Witnessing a new dawn

From its beginnings as a pilot scheme in 1996 the Witness Service has seen demand mushroom to a current level of over 60,000 enquiries a year – representing almost 50,000 individual witnesses – but Head of Service Frank Russell expects to see further growth yet. “Last year I had anticipated that our activity would increase by 45%, but it actually increased by 78% between 2002-03. With the other arrangements we’ve got in place, the VIA [Victim Information and Assistance], they sort of provide the case specific information where we would provide the emotional/practical support, that partnership is going to take us well down the road to that figure of 60,000 increasing again.”

A garrulous Fifer with a background in engineering and then general management, latterly with the Scottish Court Service, Frank Russell came to the Witness Service in June 2000 to manage the rollout across the sheriff courts and then the High Court. On completion last August he was asked to stay on permanently to run the service, which comes under the umbrella of Victim Support Scotland but is 100% funded by the Scottish Executive – a different setup from VIA which is part of Crown Office.

Not that he found the transition easy. “Because I’d been at the High Court pretty much exposed to murder, rape and drugs every day I thought I had a pretty good handle on the impact of crime, but I had absolutely no idea and it was like walking through a mirror into a different dimension. I started with Victim Support and the first thing they did was put me on a training course with a whole range of organisations and other agencies. The whole structure of VS and the training and the patience they show was absolutely fantastic.” Then there was the difficulty of coming from the disciplined civil service way of thinking into the charity environment – like sending faxes on the back of used sheets of paper.

Now a network of 26 offices across the country services all the courts with 48 paid staff and over 300 volunteers, some courts being manned only when cases are scheduled. But it’s still difficult to assess the proportion of witnesses who call on the Service. “It looks like an awful lot of people but if you look at Glasgow Sheriff Court alone, somewhere in the region of 20,000 witnesses go through the court in a year. Not all people going to court need support and that’s the important thing, you’re not ambulance chasing if you like.” On the other hand it is unpredictable just who will ask for help. “What you’ll find is a lot of people think they’re OK until they get into the court environment. They’ve got total control of their life when they’re outside, but as soon as they come into the court building they’re told where to go, they’re told to stay there, and when they’re in court they’re told where to stand, they’re asked questions, they have absolutely no control whatsoever. And that’s when, if they’re left for any length of time, they start to contact us.”

Misconceptions still exist in some quarters as to the scope of the service. “It’s not simply another victim service, it’s a service to victims and all witnesses and their families. And that is defence witnesses as well. So it’s a bit different from VIA who can obviously only support or provide case specific information to Crown witnesses.”

“You’ll find there are a lot of children in the system who are not necessarily victims, and under the new Vulnerable Witnesses Bill there’s a whole different definition of vulnerable so there will be other people that will fall into that category.” He tells how when the Service set up in one of the islands, on the very first day eight children came in unannounced – something of a logistical nightmare when volunteer support has to be found.

Curiously, throughout the rapid growth in the service the number of approaches from defence witnesses has remained constant at around 9%. To an extent this is understandable. “I’m not saying defence witnesses wouldn’t be as anxious about going to court but there are other issues for Crown witnesses.” And the Service has also had to overcome a degree of suspicion on the part of defence agents.

“We were having difficulty with convincing defence lawyers in the sheriff court system; there was some kind of wariness there. I don’t know what that was. I think there was some concern about using volunteers.” Acceptance tended to filter down from a higher level. “Kilmarnock was one of the pilots and the High Court visits on circuit, so we began to establish a credibility with the High Court players before we actually had any funding to get involved in it. Some of the advocates were turning up in other places and saying, where’s the Witness Service, they were starting to look for us. That was significant because we’d obviously made some kind of impact.”

Volunteers or not, those coming face to face with witnesses are thoroughly prepared. Twenty hours of classroom training are followed by a spell shadowing an experienced volunteer. Assumptions or attitudes may well have to be changed for a start: “like victims want offenders to be locked up for a very long time, and that’s not necessarily true; and victims want revenge, and that’s not necessarily true either. … There’s all sorts of individual things and there’s the bigger thing of what’s happening to the family unit and the victims will have individual circumstances which will affect their reaction to the crime.

“We do a lot of role play and case studies and that type of thing. It’s vital that they do not make assumptions or judgments about the victim.”

Sessions have also been developed involving talks from local fiscals, defence agents, sheriff clerks, social workers and others, to enhance volunteers’ understanding of how the system works, and the Law Society of Scotland and Faculty of Advocates have agreed to assist by providing videos for use in training.

What is equally important is establishing the limitations of the Service. “The seriousness of the contamination of evidence, that is really hammered into them. And we need volunteers to understand how stress can affect the person, we need to get them to understand the ripple effect of crime, where people can be referred on to” – perhaps specialist groups like Women’s Aid or the Rape Crisis Centre. Then there are the frequent requests to act as a childminding or taxi service, which have to be turned down.

So a lot of the advice given deals with spontaneous enquiries at a fairly basic level? “Exactly. We provide emotional and practical support. I checked the figures just a couple of weeks ago and roughly 25% of the service is emotional support, that’s sitting with people and having to try to get them through that particular moment because the way they understand it, these people are likely to be at the most vulnerable time in their lives. The rest of it is pretty much practical support and that can be anything from helping people with filling in forms, or you know, I’ll go and find out about this, I’ll go and speak to the fiscal, I’ll go and speak to the social work – that kind of thing we class as practical support.”

Perhaps inevitably, the Service finds itself called on to help in cases beyond its remit, especially where children are involved. “We’re funded for criminal work but because we’re a court based service we get approached – a lot of anti-social behaviour stuff will either go to the district court or civil court and we’re not funded for either. And you also find that children come to court, the civil court, they could walk in the front door with the mother and walk out with their father or the other way round and we don’t have any funding for being in that particular area.

“About 1% of the work that we do is actually work that we’re not funded for, but because of the nature and the sensitivities that people bring to us, because we are the organisation that we are, we’re not going to say, I’m sorry but we’re just not going to help your child here, but what we try and do is control it as best we can and it kind of rolls out at about 1% of our work. It’s just not something that I would say we’re not going to do, you just can’t do that.”

Other issues too may require a review of the scope of the Service. “I think there is a need for a service in the district courts as well as the sheriff courts but we will not know what shape or form the district courts will be until the McInnes report has come out. When you see the suggestion of the High Court work shifting something like 20% of its work to the sheriff court, that will have some kind of knock-on to whatever is going to exist in the shape of a lower court. So I think there’s going to be a need there for some form of service provision”, bringing, as he says, a whole load of challenges.

Concluding, Russell is keen to emphasise that the service is still young, growing and learning. “The service is there and it’s in the court and it’s successful, and if anybody has got any issues with not being able to find them or not getting help, well I’d like to hear about that. Like I say we only finished the total rollout back in August and we’re still growing, but we’re prepared to learn and if there’s something out there that we’re actually doing that is making people apprehensive, tell us what it is. Because we could maybe get the same result just by doing it differently.”