Victim Care, one day course (online)
5th October 2023
10:00 – 15:00 (GMT)
Do you want to give victims of crime the attention they deserve without overstretching your time and resources or diverting your focus from investigating crime?
Are you a neighbourhood police officer, crime scene investigator, police staff or working in victim support?
This course is for you if you if…
- you want to know how to reassure a victim of crime, without making false promises, leaving them satisfied with the service they’ve received.
- you want to provide a human face to victims without impacting on the job you are there to do (for example establishing the facts or investigating a crime scene).
- you want to understand how victims’ needs differ, moving beyond the stereotypes of who a victim is (or isn’t).
- you want to know how to ‘say the right thing’ without needing to be a trained psychologist or following a script.
- you also want to provide practical support to help a victim of crime to begin to move forward from their experience.
The evidence from victim surveys shows that the key to victim satisfaction is reassurance. But putting that into practice is far from simple.
What is reassurance? And how can we best provide it, across a range of victims with different needs and expectations, within the limits of our resources?
This course provides practical guidance for officers and police staff who want to improve their understanding of victims of crime, and what they need from the police.
Learn about the four aspects of victim care:
- How to challenge and move beyond conventional beliefs about victim vulnerability.
- To view victim care as ‘applied psychology’.
- How to develop empathy and emotional awareness.
- What reassurance really is, and how to provide it to a diverse range of victims.
Course format
- In depth coverage of the four aspects of victim care (above).
- An exploration of statistical findings about victim reassurance, their interpretation, and how that links with practical recommendations for change.
- Imaginative exercises to develop your understanding of victims’ needs.
- An opportunity for questions and discussion.
About Malcolm Hibberd
Malcolm Hibberd has extensive knowledge of victim reassurance gained through 25 years of research and providing courses to police services on this subject. This includes personally delivering courses in victim reassurance to more than 6,000 front line officers in the Metropolitan and West Mercia police services. His work was influential in the Home Office development of the new User Satisfaction Survey (USS) twenty years ago. Additionally, he wrote the Home Office guidance documents on statistical analysis and sampling for the USS.