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Crown Counsel Victim/Witness Services, Vancouver Region

Interview with Maryam Majedi, Manager

The following interview was conducted by BCIFV Newsletter Editor, Barbara Sherman in January 1995.

What is the percentage of cases the Vancouver Crown Victim Services office deals with that concern domestic violence?

If we look at domestic violence just as wife assault and not other offences such as sexual assault, mischief, breaking and entering and breach of probation, for the six-month period covering April to September 1994 we had 2,527 new files. Out of that, 689 of these were spousal assault charges. That is for Vancouver region though and not just for the city of Vancouver. The Vancouver region covers the City of Vancouver, Richmond, North Vancouver, West Vancouver, Squamish and Sechelt. However, our Victim Services staff do not operate in Sechelt and Richmond on wife assault cases, so the 689 spousal assaults cases belong to the City of Vancouver, North and West Vancouver and Squamish.

When you say spousal assault do you mean charges that could be made against either husband or wife, male or female?

Yes, but 99% of them are wife assaults or assault against women in relationships. We had an 18% increase in wife-assault cases for that six-month period compared to the last six-months, and a 47% increase of violence in general. In the City of Vancouver, we get between 70 to 110 wife assault cases every month, so this has made us assign one of our full-time paid case workers to do nothing but cover those cases. Her job is to make sure that the victims know that in the morning the accused is going to be released; to make sure that the victim knows the conditions of release, and, of course, most of her job is to sit down and convince these people it is a good idea to testify.

Do you have any explanation for the increase in the number of wife assault cases as well as general assault charges you see?

It is because we have more case workers that we get more cases. I don't think anything has been increased. I think what has happened is that now we get more cases. A year ago at this time we didn't deal with any wife assault cases unless it was assault causing bodily harm or a threat to death, because we didn't have enough people to deal with it.

Do you encounter male victims of assault in heterosexual relationships? Is it clear in these cases that the male was the victim?

Yes. We don't care whether they are heterosexual relationships or homosexual relationships or whether they are male or female. This is actually a very different approach than a community-based program. To us, whoever is the victim is a victim and they receive the same service that everybody else gets. Children of course are a little different because they get help (from social services) and they also get more services from us. For instance, they have a case worker who is assigned and stays through the whole case with them to make sure that they are prepared to go to court, and to make sure that they have met the Crown prior the trial.

Do you encounter cases of lesbian and gay violence in intimate relationships? If so, do the victims have special services provided by Crown Victim Services in terms of counselling?

I haven't seen lesbian victims myself, but the office has had three or four gay violence in relationship cases. It is scary to see that even in those cases one of them comes and wants to drop the charges or the No Contact Order. So the issue is not men and women, the issue is who has the power. Whoever is bigger is the one who is going to intimidate the other person.

We don't counsel victims. We are not counsellors. We make sure they have the compensation forms and that they have access to all the community programs or counselling or psychologist lists. We make sure that we refer them to these groups. Normally we use private psychologists and private counsellors.

Can you tell me about special services provided for other special needs groups such as multicultural, aboriginal and disabled victims of family violence?

We have nine paid staff in our office right now and 52 volunteers. The volunteers are from all kinds of backgrounds, including Chinese, Spanish, Filipinos, Yugoslavian, South American, and South African. They help us a lot with interpreting. As for the disabled, right now we have official case workers dealing with deaf victims, specifically in the Jericho case. Also, two of our case workers deal mainly with mentally handicapped victims. As for Aboriginal victims, most of the time we turn them over to the Storefront native liaison program. The only problem with them is they deal with both the victim and the accused, and so the very serious cases we deal with ourselves.

Do you have any comments to make about Crown Victim Services in Vancouver at this time and for the future?

Yes, I do. I hope one day the whole service will be paid staff because it is very critical to know exactly what people do. It takes a lot of training to be a case worker. You have to know completely the background of the person you are hiring because of the sensitivity and confidentiality of this work. All of our case workers were volunteers, and became paid staff. Even though we are lucky to get wonderful volunteers, the problem is if I can't find a job for them, good ones go and find a job.

The issue of continuity in serious cases is always critical and is a problematic part of working with volunteers, because the case sometimes takes three years from the investigation to the end, which is the appeal process. The volunteer's commitment is one year, so we lose that continuity, especially with children and very vulnerable people. Otherwise, I am proud to say that when I came down to Vancouver from Prince George in 1990 it was just me and volunteers; and now I have nine paid staff!

When you have a volunteer start with you, do you provide an on-going training program?

Two times every year we have about sixty hours training each time for two groups of volunteers. Normally we train somewhere between 30-40 volunteers. After they have finished the initial sixty hours training they go through a three-month probation when they are supervised. They are divided into groups of volunteers. We find out through the training what kind of cases they would like to deal with and then we assign a special case to them. The case worker monitors their job and after three months they will tell us "No, this is not for me" or we tell them "Sorry, this is not for you, and thank you for all your effort." As a result, out of every 30 volunteers we train (and we spend God knows how many hours to train them), we get five or six very good volunteers that stay for the rest of the year, and hopefully longer.

We put a lot of time and effort into the volunteer program. We have to go through the whole training of the criminal justice process, and then after that we are not even sure we are going to have them for the first three months. Some of them get scared after they've been here the first day of the training. The whole procedure of advertising in the paper, paying money for advertising, finding a place to train them, getting speakers, sending every single one of them to the police station for a criminal record search, all these people are involved and you don't even know whether that person is going to show up after the second day of training, and you can't do anything about it.

Also, there are problems of continuity if we are only having four hours of commitment weekly from the volunteers. You don't have the same volunteer to stay with the victim. That's another problem, you have a child victim and you can't assign that child to a volunteer who, rightly, has other things to do, and is coming to our office at 8:30 and his/her shift is 8:30 to 12:30. Then the case goes to court at 9:00. The child may or may not get on the stand and have to testify, or even worse, be cross-examined in the afternoon and you don't have the same person with the victim. As a result, all of our serious cases are assigned to paid staff, and volunteers are doing mainly paperwork, with the exception of those who commit themselves more than a day or two and are flexible. It's not because they can't do it, it's because it is impossible.

So you are not really able to take on any new tasks beyond your caseload right now with volunteers, and you need more money?

Oh yes. Right now we have this problem in North Vancouver. We are in constant communication with the Crown Adjustor to get a wife-assault case worker. In the meantime all of these cases are falling through the cracks and I can't help them. We don't have enough people.

Victims of wife assault need immediate support and information. Their husbands, in many cases, have been arrested. They know he is going to be released; but they don't know when, they don't know whether conditions are there or what are the conditions, they don't know what is going to happen now. Sometimes they call the police because they just want to stop the violence but they don't have a clue as to the whole procedure, especially immigrants new to this country. It is a wife assault worker's job to give all this information and also to tell them that there are services available outside for support if she needs it. We don't have one in North Vancouver, so we depend on volunteers if they show up.

Won't the Crown Attorney be able to give them all that information?

When they approve the charge they may provide some information. But when their daily work load of court cases includes two child sexual abuses, one murder, two kidnappings, and then they have a woman calling them and telling them 'I want to drop the No Contact' and they have to put priorities on, unfortunately those people go on the bottom, and sometimes they don't have somebody to answer them. The secretary does, the Crown does, but they don't have enough time because they have other jobs to do. This is the job of the Crown Counsel Victim Services, but we don't have a person to do it.

In Richmond I was lucky to get the RCMP Victim Services to do it for me and the only reason I was successful was because RCMP Victim Services is right in the same building as the Court Registry so they were almost acting as Crown Victim Services. But you can't do it in North Vancouver where you have the Courthouse and the RCMP nine blocks away, and you can't do it in Squamish.

But it is very good work. I think there is one thing that keeps all of us going, when at the end of the day a victim comes and says "I couldn't have done it without you."