Beyond Therapy: Why Victims’ Rights Matter to Democracy

By: Meg Garvin

Over the past 50 years, one of the Victims’ Rights Movement’s greatest achievements has been transforming how the legal system understands and responds to harm. We now recognize that a victim’s suffering does not end when the crime occurs; engaging with the criminal justice process itself can cause secondary victimization.

This recognition has been transformative. It has helped legislatures pass meaningful legal rights and pushed practitioners (law enforcement, prosecutors, advocates, attorneys, and more) to consider the impact of how they treat victims.

As important as this therapeutic frame has been, it cannot be the only frame.

If the Victims’ Rights Movement remains focused primarily on healing, we risk underselling the meaning and power of rights. Victims’ rights are not simply trauma-informed accommodations. They are a statement about who belongs in our democracy and whose voice matters when the state exercises its authority.

The value—and limits—of a therapeutic frame

The therapeutic rationale emerged in response to a justice system that routinely marginalized victims. Researchers documented the toll of being shut out of proceedings, and advocates used that evidence to press for reform. The concept of secondary victimization gave courts and policymakers a vocabulary for understanding how institutes can compound trauma.

This framing remains useful. It keeps the Movement grounded in the lived experiences of victims.

I have recently argued elsewhere, however, that victims’ rights cannot function as genuine legal rights unless victims have meaningful assistance from counsel in asserting them. My argument is not only that counsel reduces revictimization, but that counsel fundamentally changes the victim’s relationship to the state. It allows victims to appear not simply as traumatized individuals seeking compassion, but as rights-bearing participants with the power to invoke constitutional protections and demand accountability.

When we justify victims’ rights primarily because they help victims heal, those rights become conditional.

No other constitutional rights are justified that way. We do not protect a defendant’s right to counsel because having an attorney makes the defendant feel better. We do not justify free speech because speaking is emotionally beneficial. We do not guarantee due process because it is comforting.

Rights are justified because democratic legitimacy depends on them.

This is as true of victims’ rights as every other right. Victims’ rights to be informed, notified, present, and heard are not simply tools for emotional recovery and return of personal agency. They are mechanisms of democratic inclusion and accountability, ensuring that victims are recognized not as observers of the legal process, but as participants within it.

What’s next?

We cannot abandon the therapeutic insights. They remain indispensable for identifying institutional practices that compound harm. Trauma-informed approaches continue to improve the experiences of individual victims.

But we should resist allowing this to be the sole, or even the primary, frame through which we understand victims’ rights

A democracy that excludes the people most directly affected by the exercise of criminal justice power suffers a legitimacy deficit. Healing may be one of the benefits of rights. Democracy is the deeper reason they matter.

I am drafting a full legal article that explores this concept in greater depth, and will share as soon as it is published. Stay tuned.

Core resources:

1. Meg Garvin, The Impossible Intermediate: Why Victims Need a Constitutional Right to Counsel, 56 U. Pac. L. Rev. 275 (2025).
2. Robin Holder, Just Interests: Victims, Citizens, and the Potential for Justice (2018).