In other words, if students are
shown fellow students being victimised, they will want to believe that
there was a method in the selection of suffering, particularly where the
suffering is inflicted intentionally by human actors. Similarly, experi-
mental research by Lerner and Miller (1978) found, in line with the just
world hypothesis, that people have a need to believe that they live in a
world where people get what they deserve (good people are rewarded
and bad people punished)—and that this belief predicts people’s reac-
tion to the suffering of others who ought to be construed as inno-
cent. Further, Rubin and Peplau (1975, p. 65) found that believers in
a just world are more religious, authoritarian and oriented towards the
181
internal control of reinforcements such as delayed gratification: ‘They

are also more likely to admire political leaders and existing social insti-
tutions, and to have negative attitudes toward underprivileged groups.’
Meaning work is challenged where the individual attempts to incor-
porate into a consistent worldview a neoliberal metanarrative, a thera-
peutic discourse of the self and a personal situation in which adversity
appears to be a random act as opposed to the result of divine retribu-
tion. A view that life has meaning is challenged where adversity strikes
despite demonstrable efforts to assimilate or normalise the self to accord
with these schemata. As we shall see, adjustments in how victims per-
ceive their life history unfolding are in good measure triggered by events
that have a significance that does not align with what these templates
provide—hence the need to tailor victim narratives.
Chance and Meaningful Order

One key but often discounted feature of the victim narrative is the
incorporation of chance, fate or luck into one’s view of justice, redemp-
tion or recovery. In this section, we examine how a view of chance may
augment what is already a rich literature on meaningfulness. We explore
how chance has an interceding and perhaps even directing influence in
the reflexive dimension of recovery or narrative readjustment or explo-
ration. The view of the self as inescapably unlucky or fated with poor
chance may well be objectively understandable, given that victimisation
and especially brutal victimisation is arguably a product of one or more
types of chance. As per our division of the cohort, it stands to reason
that complex poly-victims will have a slightly different impression than
simple victims of the influence of uncontrollable forces on their narra-
tive experiences and aspirations.
The understanding of meaningful social action has required, accord-
ing to Smith (1993) and Popper (1957) that we discount the impact or
role of chance in sociological models. Smith (1993) argues that the real-
ity of chance has been foreign to sociology or viewed merely as a mar-
ginal category and ‘a measure of ignorance’ (Poincare in Smith). Smith
(1993, p. 514) asserts that chance:
182
is not residual but should be analysed, in general, within sociological

models. Indeed, since social chance refers to unforeseen occurrences, it
must, by definition, form a general, putative, explanatory element within
analytical models for it is only when examining past events through such
general models, that researchers are able to distinguish specific chance
occurrences from events explained in terms of ‘structure/action.’
Smith notes that in developing his ideal types, Weber (1930) holds
that sociology should be concerned with meaningful actions. Although
Weber accepted that there is a role for luck or chance at the level of indi-
vidual competition and in ‘chance causation,’ he nonetheless instructs
sociologists to adapt models to un-incorporate chance. On the other
hand, and as summarised by Smith (1993, p. 517) Karl Popper (1957)
argues that chance has made a major contribution to understanding the
indeterminacy of social life. Popper (in Smith 1993. p. 517) argues that
there are unforeseen, chance consequences of people’s purposive actions,
a type of chance occurrence that he believes should be the main study
for social scientists. Social scientists, according to Popper (in Smith
1993, p. 517) need to understand ‘the significance of chance in shap-
ing the indeterminacy of social life.’ Victimity is a chance encounter that
may to some extent determine further social or casino chances.
Social Chance
Human evolution is dependent on adaptive mutations. Random muta-

tions and ‘genetic drift events’ are effects of chance that constitute the
main driver of evolutionary change (Gould 2002). Much is determined
by the random apportioning of beneficial genetic material. Intelligence,
which is largely determined by genetics, broadens life chances (Deary et al.
2009). This is not to say that environment or nurture is not also determi-
native, but from the point of view of the emerging individual, that too is
a lottery that has been significantly won or lost (Phillips and Schonkoff
2000, pp. 5–10) by the time a person has the capacity to dwell on it.
Sociologists speak of ‘life chances’ to refer to the economic and social
profiles of people. Frank (2016, unpage) notes that ‘the one dimen-
sion of personal luck that transcends all others is to have been born
183
in a highly developed country.’ In addition to the relative national or

country or residency wealth, the family, as a social structure, represents
one of the mechanisms by which equality of opportunity is supported
or hindered. People are born into family and social environments that
go a long way to predicting their prospects for a good quality of life. So,
for instance, studies have shown that a person’s prospects are dependent
on ‘her parents’ position in the distribution of advantage’ (Swift 2005,
p. 256). Even in highly developed countries, people have a better than
average chance of a high quality of life if they come from families that
have more social, cultural and economic capital at their disposal to sup-
port educational opportunities, refined social and cultural opportunities,
and vocational or career aspirations. We refer to this as social chance.
Lippert-Rasmussen (2014, p. 1) argues that there are four ways in
which luck is a feature of human life. Two of these are consistent with
what is understood as social chance. Thus, ‘constitutive luck’ refers to
the inherited genetic profile that makes some people more likely to
live well, while ‘antecedent causal luck’ refers to the nurturing dimen-
sion of our backgrounds, including the presence of a positive and
stimulating environment. Citing Nagel (1979), Lippert-Rasmussen
notes that when these are combined with circumstantial and resultant
luck, what is left free from luck is not much at all. Thus, it is not sur-
prising that the children of prisoners are six times more likely to end
up in prison themselves (Victorian Ombudsman 2015), or that once
a person has had poor antecedent causal luck, it is likely that more
bad luck awaits.
Indeed, as per Hindelang et al. (1978), Eck (2001) and others, it is
social chance that underpins the distribution of victim proneness. As
hinted at previously, victimisation represents a chance encounter with
genes, offenders, justice officials, family and the therapeutic community.
These are ‘luck of the draw’ encounters that, as research has shown us,
are cumulative; one adds to another with each increasing the probabil-
ity of victimisation. That the social chance of victimisation snowballs
with each unlucky factor, is what is also discovered in the concept of
‘poly-victim.’ Social situation alongside the learnt expectation of reward
or just deserts here has its inverse: those subjected to victimisation stand
a greater chance of re-victimisation.
184
For victims, chance depredations challenge the meaningfulness of

events—a challenge that survivors, in particular, will make note of in
describing their recovery pathway. Social (and biological) chances will
predict quality of life, and these chances nurture and support unequal
starting blocks.
Casino Chance
The idea that ‘it is only a matter of time’ before one’s luck will change
is consistent with casino chance. The category of casino chance encom-
passes a voluntary effort to overcome the limitations of an ascribed or
achieved distributive profile. A person gambles for many reasons or
affects: thrill-seeking, to tempt fate, out of desperation, or the artisanal
challenge that may arise out of a self-belief in a special capacity or talent
to overcome disadvantage or beat the odds. Choosing to play is nor-
mally accompanied by the expectation of a greater than even chance of
misfortune; the initial stake, it may be reasonably expected, will be sac-
rificed in whole or in part to the betting.
The so-called professional gambler has refined the elements of the
occupation into fairly predictable sequences. As Gerda Reith (1999,
p. 1) defines it, gambling is a bounded activity ‘within which chance
is deliberately courted as a mechanism which governs the distribution
of wealth among players as well as the commercial interest or “house”.’
Reith (1999, p. 1) argues that in today’s ‘age of chance,’ ‘risk, specu-
lation, indeterminism and flux are our constant companions in social,
economic and personal affairs.’ Despite that there may be for a spare
few an artisanal, craft or even expert knowledge gained, culturally and
socially there is a stigma attached to casino chance, derived in part from
its identification with the explicit negation of the work or meritocracy
ethic, or the value that the distribution of valued goods should flow
largely on the basis of merit by earned achievement.
In a meritocracy, it is only those differences in life chances that come
from responsible choices, or those made from a position on a level
playing field, that ought to count. Luck egalitarianists, Swift (2005,
p. 263) notes, view all inequalities that are the result of differential luck
as unjust ‘and give justice grounds for equalisation.’ As Swift notes, a
185
more conventional view holds that it is necessary to distinguish ‘those

mechanisms that, though a matter of differential luck, are constitutive
of the individual and those that are not.’ If people are differentially
socialised, ‘justice requires that those differentially socialised be differen-
tially rewarded’ (p. 263).
Of concern is the indeterminacy of social life as it is modified by
chance events caused by purposive actions. What exactly counts
as purposive here is a matter of preference, but we note that casino
chance, as per our description above, depends upon a teleological
action that may lead to a more or less known risk of deprivation or
reward. All people, including crime victims, will sometimes engage in
a deliberate gambit in the hope that it will lend their lives greater sig-
nificance.3 For most dilettantes and from a social-structural perspec-
tive, casino chance is played in the hope that a bonanza dividend will
be drawn according to fairness in the luck distribution, despite under-
lying efforts.
There are certainly many people who become victims of crime as
a result of choosing to enter risky situations. This is not to say that
choices to achieve a high quality of life are equally available to people so
that choosing to avoid risk will nevertheless still bring that high quality
of life. It is also not to discount that there is a biological marker that
will predict risk-taking behaviour. As the resurgence in biological pos-
itivism has shown, there are several mechanisms, including a low heart
rate and masculinity (Choy et al. 2017), that are at play in this regard.
Biological chances are also at once relevant and, it goes without saying,
somewhat randomly distributed.
The idea that the table should come around to giving them a good
turn, after having been unkind to them, is a position that some vic-
tims of crime are seen to hold. It may also be said that many other
victims are gun shy. They believe in taking no chances, and often stay at
home behind barred windows believing that they are still very unlucky
in the casino lottery, that the ‘house’ cannot be beat by them. It may
be added that taking the chance to seek justice is also a bet against the
odds (Chapters 1 and 7), because that table is also from their standpoint
stacked against them. In this regard, too, they face a challenge to restor-
ing a meaningful order.
186
Meaningful Order
The impact of a chance injustice or unjust chance is measured by the

reflexive actor, who believes that she is either ultimately improved or
better off, or damaged and disadvantaged by the twist of fate. Some
people attribute their success to a lucky break. Others claim that a redi-
rection following an unlucky streak was their saving grace in an other-
wise bumbling existence. From the point of view of an assessment of
the richness or fullness of an individual life, the attribution of a chance
event as a grave injustice or a beneficent, divine intervention is the
result of a retrospective investigation that can only be undertaken by
others once the affected person has exhausted the last opportunity to
mount a fresh resolve upon such events.
Silver et al. (1983, p. 81) argue that ‘a critical feature of many unde-
sirable life events is that they often shatter the victim’s perception of
living in an orderly, meaningful world.’ Consequently, for victims, ‘the
search for meaning is a common and adaptive process.’ The authors
probe the mechanisms by which ‘individuals find meaning in their neg-
ative outcomes.’ Similarly, Janoff-Bulman and Frieze (1983, p. 1) have
noted that traumatic victimisation shakes the ‘belief in personal invul-
nerability, the perception of the world as meaningful and the view of
the self as positive.’ McIntosh (1995) argues that religion (like other
metanarratives) may be understood as a cognitive schema by which peo-
ple organise their perception and understanding of events that facilitates
coping. Thompson and Janigan (1988, p. 261) put it this way:
For many individuals, a severely negative experience challenges adaptive

assumptions of a just and orderly world, of a sense of control and of pos-
itive self-regard. Individuals who are able to find meaning in experiences,
such as a diagnosis of cancer (Taylor, Lichtman, & Wood, 1984), the loss
of a child (Chodoff, Friedman, & Hamburg, 1964), or being the victim
of incest (Silver, Boon, & Stones, 1983), have been found to cope bet-
ter after the event, presumably because positive assumptions about the
world and the self have been restored. Thus, there is promising evidence
that finding meaning plays an important role in how people interpret and
react to their environment.
187
Using a post-traumatic growth inventory, Calhoun et al. (2000,

p. 521) found that ‘openness to religious change’ was ‘significantly
related to posttraumatic growth.’ Calhoun et al. (2000, p. 521) have
used Calhoun and Tedeschi’s (1989–1990) concept of traumatic growth
to test how ‘event related rumination’ may be impacted by a ‘quest ori-
entation to religion’ and/or religious involvement. At the same time,
flexibility or pliable cognitive processing is needed for trauma adapta-
tion (Tedeschi and Calhoun 1995).
As indicated by these observations, the adaptation to chance trau-
matic events may include the embrace of religious dogma. This permits
the view that the experience of injustice and disorder is a matter of the
limitation of the individual in the face of the divine. A consequent adap-
tation, as also demonstrated in the remarks of some of our respondents,
is to seek to reassert a quotidian or small-world, everyday order wherein
the divine remains an unpredictable mystery that is covered by faith.
However, as noted in the literature, people as a rule do not prefer to
view their lives fatalistically. They wish to believe that they are engaged
with a just world, and they know they will occasionally be called upon
to interpret the criminal depredation as an injustice, possessing an irreg-
ularity and outrageousness that must not be permitted to derail beliefs
and expectations.
For complex poly-victimisation the task is perhaps the hardest. The
impact of a trust-breaking childhood victimisation produces a deep
sense of foreboding, which is independently identified with victim
proneness. There are many adaptations to this.
The socio-cultural reaction to victimhood is dependent, in no small
part, on the perceived role of chance and desert in the event. As dis-
cussed below, it is our contention that victim-survivors more or less
attempt to develop a narrative that incorporates the relationship
between the victim event, their worldview or sense of the order of the
world and the perceived role of chance or misfortune. They develop a
view of their relation to a meaningful/less world with reference to the
significant events in their life and the ‘chance signature’ left by these
events. In the following, we consider the reflections of respondents on
disorder and justice, social chance and casino chance.
188
Types of Chance or In/Justice Equivalencies—

Pathways to Restoring Order
Disorder and Injustice
Many victims in our study describe an unjust, disorderly world. Some

of them go to great lengths to assert a measure of the appearance of
order through the restriction or exclusion of significant others—via a
control narrative. Others reflect on how they first adapted to the disor-
der of violence and abuse by trying to find comfort in its familiarity.
One victim-survivor reported quite matter-of-factly that she was
attracted to abusive men and viewed such men as normal:
ID015: I was attracted to men like my father, it just seemed normal …

my father was like that, he was violent and he sexually abused me and
so it just seemed really normal and there was lots of men like that,
because of their own history. There’s a lot of violent women too, peo-
ple tend to forget that.
ID015 was sexually abused by her stepfather since before she could
remember up until the age of nine or ten, and described the depth of
trauma she experienced, which also involved physical abuse against her
mother. She recalled as a child deciding to take action against her step-
father and intending to force the matter of his status in the family.
I: So then your parents divorced. But how did she end up saying ‘enough’?
ID015: She used to, when things were quite bad, she had a van, she
worked full time. And I would, when I was hearing them argue,
sometimes she’d leave, she’d say, ‘I’m fucking leaving you, I can’t
handle this, we’ve got a child. How could you do this?’ I could hear
the van. It was a loud rattling van, and she’d drive off and I’d think,
‘Fuck, she’s never coming home, I’m here alone’ and I’d cry myself in
a coma, not cry myself asleep. And I’d wake up to her getting ready
for work and all was good and normal. Um, so there was a lot more of
that. But I think what ended up happening was that he was a … lec-
turer … sorry, he was a lecturer at an educational place, not quite sure
189
where. And he ended up having an affair with one of his students.

And I found a Christmas card full of naked photos while looking for
my Christmas presents.
I: When was this?
ID015: When I was nine or ten. Showed them to my mum. I was like,
‘Mum! … why is this weird lady, like what is she doing?’ and I knew
as well when I looked at it because I waited about a week before
I showed her. Just because I was not sure. But then he was really nasty,
and like and I just thought maybe this will help her leave and then we
can go somewhere and be away from him. So, showed her, and she hit
the roof and left for like two days. And then he ran off with his mis-
tress. And they are married now. And, yeah so that was what it was.
ID015 was able to connect the details of significant events to a recovery

narrative on trust and betrayal. This involved an ongoing reflexive pro-
cess, as demonstrated in her instrumental view of how she has engaged
her informal support network:
I: Currently, what are your primary forms of support?

ID015: Okay, I keep a small support network. I’m really internally
functioning, so my birth sister, for example, she had a really similar
upbringing, her birth father was quite sexually and physically abusive
I: So she was placed in care as well?
ID015: No that was her birth family.
I: So her biological father?
ID015: Yeah my biological mum, with her biological dad, different dad,
he was sexually and physically abusive as well and her coping strategy
has looked like regressing.
I: How old is she?
ID015: A year younger than me, so she’s quite a child in the way in
which she processes the world and how she operates and she’s very
naïve and has a lot of unrealistic expectations of family and people
and despite her experiences showing her quite the opposite, so she
needs a vast support network to be okay in her trauma, whereas I took
my view of the world, the world’s unsafe, it’s dangerous and people are shit
and I became my own parent and sort of did that myself especially when
you’re in care and don’t have a parents [sic] role model or somebody you
can trust, you sort of start to do it by yourself and it becomes normal
190
and comfortable so at the end there well coming out of that what
I find now is that I have a lot of trouble forming wide social groups
of support, so I usually keep one or two people close to me at most,
um I sometimes have an extended network, so my inner circle is one
or two people, my secondary inner circle is for me far more superficial
but usually for the other people they are more connected to me than
I am to them and that can be two, three maybe up to six people but
they are usually people I’ve known for a long time, we’ve got a lot of
trust and some of them live interstate now. [Emphasis added]
… And I could rock up and sleep on their couch for two weeks it’s a
bit more of a family type thing but we’re not necessarily close in a lot
of ways, but we’ve already worked for a few years to develop that rela-
tionship so it’s sorta on the backburner, and I have heaps of acquaint-
ances and colleagues who all feel more connected to me than I do to
them, so I don’t feel like they support me at all, I don’t feel like I have
much support. My secondary support network offers me support,
back up, if I need a place to crash or I’d often ask them, I’d rather
just fall back on a service if I can. My internal network which is at the
moment one person, usually quite challenging so they challenge me
on my shit and my trauma and they’re usually very educated profes-
sionals in the trauma field because I’m quite interested in that so we
have that common ground. And in that they’re quite excellent.
Counsellors try to work with victim-survivor’s expectations that good

works will be rewarded. In the regional focus group, one of the counsel-
lors noted that an adjustment to one’s worldview is a good part of the
work of developing a recovery narrative for survivors:
FG14 VSS005: I think one of the biggest things that changes after a
trauma is somebody’s view of their world, and that really significant
way in which they understand the world. Which is about connection
and I guess that bigger stuff you were talking about around having
an ordered pathway and making sense of what goes on around you.
Because you have up from birth to when the trauma happens an
understanding of the world as you see it. You experience it and then
a trauma occurs and it just turns on its head the way you understand
the world and then have to obviously put so much work into making
shifts around that change in worldview, which is where hope comes
from and reconnection and redefining what the meaning is for you.
191
I: What about that belief, that issue, about having a reflector in a world
that will provide positive support for positive action?
FG1 VSS002: I can think of a client where there was an expectation
around ‘if I do something, there must be an equal and opposite pos-
itive action coming back that must happen.’ So there was almost a
taking on board ‘this hasn’t been my experience, but I’m now going to
actively try to make it happen.’ And unfortunately it doesn’t work and
that’s not sustainable because nobody understands how much that
specific thing that they’ve done means to that person. So that’s a really
hard space to navigate as well because it reinforces.
I: Does that inform your counselling, where there’s a diminished expec-
tation with respect to that reciprocity in terms of the world? The
world isn’t being reciprocal.
FG1 VSS002: Yeah, and that’s a difficult thing to manage because you
need to recognise how significant small things can be to that person,
gestures, and recognising them, but also not wanting to perpetuate
that and beat it out of them … Or buy into it too much, or set up an
expectation. Because if you follow that or engage in that too much …
it works here but it still doesn’t work outside. And I think that creates
a lot of difficulty.
Social Chance
ID010: Oh, I don’t know how old I was when it started, but all through
my childhood. I mean, I left home when I was fifteen and I took an
overdose and was dead for a little while … they brought me back to
life and they put me in a psychiatric ward and the psychiatrist said
I had to get out of home as soon as possible … he meant mum. She
had her own issues … he looked at mum and looked at me and said
that ‘You need to get out of there,’ but the damage was already done,
so moving out of home didn’t help matters at all.
I: Right, but you had a sense of who you wanted to be I guess in this,
because there are people who end up, as you say, kind of reproducing
the environment they were in and not being able to get out of the sort
of cycle of reproducing it?
ID015: Yeah, I guess I avoided that by sheer panic, um, I was under the
assumption that abused people become abused and generational abuse
is pretty much just, 99.9% common in care kids and the outcomes
for care kids are bloody poor.
192
I: And so you were aware of that when?

ID015: Forever. I can’t remember, maybe under ten I might not have
had an awareness. But as soon as I entered mainstream foster care
I had a definite awareness of the low educational outcomes, that
everyone goes to prison, I mean like I just knew, I mean I thought
I would be dead now. That was literally how I believed it to be. I was
confident that I would develop a needle addiction. And be dead. Or
I would be in jail. Or you know as good as dead in my quality of life.
So yeah.
One of the interviewees is a complex poly-victim who was separated

from her biological sister to different adoptive parents when they were
both one year old, yet they both ended up in sexually abusive families.
As per other research, our cohort of victims is disproportionately
from family and social environments that have proved an impedi-
ment to equal social chances. In reflecting on this, it is safe to assume
that most victims seek to incorporate a view of themselves that both
acknowledges the devastating impact of an unlucky social draw, but also
(drawing upon the metanarrative described above) downplays as fatalis-
tic or defeatist the view that nothing can be made of a bad hand. Here,
against the social chance narrative, a discourse of resilience, proffered in
the connection between the therapeutic and neoliberal political subject
communities, is adopted as an antidote.
ID005: Because as a victim … you learn to live with the victimisation,

you don’t sit in the corner crying. I mean a lot of people do obviously,
but a lot of people don’t either. A lot of people have a bit more respect
for themselves. But the weaknesses that come out of that become nat-
ural as well. You know the wanting to be aware of predictability of
life, knowing the party that you’re going to be going to, you’re going
to know everyone that’s gonna be there, you wanna know what will
happen in the next hour … you do want some kind of, um, settle-
ment in everything you do.
ID015: Yeah so as a child it was survival sex working, shoes, clothes,
safe places to sleep. And then as I got older I became aware of the sex
industry as a cash exchange and that also played a huge role in com-
bination with my therapy. Some of my therapy costs were covered by
193
sex work, sex work also contributed to my ability to place value on

my body and my time which had been taken away in child abuse and
which obviously comes with its own set of complexities.
I: But you saw it as a way of transitioning from that feeling that your
body isn’t something you had control over?
ID015: Yeah no control over it, no worth, so I was able to learn how to
say ‘no,’ how to negotiate, that I can say ‘no’ because I didn’t think
that that was a thing. So I met with a lot of women who were like,
you just say no, you just say this, you set this, you own the room. So
I learnt all these skills around consent and developed value for myself
that stopped me needing to seek out sexual gratification to prove my
template or, you know, like do any of that, and I used that money to
funnel into more therapy and sort of it became its thing—
I: So in funnelling into more therapy you used the money, you actually
went where for therapy? Who did you purchase therapy from?
ID015: I saw a bunch of private psychologists around the place, picked
up different tools, paid for personal development workshops.
I: So this is where you would sort of canvas the psychologist and you’d
say, ‘Thank you very much but this isn’t for me’ and get going on to
the next one?
ID015: Yeah and I could easily do that, I could afford to. My self-care
got better because I was able to afford the sort of lifestyle that some-
body who comes out of care can’t afford, or somebody with my life
experiences doesn’t just have, you know, nice, clean, fresh fruit and
veg, comfortable living spaces, they are usually in slummy suburbs,
you know shit stuff and so yeah that was really, really good for me.
On the one hand, social chance suggests that the draw of social goods
tends to collect favourably for those already in a privileged position.
On the other, there is a belief that all chances should even out over a
lifetime.
Casino Chance
Much criminological research has been devoted to the strains and pres-
sures that are felt disproportionately by some, compelling and to some
extent daring people from disadvantaged backgrounds to take chances
194
at the pauper’s craps table, so to speak. Against the poly-victimisation

research expectation, there persists a belief that chance cannot keep fall-
ing disproportionately on a single individual. As ID015 says, ‘It’s only a
matter of time, it can’t keep happening forever.’
A prosaic example is one of our interviewees who was working the
late shift at a fast food eatery, collecting tips as part of his wage, and
who took a short cut through a ‘hot spot’ for criminal activity to make
his way home late at night when he was offered drugs but was then
robbed of his tips money. In another example, ID010 describes her
risk-taking as a girl or young woman in going to dangerous places:
ID010: I was talked into going to this place one night with my female
flatmate and her boyfriend. He was a member of this motorcycle gang
in Plymouth called the Magogs—there were the black power mob and
the Magogs, they were the big gangs back then—and they talked me
into going, even though I didn’t want to go, but they said, ‘We’ll look
after you’ … And then I went up there and they didn’t look after me
so I’m thinking that they probably did that on purpose. But anyway,
that happened, and I was with the guy I liked, even though he wasn’t
good for me either.
A young poly-victim aged in her mid-twenties reflected on a series of

misfortunes that had befallen her in addition to the sexual and physical
abuse she suffered at the hands of her stepfather as a child:
ID015: I just had this really crass way of thinking and talking and my
experience with the world was really dark, and then it got better but,
you know the last twelve months I chose better things, and I made
better choices for myself. I was really unlucky in the sense that my
foster mother’s entire large intestine died and I was told she was
gonna pass away and I had to fly out there and then she didn’t die
and survived with 1% odds, but she suffered brain damage so she
has no memory and that was following a major vehicle accident, that
I had to get cut out of a vehicle while I was sitting next to my friend
who was my main support network, and trauma informed person,
wonderful worker who asked me to drive because she was too tired
and I ran a red by accident, ran a red turning arrow, got wiped out
195
at 70 k’s by two taxis and they cut us out of the car and I was sitting
there watching her die. She survived also against odds, brain bleed,
collapsed lung, broken pelvis, broken ankle, ribs, just everything her
whole left side of her body, she didn’t walk for six months. I mean so
having those experiences, I also like I fell pregnant while on the pill,
I was on Roaccutane, so I did a termination because it’s birth defect
causing which was really triggering for my past forced termination so
that was all in a one and a half year sort of, one year actually it hap-
pened in eight months, all sort of crammed right in there. So even
though I got a better understanding of the world and better choices,
there are still things that happen to me that aren’t always about my
choices. I mean the car accident, everything I could of [sic] done
right was done, I don’t drive tired or drug-affected or, it was just an
accident and they happen. My mum’s stuff was a direct result of her
drug abuse over time and it was just not mine, like I can’t take any
ownership over it, it’s got nothing to do with me, it affected me, and
the termination again I was on the pill and using rubbers and had a
condom break and did the follow-up and still somehow managed to
get pregnant which is unlucky but apparently that actually happens so
I didn’t know these things could happen to me if I started making
good choices so it was really hard, I’ve been struggling again, even
though I had a big break from that [inaudible ] system, I was literally
just saying to my partner last night that it’s really challenging to keep
this progressive mindset of ‘I’ve gotta move forward,’ don’t settle for
anything unless it’s better than what I have today or better than what
I think, I can always be better and want to be and that that in turn
leads to a better life experiences for me. But it can be really hard not
to fall back into this ‘Fuck me, the world is fucked,’ when I feel like
I’m being victimised, by the world. Under eighteen I didn’t have any
choice in that, and then I had a little bit of choice and I chose well,
and then got smashed with another random circumstances, that are
unreasonable and almost unbelievable. I think that it’s a bit of a cos-
mic joke and it’s really hard because part of me does think that, and
part of me doesn’t, it’s sort of navigating that and at times that can
be a really dominant thought belief system, it’s just I’m unlucky and
this is targeted at me because I’m, like I had a belief system that I was
built for trauma at one point and my existence was to be this punch-
ing bag of paedophiles and then when I turned eighteen I thought
196
I was gonna die because I didn’t know what I existed for anymore,
and it’s that sort of mindset of maybe I’m just here to suffer like,
which is really grandiose in a way, but hard not to think when you
have complex trauma, like really hard, massive issue.
In our reading, however, we would like to distinguish casino chance

as seeking a good or resource, which a person does by returning to the
game in the hope that luck will come their way. It stands to reason
that some people will take the view that after being handed five losing
hands in a row, their sixth hand ought to be winning. Behind this also
is the difficulty of keeping the faith that the table is not fixed against the
player. In this way, casino chance aligns with the view of a just world. In
a just world the table is not fixed, and the persevering player ought to
get an equal chance at a winning hand.
ID010: Because we made a vow when we were young, that we’d never
get married or be happy for long but I think we need to break that
vow … but I am happy. I mean, I know that it’s ok to be happy, but
there’s always something that stuffs it up.
As we know, victims have a greater chance not of winning, but of los-

ing. That some will maintain faith that their luck will turn around is
testament to their resilience and faith or a lack of judgment regarding
some conduct or behaviour.
One complex poly-victim we interviewed saw that the risks she was
taking were no longer in keeping with her developing self-image after
she was fortunate, in her view, to have found a counsellor who ‘spoke to
her’:
ID015: I’m really, really, really glad I pushed through and found a coun-
sellor that spoke to me. And it was weeks and months even before
I actually understood what he was saying, it was just him saying do
this and I was like, ‘That’s fucking dumb’ and then one day it just
all clicked and it was like this massive shift in my internal dialogue
instantly, that allowed me to actually not be a victim of the world
and to just be okay. And to take accountability for my part in trauma
without taking responsibility for the trauma, just accountability for
197
my part and my choices and how they impact what happens to me

you know, like walking down a street dressed in skanky clothes at 2
a.m, you know, drug-affected, while it’s not my fault if somebody
chooses to abuse me, in fact it’s all on them that they have chosen
to do that to me, my choice to become drug-affected, not have a
safe way home, be out at that hour, wearing easily accessible clothes,
not about clothes that are sexually arousing, literally just about easy
to take off, easy to be taken advantage of, I have a role in protecting
myself from all sorts of circumstances by choosing better options for
myself. Without taking on the blame of the abuser’s actions. It’s really,
it’s a bit hard, to understand. A lot of people don’t which is really sad.
On another reflection, she found that her sex work was lucrative but
challenged certain parts of her developing identity.
I: So when did that stop, the sex work?

ID015: Ah, last week [laughs ] I became an occasional sex worker so
there are a few regular clients who I’ve had for years, two or three
people who see me once a year, and I still see them. So maybe three
times a year if I’m lucky. Lucky is not the right word. I’m not even
sure why I do it to be honest, because they are a regular and there
is an ongoing relationship there and they also pay me a lot, a lot of
money so, that’s really useful in the way of $10,000 is great. So peo-
ple love that and you can put it in the bank by card or whatever, but
that comes with its own set of complexities. It’s useful for a time but
then once you’ve developed those skills it becomes maladaptive. It’s
like, ‘It was great for a while but over the last two or three years it’s
been more of a challenge than a blessing’ where it’s hindered me from
engaging in straight, as they call it, employment. Or I’m at work and
it’s 3 o’clock and I’m like, ‘Fuck me I made 600 an hour, what am
I doing here?’ It’s peanuts and so it’s harder because you start to get
trapped in this pool of ‘Why didn’t I stay with the glitz and the glam-
our and the money?’ you know but then at the same time, I’m not
rewarded by that, I’m rewarded in my community work and the two
don’t fit comfortably together, they are quite opposites. So it’s like do
I choose to lean towards something that actually keeps me stagnant
and is more in my past or move towards this future? So while I do
want to be like, ‘Sex work was a part of that as well and it can be
198
really great for people’ it has its purpose and you’ve got to really have
an exit strategy like you’ve gotta have a plan and an exit strategy and
adhere to it and a fucking great understanding. I can’t imagine people
who haven’t been a victim of sexual trauma being able to disassoci-
ate from the experiences quite as well though, which could be quite
damaging for people like I see how it would be awful. But for people
who come from backgrounds of child abuse I think if you go into it
with the right headset it can be great. And that’s also how I stopped
drug use as well is I got concerned about my large amount of money
coming in and thought, ‘If I use drugs I’m going to develop a very
fast habit’ so I made an agreement with myself that if I used drugs
I wouldn’t be working so I stuck to it, don’t know how but it worked
really well for me.
She also spoke about resilience as bittersweet, inasmuch as her poly-vic-

timisation gave her a frame of reference for the more mundane and
vicarious troubles that people less affected by trauma may be deterred
by.
I: Are you stronger because of some of the things that happened to you?
ID015: Yeah. I think both stronger and weaker. I think weaker in the
way that I, well, I think it’s arguable. Yeah I think it’s definitely argua-
ble. I know on a day to day, I feel a lot of pity for a lot of people who
are suffering emotionally because of their lack of emotional intelli-
gence because they haven’t had the experiences that have forced them
to develop the tools to cope with life. So, I feel a lot of pity for people
who see something on the news and are so deeply affected by that that
it’s torturing them for days. Or people who ‘Why, why do we have
this relationship and he hasn’t called me?’ and I just think, ‘Fuck me,
you’re a pitiable piece of shit.’ And I think it in the nicest way, I’m
compassionate but I just think, ‘Fuck me, like I’m so glad that I have
enough tools to be able to regulate fucking the most horrific things
that I can exist in the day to day without having my emotions sky
rocketing up and down through the most basic everyday things.’ I can
walk past something and not be so tortured by something, so I view
myself as stronger in that way and I have a better understanding of
the world by relationally I view myself as weaker because I can’t trust
myself in or form strong relationships with people that are both sided,
199
like I can’t ever be fully engaged in it like the other person is, and
I think that ends up becoming a side of weakness because when times
get hard, I’m more inclined to withdraw, to protect myself because
I don’t have room for someone else to make an error. So, if you make
an error in your relationship that’s another stress I have to worry
about managing and that’s too much so I withdraw from my friend-
ships and I do it alone. Which I—there is only so many hours in the
day and so much I can do as a person so I feel like I miss out on a lot
of support and a lot of ability to move forward because I think that
everyone is stupid and they can’t make decisions for me because they
are gonna get them wrong.
Finally, for victims, the upshot of taking charge of the table, so to speak,
is that the chance of suicide is always lurking, the possibility might
emerge through a small window that opens when reflexive self-under-
standing and hypervigilance are unsettled, broken or challenged. The
chance that one takes may be the chance of death.
I: I didn’t ask you about that, so this isn’t currently is it?
ID015: No, no but it’s ongoing, usually attached to the lucky/unlucky
headset, where you feel like there is permanence to bad situations, you
look for a way out of that, and as a problem solver it comes up and
like is it a solution? Or like to avoid pain through avoidance strategy:
can I use that as an outlet? So when I get quite unwell, like I have to
work with that and that’s when most of my tools were originally given
to me, going around managing lows, so I view myself as a professional
at not killing myself, like very good at it, I’ve gotten very good at it
over the years, not so good early on, but every time I see someone on
TV has committed suicide, or a friend or a past person I know it’s
deeply impactful, because it serves as a reminder as it doesn’t matter
how much you do or what you do it can literally just engulf you, and
you are so dangerous to yourself, which is: I’ve been there and I know
that it happens and sometimes I feel like I’m invincible because I’m so
worded up and I’m so ‘Think!’ And a sex worker colleague, a year ago
now, committed suicide, and she was very articulate like I was, and we
described things very much the same, she described it as static in her
head which is how I described it, which is why we bonded because
I was like, no way, same experience, same describing, awesome. And
200
so articulate, so educated, so well balanced. And one night she just

killed herself. So, moments like that terrify me, because I remember
that I have an illness in my experience, my experiences are an illness,
if I’m not careful or if I don’t have enough respect for them then I can
just die, it sort of feels like a bit of a terminal illness at times. It feels
really—
I: So it makes you very vigilante?
ID015: Yeah, well it’s scary, it’s even scarier because it’s not like I can
put a lock on my door for it to stay out. I can literally kill myself and
I don’t want that. So, that’s quite weird to imagine that I can do
something to me that I don’t consent to, in a time of emotional reac-
tivity or distress or anger, I mean there is many reasons why it can
come up. But what, it’s quite abstract and it feels very unsafe.
Summary/Conclusion
In this chapter we have explored how victim-survivors address the need
to find meaning in the wake of the trauma of victimisation. We began
by noting that a neoliberal and therapeutic discourse places a great
deal of onus on the individual to develop their own self-help remedies.
Resilience is touted as a quality or quantity that may afford the adhesive
between the metanarrative and the personal biography. For many in the
therapeutic community, it is hoped that through devices like cognitive
therapy a disposition towards the trauma will emerge from the binding
of a positive view of the world to a positive view of the self.
Victims reflect on their lives, particularly in attempting to account
for the role of injustice and chance; but survival demands a prospec-
tive outlook, so victim-survivors will toggle between a retrospective
and prospective view. In that outlook, some victims seek to find solace
by attributing to the divine the play of unlucky chance events. Many
become hypervigilant, seeking to assert an order in a world assumed
to be, for them at least, without order or principle. The use of alcohol
and other drugs (AOD) ought to be considered in light of this neces-
sary toggling between retrospective and prospective looking. Sometimes
drugs or alcohol are taken to dull the vision of the past, and at other
201
times, for many who do look forward and try to regain control, they are
still troubled by such anxieties. For survivors who are fastidious about
order and control and looking outward and to the immediate future,
it is not necessarily hopefulness that something new and good will be
arriving on the horizon that animates them, but anxiety that, from both
a subjective and objective perspective, it is likely that the bad of the past
will engulf them again.
Notes
1. As we point out elsewhere in this book, an objective standpoint from
which to evaluate victim self-help protocols or decision-making is only
available if one discounts the individuality and uniqueness of the vic-
tim’s position and viewpoint. We are trying not to do that discounting,
although we may not always be sufficiently vigilant in this regard, and
occasionally do find ourselves slipping into that default presumption.
2. The stratification of success according to place of birth and parental
wealth does not lead the top 1% to be more likely to support a politics
that seeks to empower the state to effect a more equitable wealth distri-
bution. Frank (2016) cites a study by Page et al. (2013) that identified
that this extremely politically active group is more likely to ‘resist taxa-
tion, regulation and government spending.’ While this group tends to
negate the role of luck in generating their own advantage, Emmons and
McCullough (2003) have found that recognising the role of luck and
self-attributing as lucky tends to increase wellbeing measures.
3. As Robert Frank (The Atlantic, May 2016) reports, ‘people in higher
income brackets are much more likely than those with lower incomes to
say that individuals get rich primarily because they work hard….Wealthy
people overwhelmingly attribute their own success to hard work rather
than to factors like luck or being in the right place at the right time.’ He
relates how Michael Lewis, author of Liar’s Poker, credited a great deal of
success to a chance seating at a dinner table leading to a Wall Street job
invitation and the best portfolio at that firm at that time. Lewis noted:
‘people really don’t like to hear success explained away as luck—especially
successful people. As they age and succeed people feel their success was
somehow inevitable’ (in Frank, The Atlantic, May 2016, unpaginated).
202
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7
Validation, Chance and Justice
What separates victim from survivor is the availability and finessing of

the means (including techniques and justifications) beyond the existen-
tial human condition. Surviving is a reorienting claim of identity that
has drawn on skills of reflexive adaptation. This untethers the victim
from the legacy of trauma, inclusive of vulnerability (Fineman 2008),
illness (Kleinman 1988) and indignity (Arendt 2013; Benhabib
2013). A complete analysis of this distinction would require testimony
from both sides of this divide; but as we note in the introduction to
this book, our sample only contains a partial record—people who are
engaged in the affirmative project (of the survivor) who present to VSS.
That said, as our detailed quotes amply demonstrate, each respondent
has in some way experienced the shock of mortal vulnerability and
offered at least a partial account of the view of the abyss. In seeking to
understand them, beginning with how they use alcohol and drugs and
more or less ending with a self-appraisal of their adaptations, we have
juggled a number of concepts and themes that bring clarity to the vic-
tim narrative, and here we provide a synopsis of how these themes and
concepts interact or tie together.

206
We began this study with a survey of self-medication by victims of

crime, seeking some support for the hypothesis that self-medication
increases as a response to the trauma of criminal predation and that
this increase may be moderated where there is more robust informal or
formal network support. Failing to find support for a moderation by
networks in the quantitative analysis, we undertook to interview a sam-
ple of these respondents to probe these interactions further. A review
of the survey data and some of the secondary literature suggested that
understanding both self-medication and the attachment to formal and
informal networks requires, in the first instance, a means of probing
how victim-survivors describe the reality of coping with the traumatic
events that brought them to VSS to seek assistance. We became aware
that, in capturing those descriptions, we were listening to unique nar-
rative accounts that involve differing qualities of introspection and
reflection, suggesting that respondents were positioning their narrative
identity in relation to the trauma event. In seeking to ‘do justice’ to
these narrative accounts, we began to develop the view that it would
be informative to analyse victim-survivor reflections on self-medi-
cation, support-seeking and the post-trauma journey, with mean-
ing work an important qualifier. Consequently, we reviewed narrative
accounts in terms of the view that victim-offenders brought to their
daily routines and to a review of their recovery pathway. In this regard
and borrowing from Frank (1995), Barnes (2013) and Jirek (2017)
and from interviews and focus group reflections, we developed tem-
plates of four adaptations, discussed in Chapter 5, that we hope may
be used by counsellors and victim-survivors to gauge or plot individual
recovery pathways. As we have noted, the quest narrative is supported
by the potential or realised epiphany. We have argued that for complex
poly-victims such epiphany may well be forthcoming and may be a
decisive moment, but this does not occur in a vacuum: the individual
would have done a lot of self-reflective analysis on their identity and life
trajectory. This work is only partial and we see much to be gained by
further refinements and developments in this direction.
In this concluding chapter, we discuss validation and chance in
relation to justice. As is well-known to VSS counsellors (as per Focus
Group 1 and 2), criminal predation trauma is subjectively interpreted
7 Validation, Chance and Justice
207
and much therapeutic work involves offering validation. In the

meantime, and as explored in Chapters 1, 3 and 6, to seek validation
through formal justice process is to take one’s chances. In reviewing
observations about seeking validation from the criminal justice process
and other formal or informal supports, we were impressed with how
deeply the recovery narrative was upturned and inspected, and that it
was bewilderingly chancy. Since there will be socio-economic and other
dimensions of the victim-as-complainant which will load the dice for
or against a positive outcome, there is social chance in play. At various
places the victim will decide or not to pursue or accept a remedy with
the view that they will get no more from the house, so casino chance is
also at work. Where the victim declines to take the chance, they must
discount the value of validation that may have been forthcoming from
the symbolic finding or determination by criminal justice actors. They
must seek to progress the recovery narrative and the dignity of their
position independent of the marker represented by a strong, affirmative
criminal conviction and public repudiation of the offender.
Reflexive Narrative Strategy

According to Margaret Archer (2007, p. 3), reflexivity ‘depends upon
conscious deliberations that take place through “internal conversation.”’
It is ‘the regular exercise of the mental ability, shared by all normal peo-
ple, to consider themselves in relation to their (social) contexts and vice
versa’ (p. 4), and ‘the means by which we make our way through the
world’ (p. 5). As she also notes, ‘objective structural or cultural pow-
ers’ are therefore ‘mediated’ by the relative force of ‘subjective powers of
reflexivity.’
Possibly there will be some dispute over whether the subjective pow-
ers of reflexivity are necessary to make one’s way in the world, as Archer
avers. Developing the relative capacity to bring to bear those subjective
powers and achieve a coherent view both of ‘the world’ and ‘one’s way’
will be a challenge for people who are subjected to grossly disruptive
events. In this respect, as noted in our discussion of chance, we are
pointing to the centrality of a reflexive narrative strategy in the recovery
208
profile of victims. To consider oneself ‘making our way in the world’

suggests a movement of the individual from one milestone to the next,
where the identification of milestones will draw from self-reflection on
what is truly meaningful or purposive, and what lies in the way of that
meaning or purpose.
A strong theme that emerges from the accounts offered in this
research is how victims engage with formal and informal networks. This
relates to whether and how these supports provide survivors with the
means to develop a reflexive recovery narrative. As we have done in our
consideration of chance, we would like briefly to outline a distinction in
the conception or understanding of justice that resonates in our victims’
accounts of their experiences.
Where the victim is a recipient of what we have characterised as a
single, chance victimisation at a mature age, the response will be
quite different from that of the complex poly-victim. In previous
chapters, we analysed the case of ID004 and ID005 as simple and
simple poly-victims who encountered trauma as adults. Their form-
ative connections to authoritative validations would have supported a
self-identity and justice expectations. These would incline them toward
a view that they experienced a wrong where right is uncontroversial and
needs a relatively immediate redress.
If support networks and victimisation tend to be inversely related,
then complex poly-victims (victims of childhood abuse) will have
weaker support networks than simple (single-event) victims. Both
groups are likely to have adopted a justice narrative that they draw upon
to account for their situation, but simple victims (in our case, adults
who report to victim support services upon referral by the police) will
have experienced a fresh ‘shock to the system,’ and thus their view of
the chance/justice relationship may not be as considered. People who
have not experienced complex childhood trauma will have different
expectations of the robustness or reliability of networks and the institu-
tional resources that may be available. As relative newcomers to criminal
victimisation presumably without experience of the remedies (or lack
thereof ) of criminal justice, they may have a relatively innocent under-
standing; viewing the depredation as a shocking violation and clear
209
injustice requiring a form of restitution. Not having had the experience

of betrayal by an authority figure, they may, moreover expect, such res-
titution to be forthcoming. Complex poly-victims, on the other hand,
will be less likely to believe that there is a system of justice ‘out there’
that can be solicited for a remedy.
For complex poly-victims the view of justice and validation is dif-
ferent. There are those events beginning with the original trauma fol-
lowed by a likely series of invalidating responses among the victim’s
formal and informal networks. The reaction of others to the crime is
what will inform a sense of either justice or isolation and alienation on
the part of the traumatised individual. Those deeply hurt by trauma are
often deeply hurt, as research has suggested, because they have been
left to face the trauma without adequate support from others, includ-
ing their family. Self-medication, as we have been noting in this book,
is a response to trauma that serves many purposes, including that it
represents a kind of backhanded validation of suffering and legitimate
grievance, where such validation has otherwise not been (experienced
as) received by the victim-survivor. The practice of over-indulgence in
alcohol and other drugs (AOD), food (as cited by counsellors in the
focus groups) or sex (as ID015 experienced) is a consequence of unvali-
dated criminal child sexual abuse that is so common that therapists gen-
erally expect to find the underlying trauma when counselling on such
behaviour.
In reference to the metanarrative referred to earlier in this book,
everyone seeks to attach a view of the world to their lived experience
to test how they might pivot and find the grounds to move forward.
Much will be made of a chance encounter or even a single moment
of solitary reflection that is reviewed as that pivot point, after which a
new resolve and different techniques or survival tactics can be adopted.
Some victims adopt tactics based on the view that their survival depends
on developing and carrying out plans to ‘reconnoitre’ the quotidian or
everyday events in their lives. Whether they do so depends, we suggest,
on the reflexive review of their historical trauma. There is, for some
complex poly-victims an event or moment which facilitates the epipha-
nous self-affirmation.
210
Validation, Victory or Justice

According to Kritias’s Greek play Sisyphus, gods and divine power were
invented to provide a means of implementing justice in a human, social
condition otherwise too rewarding of violence and avarice (Chaniotis
2004, p. 1). Divine punishment is a consequence that will be meted out
in a wrongdoer’s purgatory or hell that otherwise escapes them in mor-
tal life. Where individuals are not provided with the justice remedy and
earthly retribution is lacking, divine punishment is an intervention that
corrects that absence by threatening to erupt as collective punishment,
perhaps by way of flood, earthquake or epidemic (Chaniotis 2004,
p. 2). The argument that divine justice will remedy a human attempt
to match the good to the right, or truth to beauty, is likewise a wish to
remove the randomness or chance (with the banal and ignorant of evil)
from the mortal coil.
Human societies have developed by shunning these spiritual and
developing naturalistic explanations and remedies to the problem of
injustice. But although divine justice was naturalised, a core remnant
remains. For example, in a trial by ‘ordeal’ or by ‘combat,’ in order for
divine justice to take place, both combatants are expected to have equal
strengths. This is still imbued in the adversarial system. The divine,
truth or justice are interchangeable depending upon belief. For our pur-
poses here, and from the standpoint of the victim, we may review the
spiritual component in terms of chance. When a disaster befalls people,
sufferers will claim to be victims and non-sufferers will deny their vic-
timhood, but the line between misfortune and injustice is not, accord-
ing to Judith Shklar (1990), fixed and permanent. Justice authorities
as well as popular or lay opinion supported by technology, ideology or
interpretation will set the line between misfortune and injustice, thus
distinguishing victim and villain (Shklar 1990).
Law’s truth is symbolised in the scales of justice. In an adversarial sys-
tem, a just victory is not a victory of justice but the outcome of a proce-
dure that was fair, presumably because it offered both sides the chance
of victory. Lawyers will admit that victory is a concept that gains credi-
bility to the extent that it refers to an uncertain outcome where a court
211
of law is not a court of justice and, under the adversarial system, has
emerged over the centuries from the idea that justice will be with the
winning party in a fair combat. Equality of arms is a device or means
that seeks to instrumentalise the authority of legality in the idea that
a relative equality of combat will produce a more legitimate outcome.
This legacy is rarely expressed or understood.
On the contrary, and following Popper’s (1957) insight regarding soci-
ety, we discount the role of chance in justice models. Thus, while it is
expected that there should be sufficient randomness for each party to
have the same opportunity to win, for an ‘equal’ combat between defence
and prosecution, there is also a firm belief that criminal justice is akin
to positive science. But if divine justice1 is a corrective for incomplete
human efforts to provide the requisite earthly order, the foundation of
our criminal process is reflected in both the overcoming and observance
of these spiritual or fatalistic precepts.
The relationship between institutional exigencies and values and the
victim-survivor’s connection with formal networks inclusive of vali-
dation is a matter of great interest and copious victimology research
(see Chapter 4). At first blush, the necessity of validation derives from
a need for recognition of the violation imposed by the perpetrator
(see Elliot et al. 2014). Theoretical notions of therapeutic jurisprudence
posit that procedures involving and interactions with the legal system
can have positive or negative effects on the mental health of those seek-
ing justice (Kunst et al. 2015). As is well-known, the risk of engaging
criminal justice officials and actors is that, far from the victim-survivor
receiving the validation that may facilitate the road to a restorative
recovery, or what has been called post-traumatic growth (Calhoun and
Tedeschi 2014). What may instead occur is that the victim-survivor
may invite the imposition of an additional burden of secondary
victimisation.
For the victim, justice is figuratively an act or series of actions that
acknowledges and validates the fact of a wrong occurring. This is dis-
tinguished from self-help, or informal remedies not sanctioned by
the state (Black 1983), where validation is provided by supporters the
victim may be able to engage unofficially. Most victims will be deprived
212
of justice validation in both these dimensions. They will not seek or be

granted unofficial self-help and many will also decline to pursue formal
remedies. The facts of the case may be deemed by police and prose-
cutors to be unfit for a prosecution. Their deep, personal hurt may be
traded away in a justice (plea) bargain that lessens the subjective enor-
mity of the crime. For these and other reasons, the victim’s interaction
with the justice system is potentially damaging, insofar as it is a roll of
the dice that is weighted against them.
Unwilling to risk invalidation, and in the absence of strong formal
validation, too many victims are left nursing a festering wound. As we
saw in Chapter 5, a recovery narrative involves a path beyond the irrup-
tive, traumatic event, especially where the event is experienced in child-
hood, or wherever it is subjectively dislocating of identity. Since most
people need to engage a just worldview and most victims place a good
deal of responsibility on themselves for their own recovery, their predic-
ament can leave them in chaos or scrambling around for a sense of con-
nection to the world enabled by routine, pathway and the guidance of a
meaningful relation to the world.
Justice as Chance Correction

Is justice an intervention against the lottery of chance? What is the
nature of events that attracts the most strident call for a response under
the banner of justice and where is the burden of that response?
In The faces of injustice, Shklar (1990) makes the central point that
passive injustice, by which she means a lacklustre refusal to act against
those acts that cause great victimisation, is akin to oppression. For
Shklar (1990, p. 46), such injustice is represented in the Arena Chapel
in Padua, in Giotto’s Inguistizia. It depicts ‘a male profile … cold and
cruel with small, fanglike teeth at the sides of the mouth.’ He wears
a judge’s or ruler’s cap backward and carries a ‘nasty pruning hook.’
Under him is ‘the real character of passive injustice. There is a theft, a
rape and a murder. Two soldiers watch the scene and do nothing and
neither does the ruler.’ From the point of view of the victim and for
Shklar, whatever the distinction between misfortune from injustice,
213
which cannot be easily set, the result is not abstract but palpable and
confronting. The inversion, chaos and disorder depicted in the image
is a confluence of misfortune, injustice and invalidation. It reminds us
that passive indifference to injustice may also be a forceful representa-
tion of a social calamity. Existential or onto-existential validation
occurs, in good part, where recognition of victim experience is provided
by social, cultural and political authorities.
The image is from renaissance Italy when the official response to
injustice would have been a public spectacle seeking to involve the
whole community (Dean 2007). Criminal justice is transacted today
in the hushed murmurs and cloistered discussions between lawyers and
judges, according to whom the public is viewed as a nuisance and intru-
sion on the order of the court. In the meantime, although it is correct
that victims have a figurative connotation which associates them with
deserving good, this is inconsistent with the normative or sociological
connotation, by which they are associated with a transgressive bad.
The Sociological Norm and Figurative Ideal
The concept ‘victim proneness’ has been used by researchers to refer

to an objective condition of vulnerability to targeting. As mentioned
in Chapter 1, flag theory (Hindelang et al. 1978) suggests that some
victims’ routines and lifestyles can be correlated with repeat victimisa-
tion as these routines and criminal interests intersect. Victims are people
who are perceived as vulnerable. And as per boost theory (Hindelang
et al. 1978; Tillyer 2014) and research on poly-victims, prior victimi-
sation produces vulnerability to revictimisation. If criminal justice
relies upon an attribution of victimisation, and people who have been
victimised commonly attract more of the same, what is the relationship
between common victimisation and justice?
Here, it is important to keep in mind that justice is interpreted
through the neoliberal lens as presuming, via the reasonable per-
son standard, the necessity of prudent consequentialism. Untoward
events have a chance signature, both in the built environment and
in the social condition. That is to say, they may be expected to occur
214
under conditions with which reasonable persons are expected to be

familiar. People can be expected to avoid producing favourable con-
ditions for unwanted chance events. As we have just noted, complex
poly-victimisation is an accumulation of unwanted chance events, but
prudent consequentialism requires the exercise of risk aversion accord-
ing to a reasonable person standard.
At the same time, chance is built into human institutions and social
and political systems, with the intent and effect of providing a means
of social reproduction that cultivates a version of normative subjectiv-
ity. Under the neoliberal meritocracy (Littler 2013) of western democ-
racies, where just deserts is presumed to be based on prudence and hard
work, distributive mechanisms are refined that support a reward struc-
ture that valorises individual initiative and innovation, especially in the
denotation of the entrepreneurial self. Even behind the façade and the
prescriptive edifice of the positivist law of the court, judgments will be
distributed according to administrative and other discretions that will
tend to favour a version of self-help. Consequently, there is no certainty
that a rule will be applied, a friendly judge will be chosen to hear a case,
lawyers will be competent or a novel interpretation of law will not be
heard to set aside a more context appreciative understanding of injury
(Kadish and Kadish 2012).
If we follow much retributive and some restorative justice, justice
actors seek to deploy their authority to penalise those who illegitimately
challenge the (pre-existing) normative order. Yet, in the archetypal vic-
timology and with regard to victims’ compensation, as Nils Christie
(1986) has suggested, it is the victim’s virtuous vulnerability that counts.
As Christie illustrates, a female pensioner on their way to a church char-
ity who is opportunely robbed of her purse (containing her contribu-
tion to the charity) is worthy of receiving the strongest support from
justice actors. One dimension of this view of desert or worthiness is
the absolute separation between the actions of the victim and those of
the villain. It was simply misfortune that the pensioner was targeted
and the event took place. But it is reasonable to view the action of the
pensioner as contributory, by opposition, to the injustice of the preda-
tion. If on the other hand by a reasonable person standard a person has
been negligent, careless or even indifferent to a real possibility of being
215
criminalised—for instance, by leaving their keys in the car—the worthi-

ness and compensation are calculated as diminished. By more than just
implication, as noted above, this ideal victim is the figurative exception
to the rule. In most cases that reflect the norm of criminal depredation,
the victim’s actions and associations will be documented on the contrary
to subtract from their perceived worthiness. For most victims of crime,
the edifice of justice falls down.
What is clear from the literature and from our own interviewees is
that most victims express a view of justice, consistent with Ewick and
Silbey’s (2003) findings, that law is austere and remote and otherwise
a game that is played and likely to be lost. As one of our interviewees
intimated, many victims are not in a position to maintain bare life, let
alone bang on the doors of the courthouse. Few have the emotional and
social resources to spare for such efforts. For instance, in relation to the
courts the problem of validation becomes a problem of evidence, and
thus of testimony and procedures of cross-examination. The call for jus-
tice is an entreaty that there is a systemic, collective, corrective response
to an event, but the response is in proportion to the ‘outrage’ of the
event, an outrage that matches common expectations regarding norms
and justice values. Justice is expressed by actors and processes to assert
the stratification of values or expectations, not upend them.
As evidenced from the descriptions of victims’ interactions with
police provided in this book (Chapter 4), the early stages of the process
of seeking validation is uncertain; and for those who have stuck with
the process up to and including sentencing, there are many chances for
disappointing results that fall short of the victim’s quest for formal val-
idation. To advance their recovery, they simply wish to be heard and
have their experiences recognised. But as an institutional discourse,
criminal justice has developed self-perpetuating means and values that,
as we have seen, are distinct from what victims are in a position to offer.
As the literature on secondary victimisation makes abundantly clear and
as we have just reiterated with reference to casino chance, it is not at
all certain that a result will be a corrective of any kind, even were vic-
tims muster the resources to take a case to court. The justice process
oftentimes is not a remedy to the chance injustice that victims have
encountered and endured. It offers only a slim chance that the victim
216
will feel fully validated. It is most often expressed to serve the victim
who is not prosaically common but metaphorically worthy.
The redundancies built into political and administrative systems
mean that chance represents for actors the possibility that an outcome
is not certain. In this regard chance is an affordance beyond the known
or predicted outcomes of justice administration and may thus be iden-
tified by subjects as hope. In the United States, a death row inmate may
appeal to the governor, the state supreme court or the Supreme Court.
A sentence may be reduced on appeal, a person might be granted a con-
ditional discharge or pardon, evidence may be lost or found, a parole
board may grant early parole, a witness may recant, or a jury may decide
to nullify or declare a verdict at odds with jurisprudence. To conserve
their strength many victims of miscarriages of justice like victims of
crime choose not to test the odds. They make themselves unavailable to
the figure in the backward facing judge’s cap.
Note
1. This may be contrasted to the concept of ‘a victor’s justice.’ This refers
to the critical evaluation of the deployment of the machinery of civil
society in the extension of conquest by the winning side in a conflict. It
connects to the realist view of normative behaviour in the international
system according to which sovereign gains must be consolidated and
legitimacy asserted.
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Chichester: Wiley.
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Afterword
Willem would like to acknowledge and share the words of Vaughen

Zeeland de Lint, previously known as Kimberly, whose tragic story is
one of the many who have come to a conclusion before being offered,
and being able to seize, the chance of a reconciliation with justice.
Kimberly was sexually abused at the age of 11 by her stepfather, John.
She protected her youngest sibling from similar abuse, in the absence
of maternal vigilance. A psychiatrist suggested that her mystery phone
stalker, who was somehow able to find her new numbers as she moved
addresses over the years, was also probably her stepfather, who stopped
calling once challenged with identification. She experienced further
traumatisation at the hands of two students, who tried to sexually
assault her in an underground car park in Toronto, from whom she got
away in a lucky escape, by running for a security guard she spotted get-
ting into his car at the other end of the lot. She never pursued justice
for herself, though she lived on a knife-edge of fear and devoted her-
self to right injustices against others. She developed chronic illnesses,
including fibromyalgia, and was in pain most of her adult life. She
became a passionate advocate for the lost and forgotten. She created
a Carolina garden of native plants. She would lovingly rescue insects
from the house for release. She could not bear the thought of death.
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 219
and Victimology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93494-5
220
Afterword
She could also not endure everyday sociability, because perfumes of any
kind would set off migraines. Her innocence had been attacked but
she still kept her elfin, humorous spirit until near the end. She came to
rely on heavy doses of a variety of anti-anxiety medications (serotonin
uptake inhibitors). She “just wanted to stop the pain.” Her life, precious
and fragile, was mostly in precarious recovery, perhaps just one lucky
turn from peace and belonging. Two days after release from involuntary
hospitalisation in early December 2012 in Brighton, South Australia she
ended her life. Her words: “It’s rainin’ somethin’ farce.”
Appendix
Self-Medication and the Pathway to Recovery
Research has found that criminal predation leaves victims in a state of

transition, or in one or more recovery adaptations. People traumatised as
victims often experience an upside-down world, where the proper order
is backward, and where their feelings or experiences are chaotic or lack-
ing in order.
Others may be hypervigilant or over-controlling of their environment.
They will seek to put everything in place and take extra care to take note
of every detail about what’s in their space. Still others may be scrambling
to find a pathway and routine that matches up a positive view of the
world to the injustice that they may be experiencing.
For each victim of crime, recovery involves finding a unique pathway
on which obstacles may be converted into stepping stones. This requires
meaning work, or an attitude about recovery that matches a way of see-
ing oneself with a daily routine and a way of seeing the world. A routine
of everyday habits may be either productive or disabling. Productive
routines like exercise support rather than undermine progress on a path-
way. Research has also found that a set of beliefs or attitudes that sup-
port a more or less positive approach to the tasks at hand is important.

222
Appendix
For example, Kevin was assaulted after attending a nightclub with a

one-punch blow. He was shocked by the event and began drinking five
whisky sodas every night and stopped going to the gym. At first, this
kept him from replaying the event and helped him sleep. However, this
behaviour continued until his girlfriend said he’d need to see someone
or she would leave. Kevin contacted VSS and was able to connect with
counselling and start building his self-confidence. He permitted him-
self some, but not too much indulgence in his feelings of injustice. He
acknowledged and moved on. He accepted that his drinking had been
part of his recovery, but knew that he needed to get back into shape
with exercise. He found that by accepting his change of habit he was in
a better position.
Everyone has a unique victim experience. Most people will increase
their use of alcohol and legal and illegal drugs: research shows this is
common and at times it may be helpful in supporting the achievement
of short- and long-term goals. The path to recovery may start with the
consumption of alcohol and other drugs but should not end there.
Index
A Criminogenesis 8
Alcohol and other drugs (AOD) 1–8, Cross-institutional input (therapeu-
17, 18, 27–30, 38, 39, 46, 54, tic and academic)/knowledge
75–79, 81–85, 87, 94–96, 98, exchange 33, 39
110, 113, 147, 200, 209
D
C Dignity 9–12, 16, 17, 19, 55, 101,
Chance and justice 205 140, 167, 205, 207
Chance types Dulling or deferring engagement 77,
casino chance 17, 135, 182, 184, 83
187, 196, 207
social chance 187
Complex poly-victimisation/repeat I
victimisation 5, 7, 8, 36, 37, Institution-critical research 45
40, 54, 87, 187, 214
Coping mechanism 17, 18, 30, 56,
62, 63, 75, 79, 81, 82, 84, 86, N
157 Narratives of (In)justice 1
adaptive and maladaptive 57, 58 Network support 28, 33, 38, 40, 206
avoidance or detachment coping formal 206
mechanism 17 informal 206
224
Index
P Victims’ (un)availability/hard-to-
Prospective, retrospective and restor- reach populations 38
ative justice 12 Victim/survivor discourse 1–7, 9,
12–17, 19, 27–29, 34–36, 38,
39, 43, 44, 46, 48, 53–56,
R 58–61, 63, 64, 68–70, 80,
Recovery narratives 85, 87, 91–94, 96–108, 110,
chaos adaptation 143, 149 113, 114, 117–120, 125, 126,
control adaptation 143 135, 137, 140–142, 145, 147,
quest adaptation 143, 165 149–151, 156–158, 160, 163,
scrambling adaptation 143 164, 167–169, 179, 181, 183,
Reflexivity/reflexively appropriative 186, 187, 192, 196, 198, 201,
research 16, 29, 43, 45, 136, 205, 207, 208, 210–216, 221,
207 222
Resilience 9, 10, 12, 17, 65, 66, 140, Victim vs. survivor 2, 3, 6, 10, 12,
156, 158, 160, 167, 168, 177, 14–17, 19, 29, 44, 45, 47, 83,
178, 192, 196, 198, 200 87, 122, 141, 142, 168, 187,
188, 190, 200, 206, 209, 211
S
Secondary victimisation 9, 96, 101,
102, 121, 211, 215
Self-reporting trauma 3, 4
Simple poly-victimisation/repeat
victimisation 5–8, 36, 38, 40,
54, 87, 126, 149, 213
Simple victimisation 5, 7, 8, 36, 40,
54, 80, 87
V
Validation 2, 4, 9, 12, 15–18, 29,
38, 54, 86, 87, 91–95, 97,
100, 101, 105, 114, 116, 120,
121, 125, 126, 147, 149, 153,
165, 206, 207, 209–213, 215
Victim-sensitive research 43, 45

Narrating Injustice Survival: Willem de Lint and Marinella Marmo

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NARRATING

More information about this series at

Palgrave Studies in Victims and Victimology

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018943642

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Cover illustration: Szekely Images/Stockimo/Alamy

Printed on acid-free paper

the issue of self-medication in the VSS clients during their every-

Adelaide, Australia Willem de Lint

1 Victims of Crimes, Self-Medication and Narratives

2 Methods, Collaboration with VSS and Victim Reflexivity 27

3 Self-Medication and Avoidance Coping 53

4 Validation—Informal and Formal Support in Narratives

5 Adaptations in Recovery 131

6 Meaning Work and Chance 175

7 Validation, Chance and Justice 205

Fig. 1.1 Type of victimisation and AOD use in simple victimisation,

© The Author(s) 2018 1

instrumental and a necessary antecedent or co-requisite of a unique

The Self-Medicating Victim

a range of concurrent risks related to the health, safety and security of

victimisation (Morrison et al. 2011; Flynn and Graham 2010; Ullman

Simple Victimisation, Simple Poly-victimisation

(Hindelang et al. 1978) has been conceived in terms of this ‘risk

trauma is, as is now known, also physiological. Knowing that childhood

which seeks to optimise the psychological flexibility of patients or cli-

It is on distributive justice and equality that an individual may gain a

Prospective, Retrospective and Restorative

by wronging them offenders place a double burden on victims of crime.

suffering, experiencing feelings of caring and kindness toward oneself,

A therapeutic narrative is in this way inconsistent with at least a good

In this light, recovery is understood as meaning work, involving the

We encountered victim-survivors who mentioned food and sex, among

Ashcroft, A. (2005). Making sense of dignity. Journal of Medical Ethics, 31,

Hindelang, M. J., Gottfredson, M. R., & Garofalo, J. (1978). Victims of

Latta, R., & Goodman, L. (2011). Intervening in partner violence against

Murray, C. E., & Graybeal, J. (2007). Methodological review of intimate part-

© The Author(s) 2018 27

conducted in an environment already familiar to victims and where they

of victimisation trauma; and how they report changes in their reflexivity

the relationship between victims and substance use/misuse as a coping

According to data collected by VSS and discussed in detail with the

New Clients - Adelaide New Clients - Regions

Fig. 2.1 New clients in Adelaide and regions (based on VSS 2011)

Fig. 2.2 Source of VSS referrals in 2011 (based on VSS 2011)

In more recent years, VSS new clients reached a peak of 3191

Serious crime Simple crime

All sexual assault Property crime

The questionnaire contained 41 questions designed to collect informa-

loss of anonymity), as has been established in previous studies of trauma

the educational and occupational figures suggest that the sample of

Property crimes (extortion and theft)

Fig. 2.4 Victimisation by type of crime

Complex poly-victimisation Simple Poly-victimisation Simple victimisation

Fig. 2.5 Simple, simple poly- and complex poly-victimisation

We also cross-checked the data on multiple and/or repeat victimisa-

catholic priests and nuns. Took heavy drugs. prolonged periods

(all sorts of drugs)

Reflexivity and Victim-Sensitive Research

through small consultancies and students’ internships, was maintained

to communicate their discontent, jeopardising the remaining of the pro-

Closing Reflection: Victim-Sensitive, Institution-

in part, to present and explore a survivor’s journey through painful

Fig. 1.1 Type of victimisation and AOD use in simple victimisation,

victimisation (Morrison et al. 2011; Flynn and Graham 2010; Ullman

(Hindelang et al. 1978) has been conceived in terms of this ‘risk

Fig. 2.1 New clients in Adelaide and regions (based on VSS 2011)

Fig. 2.2 Source of VSS referrals in 2011 (based on VSS 2011)

Fig. 2.4 Victimisation by type of crime

Fig. 2.5 Simple, simple poly- and complex poly-victimisation

Reflexivity and Victim-Sensitive Research

From Macro-Analysis to Micro-Analysis

Avoidance and Disengagement Coping

I: Do you have a daily routine, a routine every day?

Self-Medication as a Coping Strategy

Fig. 3.1 Overall patterns of consumption

Fig. 3.2 Patterns of consumption before and after crime by AOD type

Fig. 3.3 Patterns of consumption before and after crime by frequency

I: And how did you cope with the stress?

Formal and Informal Networks

Fig. 4.1 Support sought by victims

Fig. 4.2 Perceived response to type of support

I: And so the police came?