This article addresses the need for crime victims to be treated with fairness and respect and to be protected from those who have victimized them, and, to that end, it provides a conceptual model for crime victim legal clinics and discusses the various forms that successful legal representation of victims of crime can take.
Legal clinics helping crime victims have grown out of the recognition that crime victims without legal counsel are often unable to exercise their rights. Slowing that progress, however, is uncertainty about how to define success in a legal clinic’s representation of crime victims, and how to apply that definition in evaluating whether clinics have represented victims successfully in particular matters. These are just the types of questions a conceptual model is designed to help answer. National Institute of Justice-backed research offers the first conceptual model for aligning victim legal services with desired results and assessing effectiveness in terms of actual client outcomes. The research also provides a roadmap for evaluating whether and how case outcomes are benefiting their crime victim clients in meaningful ways.