Transcending

Reflections Of Crime Victims

Howard Zehr

• Publisher: Good Books
• Year: 2001
• Print ISBN:
  9781561483334
• eBook ISBN:
  9781680992755
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Conflict Resolution
• Index: Social Sciences

Are victims of crime destined to have the rest of their lives shaped by the crimes they've experienced? ("What happened to the road map for living the rest of my life?" asks a woman whose mother was murdered.) Will victims of crime always be bystanders in the justice system? ("We're having a problem forgiving the judge and the system, " says the father of a young man killed in prison.) Is it possible for anyone to transcend such a comprehensively destructive, identity altering occurrence? ("I thought, I'm going to run until I'm not angry anymore, " expresses a woman who was assaulted.) Howard Zehr presents the portraits and the courageous stories of 39 victims of violent crime in Transcending: Reflections of Crime Victims. Many of these people were twice-wounded: once at the hands of an assailant; the second time by the courts, where there is no legal provision for a victim's participation. "My hope, " says Zehr, "is that this book might hand down a rope to others who have experienced such tragedies and traumas, and that it might allow all who read it to live on the healing edge."

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• About This Book — Howard Zehr
• Part I. Stories and Reflections of Crime Victims
• “There’s nothing like murder to make you really, really look at yourself.”
• “It’s like destroying the old structure and rebuilding.”
• “The light of hope for me is that justice will eventually be done.”
• “We grabbed onto all sorts of things as we were falling. One of these was forgiveness.”
• “Shaking hands with Charles … that’s the hand that held the gun that murdered my son.”
• “It’s like a jigsaw puzzle where there’s more than one way to put the pieces together.”
• Part II. Looking for the Burma Shave Signs: Victimization and the Obligations of Justice — Howard Zehr
• National Resource Organizations for Victim Issues
• Acknowledgments
• About the Photography
• About the Author and Photographer