Victims Observation Report

Improved Essays
On November 5, 2015, I had the opportunity to meet Peg Sale, a volunteer victims advocate from the Arapahoe County Victims Assistance Program and a member of my community. The Arapahoe County Sheriffs Department provides primary law enforcement and victims assistance services for the towns located along the I-70 corridor in unincorporated Arapahoe County as well as the cities of Cherry Hills Village, Cherry Creek State Park and the Bow Mar/ Columbine Valley. Arapahoe County Sheriffs Department is also contracted with the city of Centennial to provide primary law enforcement and victims assistance and provides back up and agency assists for other agencies within the county and neighboring jurisdictions. The Arapahoe County Sheriffs Departments …show more content…
Ms. Sales has been a part the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Department VAP for over 20 years, when she began she was the only victims advocate for District 8 for a span of 3 years. After many advocates have come and gone from the program over the years there are currently only three victims’ advocates for the district. All victims advocates are required to attend monthly meetings for their continued training. These meetings offer speakers and additional information that may useful in their positions as victims’ advocates and the services they provide to the victims. Ms. Sales states she gains much satisfaction in her position as a victims advocate because she has always wanted to help. She finds that although only a volunteer her position is very important not only for her in her own life but also for the victims she comes in to contact with as well as the community she …show more content…
Sale states that the best thing she likes about her position is the satisfaction of being there for the victim in their time of need and being able to help, as well as the mutual respect gained and given between the victims’ assistance program members, the sheriff’s department and the community. She states that what she likes least about her position is when she has to do a death notification; this is the hardest part of volunteering. Not knowing how to say and do the right things when it comes to telling someone that their loved one was killed in an auto accident or some violent or non-violent situation and death notifications become especially harder when it is a younger person or are members of your own community. If there was anything Ms. Sales could change about her job, she states, “It would be to find a method or a way to make victims of domestic violence, both female and male, understand the true situation in which they are in.” To help them understand and see that they really can get out of the domestically violent relationship and make it on their own without the abuse that they have endured for such a long period. “Would just like that one thing to make it all

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