By Lurnay Tshabalala-Mavuso | Law & Legal Analysis | Jan 2023
WHAT IS JUSTICE ?
Justice is the idea of fairness and impartiality, especially with regard to the punishment of wrong doing.
This question has been sprawling in my thoughts for the first three years I have spent in law school. Even today I still ask myself the very same question, is Justice really served when we just put the perpetrator behind bars and forget about the victim?, and I believe that I have found the answer to that question. Justice isn’t being fully served when we just put the perpetrator behind bars and forget about the victim. I know many of you reading this piece right now are asking themselves, HOW DO WE FORGET ABOUT THE VICTIM?, let me tell you how, we forget about the victim by focusing on proving the actions of the perpetrator and not bearing in mind that in that process the victim gets to re-live the traumatic experience when they have to answer questions in a court cross-examination, where they re-live the experience and have to go back detail by detail as to how the experience and/or event went about. This is forgetting about the victim and that is how we forget the victim. We forget that the victim has a mental health to take care of, that needs for that matter to be taken care of by the victim themselves, the cross-examiners and the judicial officer.
Another question :
HOW DO WE TAKE CARE OF THE VICTIM’S MENTAL HEALTH?
A victim’s mental health can be take care of by organizing counselling for the victim before and after the trial proceedings. When that is done we mitigate the damage that could be done unto the victim’s mental health after trial and/or testifying in court. This will assure the victim that in the process of getting justice, they too are taken care of and that justice does not focus only on one side which is the perpetrator’s side. Which is what is being done in our justice system today. The victim should be taken care of in every way because in the process of getting justice they play a huge role in ensuring that the perpetrator gets to be put in place by law and without the victim, the law cannot be practiced.