Crime Victims Fund Stabilization Act of 2025
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. SCHMIDT. Mr. Speaker, I, too, want to add my voice to those thanking our colleague from Missouri for her leadership on this work. It has been a pleasure to work with her and with our colleagues on the other side. It has been an honor to help lead the support for what she is trying to get done here.
Mr. Speaker, in my State, we dealt with this issue a number of years ago, and it is a policy fight that is separate from what we are doing here today. We actually ultimately decided to move our State-based crime victim support programs into appropriated support from our general fund and deposit all of these erratic streams from the court system into the general fund so that the risk of funding was shifted onto the State generally and not borne by those who rely on the services in particular.
That is a discussion for another day.
I share it today because for me, at least, this brings back memories of a time when we were wrestling with the same issue back home.
Mr. Speaker, how do you look a rape victim or a domestic violence victim in the eye and tell them that the good folks in your community, the advocates and the supporters of domestic violence services or rape crisis centers or child advocacy centers who want to be there to help you in your time of greatest need may not be there because their government didn't pay the bills?
The lights aren't on. The staff wasn't paid, so they left. That is where we are writ large in this subject matter, and we are there because of the vagaries in the recovery cycle and all kinds of things that happen in the court system that generate these revenue streams. This is a way to put our finger in the dam until we figure out longer term how we provide that sort of certainty.
There are a lot of different groups of crime victims. By the way, none of them asked to be crime victims. They didn't wake up and expect to be victimized. They have had a terrible moment thrust upon them by somebody else's actions, and they are in a time of need where they need help. That is what advocates do in these support services. That is what this money goes for.
This helps a lot of different types of crime victims. I will share a couple of moments in my last minute or so here about the work of the child advocacy centers that this supports. I have often said in the work I did when I was a State legal official, we did a lot of work with crime victims, child crime victims, supporting our child advocacy centers, and prosecuting criminal cases under State law against offenders who committed terrible crimes against children.
I have often described it to people this way: It is not like on TV in the crime shows.
When the victim is an 8-year-old child or a 7-year-old child, and when what happened to them was some form of sexual abuse, the odds are about 90-10 that the offender is somebody that the child knew and trusted.
It is rare that it is a stranger offense with little kids. That is because that is how the offender got access to the child.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. SCHMIDT. Mr. Speaker, on our watch, we prosecuted parents, we prosecuted grandparents, we prosecuted ministers, and we prosecuted coaches.
Mr. Speaker, the only evidence you have is what that child can testify to in front of a bunch of strangers in a jury box, a judge in a dark robe, and people in our adversarial system because you rarely have physical evidence in these cases. We sometimes, but rarely, have extraneous evidence.
That child has to be able to testify, or justice is never done, and that child cannot testify if he or she has not had the support and services of victim advocates at, for example, a child advocacy center to bring them to the point they can tell truthfully what happened to them.
This bill is about justice, and I am proud to support it.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source