PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — As the year winds down and the number of homicides in Philadelphia continues to go up, a victim services group says keeping up with the need for their help has been nearly impossible.
The Anti-Violence Partnership of Philadelphia is one of seven victim services agencies in the city. They offer programs in three key areas: victim witness, counseling and youth.
Victims need a variety of services to help them heal from the trauma of violent crime, says Executive Director Natasha Danielá de Lima McGlynn. However, with a growing number of violent incidents in the city, agencies like hers are falling short.
“We are seeing an overwhelming demand for our services that surpasses our capacity to meet that need,” de Lima McGlynn said.
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They partner with 40 schools throughout the city, but there’s an 11-month wait list for out-of-school youth counseling services.
“What are we then communicating to the individual? One: Your healing process depends upon counseling. Your healing process needs to wait? And that's not how it's supposed to be,” de Lima McGlynn said.
That lack of access to counseling services, she says, is a major obstacle to ending the cycle of violence.
“If you are bottling your emotions, if you're not processing, if you don't feel human, you don't feel a sense of justice, maybe you don't know how to articulate your emotions, you don't know what words to express. Think about how that's going to actually impact you,” she said.
City leadership needs to take a hard look at factors perpetuating cycles of violence, de Lima McGlynn said.
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“There's a sense of security from our elected officials,” she said. “What we're looking at are people pointing fingers anywhere and trying to place a sense of blame … and no one really stepping up.”
De Lima McGlynn, who was recently appointed to Gov. Tom Wolf’s Victim Services Advisory Committee, wants to see greater access to more services in marginalized communities. She says her clinicians have shared with her that many young people say they feel as though the city simply doesn’t care about them.
She says she’d like to see more accurate data collection on violent crime, and she believes future leadership needs to have a proven track record of understanding not just that data but also the trauma that accompanies it.