Helping Crime's Victims

A twelve-year-old named Kenneth was playing in an alley behind his home in Chicago's West Side ghetto when another youth doused him with gasoline and threw a match at him. Terribly burned, Kenneth was rushed to a hospital where doctors worked desperately to keep him alive. His agony was only beginning: pain, scars, medical costs, loss of schooling--all combined to make him a victim many times over.

In most cities, neither the courts nor the local government pays much attention to the special needs of such victims after a crime has been committed, but Chicago has a program called Youth Victims of Crime, a division of the Department of Human Resources. The program was started, explains DHR Commissioner Deton Brooks, because "it was a bit ludicrous that all sorts of services were available to help the criminal, when all you'd see of the victim was his appearance in court to testify, and then you'd say 'Goodbye.' "

In Kenneth's case, one of 1,600 the program has handled in the three years since it began, social workers found baby sitters to care for his brothers and sisters so that his mother could visit him in the hospital. They even provided the mother with transportation. When Kenneth returned home, tutors were brought in to ensure that he would not fall too far behind his classmates. Once he was back in school, he received special psychological counseling to help adjust to his physical and mental scars. When program workers discovered that his family's apartment was in substandard condition, they called in city building inspectors to force the landlord to make repairs.

"Timing is crucial," says Brooks.

"We have to get to the victim before the family makes any blunders, such as signing up for expensive funerals or allowing neighborhood groups to make a cause out of the case." He cites one instance in which a white girl in a mixed neighborhood was slain by four black youths. Social workers helped the family prepare for the funeral, provided interment funds and even burial clothing. Their quick action helped quash angry neighborhood talk of retaliation. "The program," says Brooks, "shows that someone in the city cares."

The victim program copes with a dismal variety of problems. One youth, for example, was harassed by a street gang and finally shot in the stomach. The boy's father desperately wanted to move away from the area but could not afford to, so program workers found him a new job in Michigan. An eight-year-old girl with a deformed leg was unable to run away from an attacker who raped her on her way to school. The program arranged for her to be bused to a school for the handicapped. When word got around that a boy who had witnessed a gang killing was going to be murdered when he returned from a summer camp, a DHR worker intercepted the camp bus and had the boy hidden with relatives for six months.

Brooks gets no federal money, but his 70-odd part-time caseworkers draw some of their salaries from other programs that are federally funded. Why doesn't the program have its own full-time staff? The work is so agonizing that the department stopped assigning personnel exclusively to the juvenile victims. Says one veteran worker: "We'd never before had to plan funerals for children or to deal with the rapes of youngsters. It was turning our own people into nervous wrecks."

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