Most victim services organizations can now claim they've completed cultural competency training. Staff have learned about communication styles across cultures, reviewed lists of customs and taboos, and perhaps discussed implicit bias. This represents progress from decades past, when services operated as if all victims shared identical backgrounds, needs, and relationships to authority.

Yet something troubling persists. Communities of color, immigrant populations, Indigenous peoples, and other marginalized groups remain dramatically underserved. They report crimes less frequently, access victim services at lower rates, and express less satisfaction when they do engage. The training hasn't closed these gaps. In many cases, it has provided institutional cover while leaving fundamental barriers untouched.

The problem isn't that cultural awareness is worthless—it matters whether staff understand that direct eye contact signals disrespect in some cultures or that family decision-making structures vary. The problem is that surface-level sensitivity cannot address structural barriers embedded in how services are designed, delivered, and evaluated. Genuine cultural competence requires something far more demanding: a willingness to question whether our fundamental frameworks for understanding victimization, justice, and recovery are themselves culturally specific constructs that may not serve everyone equally.

Cultural sensitivity training typically operates through an additive model. We take existing services—designed within dominant cultural frameworks—and add awareness of difference. Staff learn to accommodate dietary restrictions, offer interpretation services, and avoid obvious cultural faux pas. These additions matter, but they leave the underlying architecture intact.

Consider how intake processes work in most victim services programs. They assume victims will present individually, disclose traumatic experiences to strangers in institutional settings, and articulate needs in terms that map onto existing service categories. They assume victims want professional intervention and that formal documentation helps rather than harms. These aren't neutral procedural choices—they reflect specific cultural assumptions about privacy, help-seeking, institutional trust, and recovery.

For many communities, these assumptions create impossible barriers. A Latina immigrant may understand her victimization through family and community frameworks that don't center individual experience. A Somali refugee may have learned through direct experience that documentation by authorities leads to surveillance and deportation, not safety. A Native American victim may find that the justice concepts underlying services—individual perpetrators, linear accountability, closure through punishment—don't match her community's understanding of harm and healing.

Structural competence requires examining these foundational assumptions rather than simply training staff to be nice to people who differ from the norm. It asks: Who designed these services, and whose needs were centered? What would it mean to design from the ground up for communities currently underserved? What expertise exists within those communities that we're failing to recognize?

This shift is uncomfortable because it moves from fixing deficits in staff awareness to acknowledging deficits in institutional design. It requires power-sharing rather than just politeness. Organizations must ask whether their metrics for success, their definitions of appropriate outcomes, and their theories of recovery themselves represent cultural positions rather than universal truths.

Takeaway

Cultural competence isn't about making existing services friendlier—it's about questioning whether the services themselves were designed with your community's concept of justice and healing in mind.

When victim services professionals discuss why certain communities underutilize services, they often frame the problem as barriers to access—language difficulties, transportation challenges, lack of awareness. These barriers are real, but this framing obscures something important: many communities have entirely rational reasons to distrust systems that claim to help them.

Historical harms matter enormously here. African American communities have direct intergenerational memory of police violence, discriminatory prosecution, and justice systems that protected white perpetrators while criminalizing Black victims. Latino communities have watched immigration enforcement weaponize victim services, with people who sought help finding themselves in deportation proceedings. LGBTQ+ communities spent decades experiencing the criminal justice system as persecutor rather than protector. These aren't ancient grievances—they're ongoing realities that shape contemporary help-seeking decisions.

Current experiences reinforce historical patterns. A Black woman who calls police about domestic violence may face officers who treat her as the aggressor. An undocumented immigrant who reports sexual assault may encounter agencies that share information with ICE. A transgender person seeking services may face misgendering, invasive questions about their body, and providers who treat their identity as more interesting than their victimization. Each negative encounter confirms community wisdom about the risks of engagement.

Effective cultural competence requires acknowledging that community reluctance isn't ignorance to be overcome through better outreach—it's earned knowledge about institutional behavior. Trust must be rebuilt through demonstrated change, not promised through mission statements. This means victim services organizations must examine their actual practices: Do they share information with immigration authorities? Do their mandatory reporting policies create risks for victims from marginalized communities? Do their partnerships with law enforcement compromise their independence?

Building trust also requires presence and relationship over time. Pop-up services and occasional community events cannot substitute for sustained engagement. Communities assess organizations not by their brochures but by their track record—who they've helped, who they've harmed, whether they've shown up consistently, and whether they've been accountable when they've failed.

Takeaway

Community distrust of victim services often reflects accurate assessment of institutional behavior, not cultural misunderstanding—and trust can only be rebuilt through demonstrated change, not better marketing.

Perhaps nowhere is the limitation of additive cultural competence more apparent than in Indigenous communities. Standard victim services rest on assumptions about crime, justice, and healing that reflect colonial legal frameworks—frameworks that Indigenous peoples never chose and that often directly harmed their communities. Adding cultural sensitivity to these services is like offering a more politely administered version of an imposed system.

Indigenous-developed victim services models operate from fundamentally different premises. Many center collective rather than individual harm, recognizing that violence against one community member wounds the entire community. They may emphasize relational accountability—the offender's obligations to victim, family, and community—rather than punishment administered by an external state. They often integrate ceremony, traditional healing practices, and elder guidance rather than professionalizing support through Western therapeutic frameworks.

The Hollow Water Community Holistic Circle Healing program in Manitoba offers one example. Developed by and for an Ojibway community to address sexual abuse, it operates through community circles rather than courts, focuses on offender accountability and community healing rather than incarceration, and integrates traditional practices throughout the process. Crucially, it was designed by the community based on community understandings of justice and healing, not adapted from external models.

These approaches aren't simply "alternative" services to be offered alongside standard options. They represent different answers to fundamental questions: What is harm? What does accountability look like? What enables healing? Who holds authority over justice processes? Genuinely culturally competent victim services must reckon with the possibility that these questions have multiple valid answers, not one universal framework plus cultural variations.

For non-Indigenous victim services organizations, engaging with decolonized models requires humility about the limits of their own frameworks. It may mean supporting Indigenous-led services rather than trying to serve Indigenous communities directly. It means recognizing that "evidence-based practice" often means "validated within dominant cultural frameworks" and that other ways of knowing produce their own valid evidence.

Takeaway

Indigenous and community-developed justice models aren't alternatives within the existing system—they represent different answers to what justice and healing mean, challenging victim services to question whether their foundational frameworks are universal truths or cultural positions.

Genuine cultural competence in victim services requires institutional transformation, not individual awareness. It demands that we examine whose needs our services were designed to meet, whose understanding of justice our frameworks assume, and whose definitions of healing our outcomes measure. This examination will reveal that much of what we treat as professional common sense is actually cultural particularity.

The path forward involves sharing power with communities rather than just serving them more sensitively. It means supporting community-led services, restructuring partnerships to center community expertise, and accepting that some communities may prefer their own approaches to having our services made more accessible.

This is uncomfortable work. It asks victim services professionals to question the frameworks that ground their expertise. But the alternative—continuing to wonder why certain communities don't access services designed without them in mind—perpetuates harm while claiming to address it.