A City Where There Is Help for the Criminal's Helpless Victim​​​​

ST. LOUIS—Back in 1972, Carol Vittert, a wealthy young suburban housewife with both a social conscience and time on her hands, decided she wanted to do something to help people. Just what, she didn't know—except that she wanted it to be in an area “where nothing had really been done before.”

Her brainchild came to her one day after reading about a Chicago juvenile court program that utilized neighborhood volunteers. Mrs. Vittert, now 27 years old, decided to use the same approach in helping the forgotten persons of crime—the victims and their families.

And so she founded Aid to. Victims of Crime, a largely volunteer group that works with the poor, elderly and handicapped victims of violent crime and their families in the inner city of St. Louis. The organization is believed to be one of the first of its kind in the country, although several others have sprung up since it was founded in November, 1972.

The people we help are those most hurt by crime,” Mrs. Vittert, who has short cropped blonde hair and the cherubic face of a Big 10 cheerleader, said the other day. “They are the people who don't have carfare, insurance or medical insurance. And they don't know what to do when crime hits them.”

Aid to Victims of Crime works this way: Every morning, the three paid staff members at the group's headquarters, 812 Olive Street, receive from the police the names of crime victims the day before in the three high-crime precincts that have been selected for the project.

The staff members then assign the cases to volunteers living in the victims' neighborhoods, and the volunteers then contact the victims and try to help them in any way within agency guidelines.

The program's approach is a “service concept rather than a compensation concept,” according to Anna Forder, a lawyer who is the program's director. “About the most we can give moneywise is $35 for each victim.”

Among the services the volunteers offer include:

• Helping the victims or their families get in touch with public or private agencies, such as the welfare office, the food stamp office and hospitals.

• Helping a victim get credit payments extended when there is a loss of money or job.

• Contacting the victim's employer to ask him to hold the victim's job open and/ or allow paid time off for court appearances.

• Providing child care and emergency food and clothing.

• Arranging funerals.

• Helping the victim find a new job and new home, if necessary.

Aid to Victims of Crime was financed through private donations until March, 1974, when it received a $25,000 grant‐ from Lilly Endowment through the St. Louis Jaycees. Another $22,000 from Lilly was given last month, along with $4,000 from the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration.

So far this year, 428 crime victims have been contacted, Miss Forder said, and 99 have been given tangible help. Most of the victims are black, as are most of the 70 volunteers who work with them.

One typical victim was Barbara Harris, a 36‐year‐old unmarried mother of eight who lives in a public housing project on the city's South Side. Last June, Miss Harris's purse containing a $180 welfare check and $81 worth of food stamps was snatched as she was walking to a grocery store near her home.

“I was really worried,” she said, as she sat in her living room the other day. “There was no food in the house for the kids to eat, and I didn't know what I was going to do.”

The next day, she was contacted by a volunteer from Aid to Victims of Crime, who brought her $25 worth of groceries and drove her downtown for some free food stamps. The volunteer also called Miss Harris's landlord and the furniture store where she owed money, and explained why she wouldn't be able to make her payments that month.

Today, Miss Harris is a volunteer for the program, calling on neighbors who have also been crime victims.

“I do it because I appreciate what was done for me,” she said. “And I really like helping other people with the same problem.”

Whenever there is no volunteer in an area where a victim lives, Ann Slaughter, the program's outreach worker and the only black on the paid staff, makes the visit herself. She has, among other things, helped a grieving widow plan her husband's funeral; stayed in a victim's house so his family could attend his funeral with no fears that their belongings would be stolen; helped a grandmother pick out a suit of clothes for her slain grandson, and found a fearful rape victim another job in a new neighborhood.

She drove another rape victim, a thin, 22‐year‐old named Eunice, to see a doctor after Eunice complained about the way she had been treated at a city hospital.

“They were really rude to me,” Eunice said, sitting in her mother's apartment. “They didn't give me any information at all about venereal disease, and even the clerk who took down tne information was snotty.”

Mrs. Vittert, the program's founder, was herself a victim of violent crime in 1973. After visiting a male victim who had been badly beaten, she was hit in the stomach and knocked unconscious on the sidewalk in front of the man's house. When she came to, she drove herself to her doctor.

“That situation made me realize the value of neighborhood volunteers,” she said. “The man I had gone to see was a drug pusher who had invaded somebody else's territory. I didn't know, that, but the people in the neighborhood would have.”

Mrs. Vittert was one of 10 young women who won Mademoiselle magazine awards for 1974 for “outstanding achievements.” She is a graduate of Goucher College, and worked for the food stamp program in Washington, D. C. before marrying her husband, Mark, now 27, a wealthy businessman who starts and sells new companies. They live in suburban Clayton, Mo.

Mrs. Vittert stressed that the purpose of her program was not to get tougher sentences for criminals—only to help the victims.

She said that ideally, she would like to see the Federal Government enact a crime victim's compensation law, something that only 13 states now have. Her own state, Missouri, does not have such a law.

New York State does have a Crime Victim's Compensation Act, which reimburses an innocent victim of crime for out‐of‐pocket medical expenses and for salary loss up to $135 a week, up to a maximum of $15,000. It also provides a $15,000 death benefit to the victim's survivors, plus a funeral expense of $1,500.

Among the groups aiding crime victims in the New York area are the Crime Victims Service Center, at 1500 Waters Place, in the Bronx, which aids Bronx victims; and the Vera Institute of Justice, which in June will begin a $1.4‐million program in Brooklyn, called the Brooklyn Victim/Witness Assistance Program. Both programs are funded by the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration.

“I'd like to see more and more of these programs started,” Mrs. Vittert said. “It's really easy to start one. The only danger is that some people might start them only to prosecute the criminals. Things like that can really turn into vigilantism”