TVFV is a nonprofit (501(c)3) based in Nashville that has a Statewide focus on crime and justice issues. Crime is a reality, and the emphasis of TVFV is prevention of crime, identifying, supporting, and linking victims of crime. Knowledge is power. The right information may prevent someone from becoming a crime statistic. And, for those who become a victim of crime, the right information can help in the long process of restoration. TVFV works to help victims claim their voice and reclaim their power.
Although TVFV is a young nonprofit founded 12/12/12, the founders of TVFV, Valerie Craig and Verna Wyatt had a previous eleven year history of working together as a team on crime victim issues. They have a proven reputation in Tennessee with law enforcement, justice professionals, and the advocacy community, and they have a passion for this work and understand victimization. For over a decade, as victim advocates, Craig and Wyatt have planned and presented hundreds of community programs together across the State on subjects such as domestic violence, child sexual abuse, rape, internet dangers, bullying/cyberbullying. Craig and Wyatt have co-written resource guidebooks on meth, child sexual abuse in the faith community, and acquaintance rape. They have co-produced 17 documentary videos over the years featuring the voice of the victim, which have been successfully marketed, and used as a resource, across the country as well as internationally. Verna Wyatt is a survivor of crime, has been on numerous State Commissions and Task Force (POST Commission – Police Officers Standards and Training, Tennessee Sex Offender Treatment Board, Tennessee Judicial Selection Commission, The Commission to Study the Death Penalty in Tennessee, Children's Justice Task Force, Nashville’s Domestic Violence Safety Assessment Commission and Tennessee Task Force on Sentencing and Recidivism.)
Wyatt and Craig have co-written two versions of victim impact curriculum, the first created as they began facilitating victim impact classes in 2005. The more recent curriculum was created in 2013 based on their 7 years’ experience and insight gained from hands-on, weekly facilitation of victim impact classes. Craig and Wyatt have co-facilitated weekly victim impact classes for incarcerated men and women for 16 years now, reaching thousands of inmates, giving Craig and Wyatt unique insight into offender behavior. As long time victim advocates familiar with the signs and the impact of victimization, they have witnessed that in addition to the obvious victimizing behavior that put their class participants in prison, these incarcerated men and women have personal victimization in their past that was never addressed, and for the majority, never acknowledged until class. Victimizations like child sexual abuse, growing up in domestic violence, rape, child abuse, witnessing violence and murder, and emotional abuse – all crimes that are well documented for having long term negative impacts without intervention. Victim advocates understand the urgency for connecting any victim who has experienced one of these crimes with psychological help for dealing with the emotional fallout (short and long term) from these kinds of traumas. Yet, our prisons are full of men and women who have layer upon layer of victimization that has never been addressed, or even had someone indicate that what happened to them was not “normal.”
95% of incarcerated people WILL eventually return to our communities. If we are TRULY serious about preventing more victims, then we must address (and help) the people we KNOW who are capable of creating victims – the inmates. They need assistance to understand their own victimizing behaviors towards others, but they need to make appropriate connections between their own personal trauma and the impact it has made on their thinking and behavior.
For more detail on each of the founders, see the videos on our website: www.tnvoicesforvictims.org