Hello all! OVS Training and Outreach is working to craft an awareness campaign for OVS services, and we need your help! In this thread, can you please let us know how victims in your county self-identify? What terminology do they use? What resonates with them? For example: survivor vs victim, etc. Please response with your county, as well as terms that are used in your area.
Thank you for your help with this important initiative!
Tagging @Lindsey Crusan-Muse, @Karen Ziegler (she/hers) and @Christopher Bromson to get the ball rolling!
#Victim #Identify #IdentifyingVictims #Survivors #Locate #Awareness #Visibility
Sorry that I'm late to the party, all! Everything that @Christopher Bromson and @Karen Ziegler (she/hers) have said I would second. We let the patient/client/participant in services make that determination as to how they identify (victim vs. survivor), and we never assign this for them. When I do outreach presentations or in other statements (such as our mission statement), we use victim/survivor to include both.
It's also challenging because within our own programs there is a variety with terminology - for example, our Forensic Examiner Program uses the term "patient" to describe the person they are providing services to (because they are coming from a nursing/medical model) while our Support and Advocacy Program uses "client" (or even "participant" if we're talking about support groups!). Mostly, we want the person to be the driver of all of this.
Happy to, @OVS Training & Outreach !
This information is great, @Christopher Bromson and @Karen Ziegler (she/hers)! We're doing some research on how best to reach out to survivors of crime, and whether or not certain words (more so than others) will help connect more people to the services they need. This is a great start!
Please like, share, and tag other people in this thread who may be able to provide some invaluable input!
@Christopher Bromson said everything I could say! We use victim/survivor/witness or just person/client/individual. As other programs do, we give folks as much control as possible so we would use whatever language makes the most sense to them. This can change over time and we would want to give space and energy to the person exploring.
Well hello there OVS champs! Thank you for starting this thread and for engaging the community in this important discussion. To put it quite simply (speaking on behalf of CVTC down here in NYC), we use whatever terminology the individuals we serve use. There is often a fair amount of fluidity (said the director of the place with Victims in the title). For some, using the word victim can be empowering. For someone who was sexually abused as a child, for instance, the word victim may help make clear that what happened to them was not at all their fault, that someone made a choice to hurt them. For some the word survivor is the right word and carries a sense of empowerment. For others it can feel almost euphemistic, or like it carries too much weight within their identity. Some use the words interchangeably, and some don't like either word, feeling that it gives the traumatic experience too much weight. This is all to say that we strongly believe that the person who has experienced the harm is the one who gets to pick the way they talk about it.