Title: Letter From OVC
Series: Resource Guide
Author: Office for Victims of Crime
Published: March 2002
Subject: victims -- general, crime victims' rights week, victims' rights,
victim services, National Crime Victims' Rights Week, resource guide
2 pages
4,096 bytes

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U.S. Department of Justice
Office of Justice Programs
Office for Victims of Crime

Washington, D.C. 20531

January 2, 2002

Dear Colleague:

I am pleased to present to you the 2002 National Crime Victims ' Rights
Week Resource Guide, developed for the first time in partnership with the
National Center for Victims of Crime. By bringing together the most
critical elements of past Office for Victims of Crime Resource Guides and
the National Center's Strategies for Action Kit, this year's Resource Guide
offers you a dynamic vehicle for carrying out outreach and public
education campaigns in your own community.

The annual commemoration of National Crime Victims' Rights Week
gives us a unique opportunity to celebrate the tremendous progress made
on behalf of victims and to help lend a measure of dignity and respect to
their plight. This year's theme, "Bringing Honor to Victims," encapsulates
the goal of the thousands of victim advocates and victims themselves who
have labored over the years in an effort to gain standing and equity within
the criminal justice system and in society as a whole. It points up that we
are striving not simply for certain basic legal rights, but for a very
fundamental sense of selfhood and humanness very often denied victims.


The Office for Victims of Crime has the great privilege each year of
helping to lead communities across the country in their observances of
National Crime Victims' Rights Week. The terrorist attacks of September
11th, while giving a very public urgency to America's public safety
concerns and underscoring the need for strong national guidance, have not
changed the fact that the real force behind victim services lies in people
like you who work day in and day out at the local level.

There seem to be far too few opportunities to pay tribute to the men and
women who have dedicated themselves to lives of help and healing. We in
the Office for Victims of Crime are grateful for the chance that National
Crime Victims' Rights Week gives us to do so. On behalf of all of us,
thank you for all you do!

Sincerely,

John W. Gillis
Director