This is National Crime Victims Rights Week. And survivors of violent crime and their loved ones are holding healing vigils across the nation, including one in Detroit on Saturday.
The events are sponsored by the group Crime Survivors for Safety and Justice. It provides a support network for survivors, and “to promote a more effective vision of shared safety that includes more crime prevention, greater support for survivors and their families, and less reliance on incarceration,” according to the group.
Deleah Sharp lost her brother to gun violence in Pontiac nearly 30 years ago, when she was 17. But “it's not just a distant memory…it is something that is still impacting my life today,” she said.
“I know a lot of people go through traumatic experiences, and they may just go in their home and try to go through it by themselves," Sharp said.
“That grief and trauma, we also know that is very vulnerable. It's very scary. But we create spaces that are trauma-informed to try to alleviate some of those fears, and the stigma.”
Elle Travis will also be in attendance on Saturday. Travis is a survivor of Detroit’s rape kit backlog—in 2009, prosecutors found more than 11,000 of those kits sitting, untested, in an abandoned warehouse.
Subsequent efforts to test all of them, and prosecute some of the offenders implicated by DNA evidence, have yielded convictions and justice for some survivors—but not Travis. The man who sexually assaulted her was acquitted in 2017, despite being implicated as a serial offender.
When that happened, “I came out of court [and] I was a mess, understandably,” Travis said. “But I realized if no one did anything, or at least spoke up about what was happening in our city and our community, then it was going to keep happening. It was going be a repeat cycle of rapists and serial rapists being released back into our community.”
As a result, Travis founded Hands on Healing Detroit to “help survivors find resources and navigate in the aftermath of trauma here in our city,” she said. “We need resources, wraparound support services, and compensation to be able to fully heal and recover.”
Travis said there’s been some progress in that direction, but there’s still much work “to make sure our communities are safer than they were when we were growing up.”
According to Crime Survivors for Safety and Justice, the vigils will allow survivors “share their stories and honor loved ones and themselves with a powerful healing circle. Together they will call upon local, state, and national policymakers to implement new safety solutions based on prevention and healing, such as investments in trauma recovery services, programs for youth, mental health and drug treatment, and rehabilitation.”
