VSE’s Victim Care Team (VCT) provides comprehensive care and support to individuals who have experienced victimisation. The team empowers victims, fosters a supportive environment, improves systems providing essential care and guidance, and works tirelessly to ensure that victims’ voices are heard, and their needs are met. 

When contacted by victims’ in need, the VCT uses our secure referral system to transfer victim information and refer victims to support organisations across national borders.  

The VCT has recently introduced a Victim Platform, which helps shape the services and policies that impact victims’ lives; working with them to ensure that support systems are more effective, responsive, and inclusive. 

Your donations will be used so that the Victim Care Team can not only provide victims with advice and referral to services in their home country but will also ensure the Victim Care Platform can provide a structured and supportive environment where victims can safely share their insights, experiences, and feedback, to improve the systems designed to support them. 

By actively involving victims in VSE’s work, the Victim Platform guarantees that services and policies are shaped by those who know their needs best—victims themselves. 

VSE gives victims a voice, we ensure no victim is left without support, we train those who interact with victims, and we change legislation to ensure their rights! 

Our Terrorism Response Network was created after the 2015 Paris attacks and works to ensure that, following a mass violence incident, all European victims are identified and contacted by support services as quickly as possible. Despite our successes, the Network is limited geographically and in the support it can offer.

The Network helps refer international victims of terrorism to their national support organisations, to develop and spread victim-centric information, and to provide long-term advice and support to stakeholders and victims.

We work with national governments and operate the EU Centre of Expertise for Victims of Terrorism to ensure our responses complement and enhance existing systems.

Your financial support will provide resources to:

• enlarge the Network, connecting with support services and government agencies around the world;

• enhance existing, and develop and adopt new, protocols and processes to improve the way the Network responds after an attack;

• develop new technical and information tools to better support victims and national entities;

• ensure the victims’ perspective is included within national crisis response mechanisms ahead of the upcoming 2024 Paris Oylmpics.

Victims of the most serious crimes as well as the most vulnerable victims, such as children, can be badly affected by their participation in criminal proceedings. Our mission is to minimise the trauma they experience when taking part in justice processes, whilst enhancing the impact of their engagement.

While the use of canine support in Europe is in its infancy, in 2021, VSE led a multi-national pilot project (FYDO Facility Dogs Europe) to train and enable the use of facility dogs in criminal proceedings in Belgium, France, and Italy.

Facility dogs comfort and empower victims, providing them with a sense of security and safety, improving their ability to testify about the traumatic events they’ve experienced, and they reduce the stress and vicarious trauma experienced by family members and police officers, prosecutors and judges, whilst facilitating their work with victims.

• In France, 10 FYDO dogs support vulnerable victims during criminal proceedings.

• In Belgium, 3 FYDO dogs work with the police and in youth care institutions.

• In Italy, 10 FYDO dogs and 8 handlers work across the country; discussions are underway to introduce FYDO dogs to regional courtrooms.

Your patronage will help us:

• create the FYDO Europe Network, bringing together existing facility dog organisations as well as end-users to exchange knowledge, and develop services and standards;

• develop materials and awareness raising tools to promote FYDO across Europe;

• establish infrastructure for the training and placement of dogs across Europe.