Crime victims’ experiences with seeking compensation: a qualitative exploration

Abstract

This article describes and discusses the results of an exploratory qualitative study regarding the experiences of victims of crime with damage recovery. It examines the steps taken by crime victims to obtain compensation, their considerations in whether or not to follow different legal ‘pathways’ and their actual experiences in their attempts to obtain compensation for their losses. This study offers a unique insight into Dutch ‘law in action’, as experienced by this group of victims. First we will briefly review the increasing attention for victims’ compensation in the Netherlands (Section 2), after which we will give a brief overview of the legal pathways to compensation in the Dutch law system (Section 3). Then, we will focus on the present study; first by presenting the study design (Section 4), followed by some sample characteristics of the group of respondents (Section 5) and finally the qualitative results of the current study, with some reflections of the authors (Section 6). Finally, we will make some concluding remarks on this (type of) research (Section 7).