Victim Assistance in the Age of Victims' Rights: A Study of California's County Victim-Witness Assistance Programs
Journal: eScholarship (California Digital Library)
Year: 2011

This dissertation examines how crime victims' pleas for recognition by the criminal justice system have been answered through the formation of county victim-witness agencies (VWAs) in California. It tells the story of "victim advocacy" as an idea, a field, and an institutional development in California. In California as elsewhere in the United States, over its forty-year history victim advocacy and VWAs came to embody two often competing visions of how the state should respond to individual crim