Violent And Nonviolent Crime Case Study

Practically all countries today have some form of legal system. These systems are usually divided into three categories: Common Law, Code Law, and Theoretical Law. The United States, like many other countries, has a Common Law based legal system, where the laws that are enforced in courts are developed by judges and based on precedents set by prior judges. While the United States may use this kind of legal system, just like countries such as England, Australia, and India, it has developed many of its own characteristics and practices. In the United States, it can be viewed that the main goal of the legal system is to identify suspects, prove their guilt, and then sentence them for punishment. Thus, the system’s main goal is not to help the victim. This outcome oriented system is often incompatible with the psychological needs of victims, due to their increased levels of stress and anxiety (Parsons & Bergin, 2010). For many

While less common, victims of nonviolent crimes can still have psychological trauma from their initial victimization. Additionally, traversing the legal system can be a highly traumatic experience (Campbell & Raja, 1999). Thus, it is important to analyze the interaction with the legal system for both victims of violent and nonviolent crime. Since anxiety and depression often result from trauma (MacLeod, Carson & Prescott, 1996), and can be worsened by the psychologically negative practices of the legal system (Parsons & Bergin, 2010), they are the logical choice to assess the psychological impact of the legal system on victims. This study hypothesized that as victims of violent and nonviolent crime progressed through the legal system, their anxiety and depression levels would increase, with the violent crime victim’s anxiety and stress levels increasing significantly more than those of nonviolent