When Criminals Became the “Victims”: The Quiet Defunding of Crime Victims' Services
As a victim advocate who has spent more than two decades standing beside survivors of homicide, sexual assault, domestic violence, and other violent crimes, I have watched something deeply disturbing unfold in the criminal justice world.
The very funding that was created to help real crime victims is disappearing, and it is being deliberately redirected to organizations that primarily serve defendants, offenders, and convicted criminals. These groups are now marketed as helping “victims of the system,” “victims of mass incarceration,” or “victims of poverty and racism.” Meanwhile, the mothers burying their children, the women escaping violent partners, and the families shattered by murder are being told there is simply no money left to support them.
This is not a funding shortage. It is a funding reallocation based on ideology.
Major philanthropic foundations and government grant programs that once supported rape crisis centers, domestic violence shelters, court advocates, trauma counseling, and victims’ compensation funds have shifted hundreds of millions of dollars into bail reform initiatives, reentry services, and “defendant-centered justice” projects. The narrative is clear: the person who committed the crime is now framed as the real victim, a victim of circumstance, of the justice system itself, or of societal failures.
The actual victim? They are increasingly treated as an afterthought.
I have sat in too many meetings where victim service organizations, the very groups that answer the phone at 2 a.m. when a survivor is in crisis, are told their grants will not be renewed because “equity” and “system reform” are now the priorities. Meanwhile, well-funded advocacy groups working to keep dangerous offenders out of jail or to reduce their sentences receive multi-million-dollar grants with far less scrutiny.
The consequences are devastating and measurable:
- Victims’ rights organizations are closing programs or shutting their doors entirely.
- Waiting lists for trauma counseling and advocacy services have grown longer.
- Survivors are showing up to court alone, without support, while their offenders walk out on personal recognizance bonds funded by the same foundations that claim to care about justice.
- Compensation funds for medical bills, lost wages, and funeral expenses are drying up in state after state.
This is not compassion. This is a betrayal.
When we treat the offender as the primary victim, we invert the moral order of justice. A person who chooses to commit robbery, rape, or murder is not the victim in that story, the person they harmed is. Conflating the two does not make society kinder; it makes it more dangerous for the innocent and more hopeless for those who have already suffered the most.
Real crime victims did not cause the system’s problems. They are the ones paying the price for them.
It is time for foundations, lawmakers, and criminal justice leaders to stop pretending that funding defendant services is the same as funding victim services. The two are not morally equivalent, and they are not interchangeable.
Victims have waited long enough. Their organizations are fighting for survival while billions flow to the other side. If we truly believe in justice, we must restore the funding meant for the people who never asked to be part of this story in the first place, the real victims.
The silence from those who control the purse strings is deafening. But the pain of the victims they have abandoned is louder.
It is time to choose who we actually stand with. I know who I do.
If you would like to help make sure crime victims, get their chance at justice, please donate to Crime Survivors by clicking the link below.
